May 8, 2022

The 8th of May started out as a normal day at the Goodwill Hose Company's firehouse, located half a mile from the Vigilant Fire Company's firehouse, and largely considered their sister company since they ran many calls with each other. Around 9 AM, Engine 202 and Ambulance 201 were handling a medical emergency not far from the firehouse, and Patrol 3 and Salvage 3 across the street from the Vale City Fire Patrol were out on a flooded cellar pumpout in an office building elsewhere in District 2 of the city with the Valiant Hook and Ladder Company. A few Goodwill firefighters were still at the firehouse, standing by with Utility 202 in case they got another call. It was a warm morning, and they decided to pass the time by running the two saws off the utility truck and filling them up with gas and dust.

Yang's husband George was among them, having responded over to the firehouse from their apartment. It had been about twenty-five minutes since the medical call came in, and he was filling up the chainsaw on the utility truck with dust out on the front apron of the firehouse when he had a hunch something was going on behind him. He looked over him as the other two firefighters at the station looked over to him. As he looked up to the second floor of the firehouse, he saw something that made him jump. "Holy shit! The firehouse is on fire!" Smoke was pouring from the second floor, and just as George noticed the smoke, the fire alarms inside the station went off. "I'll call it in! Grab your gear and get the utility out of here!"

A volunteer lieutenant replied back to him, "You got it! George, tell Fire Alarm to get a Code 99!" He and the other firefighter then ran in to grab their gear and the utility.

George ran into the firehouse and to the base radio at the watch desk towards the front of the firehouse. He frantically grabbed the mic and transmitted, "Goodwill Base to Fire Alarm, urgent!"

"All other units hold your traffic," Blake happened to reply, working that day as a dispatcher. "Goodwill Base, go ahead with the urgent."

"Our firehouse is on fire," George replied back to her. "We have heavy smoke and flames showing from the second floor on the alpha side of the building! Strike the box and get me a Code 99!" George then ran to grab his gear and get out just as the utility turned on and the lieutenant began to drive it out of the firehouse.

Once it was outside, all three of them packed up and masked up. Their gear was much different from Vigilant, consisting of heavy wool coats and yellow pants and a black cork helmet. Their air packs were 45-minute composite bottles instead of the 30-minute steel bottles Vigilant had. The three of them grabbed water can extinguishers and marched in, determined to try to get a knock on the fire as their pagers rang and their siren began to go off. As they ran up the back stairs, the smoke hit them, and they all had to get down low. The lieutenant told George, "I think it's confined to the front bunk room! If we can just knock it down, we can save the rest of the firehouse!"

"Yeah," George replied. As they crawled and reached the front bunk room, they were met by a fire at the very front of the room near the windows. George pulled the pin on his water can and sprayed at the fire. With just five gallons, he was able to put out much of it, and just as they heard sirens pulling up to the firehouse out front, they were able to knock down the fire with their three water cans. As they drained their water cans empty, they all were worried for the integrity of the mostly heavy timber firehouse, which had served the company well since it was built in 1902. "I think we got most of it, LT!"

"Yeah," the lieutenant replied. "George, I think our engine is here! They're gonna pull a line up here!"

...

Later on, around 11, as firefighters all packed up from the fire at Goodwill's firehouse, Weiss talked with their captain, a man named Caradoc ap Dafydd who was 30 and had been a firefighter for 15 years. They both suspected that the air conditioner in the front bunk room had set the fire. "This is the 9th fire in the city since the beginning of May that's had something to do with those Rossman Company air conditioners. This one we bought on the 20th of the last month. That's barely 18 days or something like that. 18 days."

"I'm sorry it had to happen here," Weiss replied to him. He was clearly distraught over the fire, having spent many years of his life at the firehouse. "It's a good thing guys were here, or we could have been looking at a total loss."

"Exactly," he replied as he sighed and shook his head. "Still, we lost the entire front bunk room and everything on it. Shit fucking sucks."

A city fire marshal then walked up to both of them. "Hey there. Guys, I called headquarters, and they're gonna make a call to the Royal Fair Trade Office about this. We had a fatal fire involving the air conditioners yesterday over in District 3, and one person killed is one person too many." He was clearly not amused and rather angry about these air conditioners. "These air conditioners are a pain in my ass. Even if a recall is approved, it's gonna take time to go into effect, and not everyone will turn them in right away. Be prepared to see more fires caused by these damn things."

Meanwhile, outside, George and Yang stood together, the latter comforting the former over the damage to the firehouse. George was to the point of tears, having been very attached to the fire station. "Yang, we lost so much in the fire. We had irreplaceable items up there."

"I know, dear," Yang replied, resting on his shoulder. "I know. Speaking of, I gotta wonder, did you guys plexiglass the duty crew run board from August 23rd? We did a few weeks after the attacks."

"Yeah," George replied as he wiped his eyes. "It's still downstairs. We got it plexiglassed two months later after leaving it alone for that long." He then chuckled as he remembered a funny memory about it. "I remember, when we got it, we were given a few sheets just in case we were unhappy with one of them. That was a good thing, because as we were hanging up the first one, it shattered. The funniest thing is that it was the birthday of one of the guys up there we lost, Eddy Reynolds, and he had the nickname "Glass Breaker" because he had broken two windows on accident at the firehouse at once, not one time, but two times."

Yang could not help but laugh at the story. "What a coincidence, huh?"

"Yeah," he replied. "We think his ghost was watching, and he accidentally shattered it as he was giving us a hand. I remember, our captain said 'damn it, Eddy, not again' and we all just broke down laughing."

