Chapter 1: Start With a Bang
Sapphire shielded her eyes with her paw as she tried to take in her surroundings. There had been a big explosion when she had landed and she registered that she was in the middle of a blizzard. She blinked a bit to clear snow out of her eyes and squinted into the distance. She saw a train, stopped on the tracks. She sniffed the air; there was blood, lots of it.
"You must make haste." Ekundayo had said. "And take all your skills with you."
"I need a drink…" Sapphire grumbled as she approached the train. She could now hear voices.
"Don't stop this train!" someone hissed.
"He's been in prison for a number of years now, so his people skills are about equal to yours."
"Dumb animal…" Sapphire spat.
She sauntered up to the back of the train and took in the sight:
There was a man, with long black hair tied in a ponytail, dressed nicely in a style that reminded her of the humans who lived in Harmonia, and two others who appeared to be engineers of the train. But it was the black haired man, the one who had spoken; that Sapphire instinctively knew was her ward. And he seemed to have gotten himself impaled with an iron pipe to the railcar. Sapphire grinned…and then threw a complete tantrum.
"What the hell Ekun?! You bring me here to heal?! I thought I told you I gave that up!!!! You baited me you mutt! You cur, you-you….ARRRRRGGGGHHHH!!!!" She grabbed a paw full of snow and tossed it into the sky before using her water-based magic to turn it into icicles.
That out of her system, Sapphire hopped up on the train and began inspecting her ward.
"You two," she said to the engineers who were standing there, awestruck, "make yerselves useful and get me a bucket."
As they ran to obey her order she approached the man once again, her talons glinting in the low lamp-light.
"Keep away from me! What the hell are you?!" the man spat as Sapphire moved to probe his wound.
"Would you shut yer yapper?! I'm a trained healer!" Sapphire snapped back.
The man seemed almost taken aback. This gave Sapphire enough time to get her claws into his wound. By the time the engineers had returned with a pail, he had recovered.
"Get the hell off of me!" he shouted.
He tried to wriggle away, but failed seeing as he was attached to the train car and really only succeeded in making his wound bleed more.
"Watch it! You wanna get yerself killed or something?!" Sapphire squawked, pressing her paw up against the edges of the wound, attempting to stop the blood flow. With a wave of her paw a large mass of snow was dragged up from their surroundings and instantly changed to water, which she used to fill the pail with nothing more than a little flick of her paw. Ignoring the astonished looks on the human's faces, she continued her exploration.
"Hmm, looks like he swallowed something." she mumbled.
She held up two red stones, almost invisible against the blood on her paws.
"Wait…don't…" the man gasped, reaching for them.
"Relax," Sapphire said as she tossed them into the pail of water, "you'll get your pretty red rocks back." She turned to the engineers. "I'm going to need some bolt cutters and a hot poker."
"What the hell are you doing to me?" the man rasped, he coughed and spit up some blood.
"Your iliac arteries are in serious danger. If you move even an inch you could rupture them and bleed out faster than you can say 'oh shit'."
Startled by this, the man slumped back, allowing her to examine him. He watched as she took a cigarette out from some sort of pouch hidden in her thick feathers and lit it with a flick of a silver lighter.
"Those things'll kill ya." He slurred from blood loss.
"Says the man with the pipe in his stomach." The creature drawled.
Just then the two engineers came back with the tools she had requested.
"Right, let's get this over with." The creature grumbled.
She took the bolt cutters and began to gently work through the excess pipe, eventually causing it to fall off with a resounding clang.
" 'kay, this is gonna hurt." She said, "on three….one…" And with that she yanked the pipe from his stomach.
Quick as a flash she grabbed the poker and pressed it into the wound, cauterizing every leaking vessel. The man's screams of agony fell on deaf ears as she unflinchingly burned away the torn flesh. At last she removed the poker and dropped it into the snow. She looked up at her ward, he had fainted. Then she turned to the two engineers, who were standing by looking horrified.
"Got any place you can put him? Somewhere warm and dry. He needs to get to a hospital as soon as possible."
As the engineers gently picked up the wounded man Sapphire sighed and ground her cigarette into the snow.
"Well now, this should be interesting." She smirked.
