Darkness and a Fairy
Chapter 1
….Woop...woop...woop...
Beep...beep...beep...beep
...Hull breach... hull breach...
...pipo...pipo...pipo...
Ee...ee...ee...ee...ee..ee
Hikari awoke to a cacophony of assorted alarms and alerts. The HUDs in both her aircraft and her exo-armour were both flashing damage alerts. Her head hurt like hell, there was a sharp pain in her left side and left thigh.
First things first, she thought. Calm down, and assess the situation.
The situation was her escape from that alternate, nineteenth century, earth didn't go to plan. Both Queen Victoria and Kaiser Wilhelm decided to 'prematurely' break their treaties with the United States government, with the alien invasion no longer a priority, and a certain engineer (i.e. her) being their new 'must have' asset.
Her aircraft was currently in a flat-spin, and rapidly losing altitude. The jerk to the right, before she entered her Gate's threshold, was obviously from shrapnel from an exploding Prussian fighter-plane impacting the left of her aircraft, and the sharp jerk to the left, before she blacked out, was the shrapnel tearing through her left intake.
A particularly large piece of said shrapnel had pierced through the aircraft's fuselage, and the side of her exo-armour, and was lodged in her thigh.
She cut the direct neural-link she had with her exo-armour. The pain in her head and side vanished, as the feedback from her damaged armour was no longer passing through her own brain.
That's one problem temporarily dealt with, she thought. My leg isn't bleeding heavily, but it will, when I remove that from my leg. I'll leave that until later.
Gritting her teeth against the pain, she used the manual controls in her exo-armour to pull back on the aircraft's control stick.
She pulled out of her spin, but was still losing altitude too fast, and needed to slow down enough to change her crash-landing from 'exploding fireball' to 'left an x-hundred metre gouge in the landscape'
Blackness
()()()()()()
"...ello. Can you hear me?" said a girl's voice.
For the second time, Hikari woke to a lot of pain. Her head hurt for real this time, and she could see blood on her hand when she touched her face. There was light coming in from where the impact tore a hole in her armour. Some sort of EM interference seemed to be messing with all of the external feeds, and her control panels were dead.
"Daisy! Get away from there," said another girl's voice. "Giants are dangerous."
Giants? thought Hikari. I'd better dispel that misconception right now. Besides, I'm not going to be able to get out of here on my own.
She kicked the emergency-release lever with her right foot, forcing the armour's hatch open.
A blonde head came into view. The girl was about the same height as Hikari. She had obviously entered through the damaged canopy of the aircraft, and had a look of concern on her face. "Ivy!" she exclaimed. "She's a fairy, too! Get some help. She's injured!"
"What?!" cried the other voice, possibly Ivy. "How the hell are we going to get her out of this?"
"There's a panel on the outside of the aircraft," said Hikari. "It has a 'rescue' marker pointing to it. There's a lever under it that will forcibly release the canopy."
"We can't read the Giant's language," said Daisy.
"Yellow triangle, roughly where the back of my seat is."
"Ivy, Violet. Did you hear that?"
A few minutes, and an extra couple of fairies, later resulted in the aircraft's canopy being released.
Hikari reached behind her seat, and unhooked her emergency first-aid kit. "There's a bigger one of these behind the aircraft's seat," said Hikari. "You might need to get some people to collect it later."
Daisy nodded. "What is it?"
"Bandages and other things," Hikari replied, as she pulled out some items. "I'll need your help for this next bit."
Daisy leaned inside the hatch. "What do I need to do?"
"As soon as I pull out this chunk of metal, put this pad on, and wrap the bandage tightly around it and my leg. I'll probably pass out again, so I'll have to tell you what some of these other things are."
Hikari pointed out the important items.
"Okay," said Hikari, as she reached past Daisy to the neural-link unit, as the EM interference wasn't affecting it. "Get ready. 3... 2... 1..."
()()()()()()
"...aking up. Get Daisy and Ivy," said a voice.
"Can you hear me? What is your name?" asked a pink-haired fairy.
"Atashi-wa Hikari desu," replied Hikari. Oh smeg! Did that head injury affect my language-centre?
Hikari reached towards her right ear. "Atashi-no hon'yaku debaisu-wa doko-ni arimasu-ka?"
"Are you looking for this piece of jewellery?" she asked, handing it over.
"That's better," said Hikari. "I never thought I would ever need to use the 'output' function on this. Hopefully, this headache will go away soon, and I can talk without it."
Daisy, Ivy, and two other fairies entered the room. Daisy was blonde, had green eyes, and wore green overalls, made from a couple of leaves. She wasn't wearing a shirt. Ivy had green hair, green eyes, and was wearing a green dress, again made out of leaves. The next fairy had blue hair and blue eyes, her blue dress was made from flower petals. The fourth fairy could have been Daisy's twin, except she was wearing a yellow flower-petal dress. "I thought Daisy was the only one with no colour-sense," she said, looking Hikari up and down. She and 'blue' were holding Hikari's clothes. "Red hair and green eyes, but black clothing? What's with this pattern? The dragon breathing lightning looks impressive on that shield, but someone screwed up on the crossbones in the background."
"Those are spanners, not bones," replied Hikari. "I'm an engineer." Daisy's eyes lit up
"What's an engineer?" said 'blue' and 'yellow' together. "Also, what are spanners?" said 'yellow'.
"They're tools!" exclaimed Daisy. "She builds things, like Ivy and I do."
A purple-haired fairy entered the room. "Rose, Daisy, Ivy, Violet, Saffron, could you please leave me with the patient for a moment? I have to talk to her alone."
"Yes, Queen Snapdragon."
()()()()()()
"Now the others are out of earshot, what tribe do you lead?" asked Snapdragon. "I recognise a Queen fairy, when I see one."
"I'm a 'tribe' of one," replied Hikari. "My mother was mostly human."
"And your father?"
"Non-existent. Someone tampered with a medical device called a Gene-loom, and it happened to scan my mother by accident. I do find it interesting that my rescuers are the Snapdragon tribe."
"Why is that?"
"My mother's mother's family name is Sturmdrachen."
"Storm-dragon." Snapdragon laughed. "That is an amusing coincidence. So what led you to end up here of all places?"
"I tried to disarm a device, called a nova-bomb, that some people attached to a trading port. All I managed to do was delay the explosion long enough for them to evacuate the place. I was caught in the blast, and had to channel the energy into several, random destination, space/time Gates to try and 'bleed-off' the energy. I ended up several hundred years, and a few dozen realities, away from home. Part of me wishes I'd stayed in the reality with the giant transforming robots."
()()()()()()()
A few weeks later, Hikari's injuries had healed, and she and the others flew back to the wrecked aircraft. Daisy and Ivy had gotten some of her friends to hide it using rapidly-grown vines and some concealment magic.
"The plane is scrap," said Hikari. "I should be able to repair the exo-armour, once I pull this out of it."
"It's too big." said Daisy. "You'd need to be the same size as your exo-thingy to recover your exo-thingy."
"Not a problem," said Hikari. "I gained a spell a few years ago, but it keeps wearing off after a couple of hours." Rings of purple runes appear around Hikari's body, and orbit her tiny frame for a few seconds. Where a six inch fairy once stood, there was now a six foot sylph.
Hikari flew around to where the metal had pierced the aircraft's hull, gripped onto it, and braced her feet on the fuselage. She then pulled as hard as she could. The metal easily moving under her genetically-enhanced strength. She was physically way stronger in her sylph form, but it was currently time-limited, so she needed the exo-armour and its holographic projection systems.
She picked up the exo-armour, and carried it back to the outskirts of the fairies' settlement. The hull damage will probably take the best part of a week to repair. "The biggest problem," she said aloud, "is the this world's mana-field causes EM interference to standard instrumentation."
"I don't understand, said Daisy.
"I have to readjust all of the electronics inside my armour. The exotic particles in that previous world's atmosphere did something similar, but to my spell-casting."
()()()()()()
Almost a month later, and the exo-armour was ready for shakedown tests. Snapdragon and Daisy looked in awe, as the light rippled around its surface, hiding it from view.
"The giants would never find you like that," said Daisy.
"Watch this," commented Hikari, her voice amplified by the armour. The light-field changed again, and standing in front of them was a six-foot-tall version of Hikari, minus the wings.
"She looks like one of the Giants," said Queen Snapdragon.
"Your highness!" called one of the settlement's sentries. "Come quickly! The Giants are here!"
Everyone headed towards where Water-lily indicated. In a giant clearing, humans were erecting tents, and some sort of grandstand facility.
"Humans," commented Hikari. "Those are the 'Giants' you spoke of?"
"One species," replied the queen. "There are several. However, these ones appear here roughly every two years, for some sort of sporting event." She pointed towards a set of three elevated rings that were being carefully positioned. "They call the sport 'Quidditch' and it is quite entertaining."