Yang smiled, enjoying the story on an otherwise rather bleak near-Summer day. "Thankfully, our preservation of the run board was incident-free. The names of the two paid firefighters and the volunteers that were already there, plus all the volunteers that came up before we got sent out but after the attacks began, will be forever on that chalkboard. I head Beacon Fire at the academy has two such chalkboards. One for the Battle of Beacon, and the other for the attacks. They lost 10 guys in the former, and 6 in the latter." She then heard her phone ring in her pants pocket. As she grabbed it and looked at it, she saw it was Raven, who was watching their son for the day. "Hello, mom?"

"I heard about what happened to Goodwill's station," Raven replied to her on the other end of the phone line. "Is everyone alright? Is your husband okay?"

"Yeah," Yang assured her, clearly being able to hear that she was worried. "Nobody got hurt. The damage is limited to the front bunk room, but everything in there got destroyed. They think it was the air conditioner again that set it."

"Not another one of those," Raven sighed in annoyance. "Patch First Aid had one a few nights ago. I heard we're not the only area hit by this. They've had 36 fires now, counting this one of course, across the kingdom they think were possibly started by these piece of shit Rossman air conditioners since mid-March. They had one last night up in Port Vytal that killed a whole family of six! Yeah, six! Something needs to get done, and done fast."

"Sounds like they need to get that recall going before anyone else dies," Yang agreed with her, sharing her worried tone. "Who knows what will happen next before one goes into effect?"

Meanwhile, as Weiss walked to her captain's car, she looked around to see if anyone noticed her walking over, looking somewhat worried. She then took her helmet off as she opened the hatchback of the dark red SUV and reached inside a compartment among the various shelves that were in the trunk. As she reached in, she grabbed a flask of alcohol and opened it, taking one last look around to make sure nobody was watching her. Then, she took a quick drink before putting the flask away. "Agh, shit," she said to herself before she closed the compartment up, put her helmet back on, and closed the hatchback. She thought to herself, "It was only a small sip. It never hurt no one, right?"

Drinking and going to calls was not allowed, and especially not drinking while on the scene of a call, and yet Weiss had been taking a sip of the hard stuff at least once at some calls for the past two weeks. If she got caught, she could be kicked out of the entire fire department, and yet she felt the need to take a sip after a long duration of time. In her mind, she was not guzzling down the stuff, just taking a small sip, so it should not have been noticed by anyone, right? Besides, despite her short stature, she could hold down alcohol well, and not get buzzed for a while. However, it did negatively affect her in one way, even if she had a hard time getting buzzed or drunk: marriage. She was afraid of getting married to Jaune, even though by that point they had been together for almost two whole years, due to the fact that she feared what her drinking would do to a pregnancy. She wanted to have children of her own, but she was afraid of the possible ways her impulses could control her in the nine months in between conception and birth.

...

After her cardiac arrest on the 3rd, May's wife had been in the hospital, and the fire company had kept up with the status on her condition. Additionally, Elsa was now getting ready to get out of the hospital, having recovered from her injuries. However, she would not yet be cleared to go back to firefighting, which would have to wait at least until early to mid June. Meanwhile, Blake was counting down the months until she would work her last ever shift at the Fire Alarm Office before she hopefully went to the police academy. The test for the VCPD was on June 11, and test results would be announced for the January 2023 Academy class on July 9. She was also counting the time before Sun was to be deployed to Menagerie from June 1 to August 31. She was worried for him, and wondered how the war was going.

Meanwhile, Penny was enjoying life with Ross. He had by then moved from his apartment to her's, since she was closer to the firehouse than his old apartment. In her time in Vale, she had been treated like anyone else, a dream she had once thought impossible in Atlas. Her relationship with Ross had further made her feel more like a normal person, especially 'in bed.' On this particular evening, the two had just finished a lovemaking session when Penny's own phone rang. As she sat up from bed, she picked it up from the dresser next to their shared bed and saw it was her father, all the way from Atlas. "Pronto?"

"Penny," her father Pietro spoke in a rather neutral tone. "Come va?"

"Sto bene, grazie, e tu?" Ross smiled, finding Penny's Mantillian rather soothing to listen to.

"Non bene," Pietro replied, now taking on a somewhat depressed tone. "Penny, Atlas ti vuole di nuovo qui per una settimana. Penso che riguardi una missione che hai fatto a Dragonica. Dicono che fosse nel 2019."

Penny sighed as she realized what her father's annoyance was about, and at the prospect of returning to Atlas for a week over what she thought was old business from her military days there. "Mi stai prendendo per il culo, vero?"

Pietro chuckled at her vulgar reply. "Credimi, Penny, ho un diavolo per capello, non ci piove."

"Va bene, va bene," she replied to him. "In che data mi vogliono tornare in Atlas?"

"14 maggio," he told her, giving her her answer. "Devo andare. Ti parlerò allora. Quando arrivi, vieni a trovarmi prima. Ti voglio bene, Penny. Ciao."

"Ciao," Penny concluded the conversation with. She shook her head as she stood up and stretched her naked body.

"My dear," Ross asked his girlfriend. "What is it? What was the phone call about?"

"My dad called me," she explained to him. "Apparently, Atlas wants me back for a week starting on May 14th due to some bullshit about one of my past missions. I don't know why, but it must be serious."

...

THIS CHAPTER IS DEDICATED IN MEMORY OF LIEUTENANT/PAST CHIEF MICHAEL CHIAPPERINI AND FIREFIGHTER TOMASZ KACZOWKA OF THE WEST WEBSTER VOLUNTEER FIRE DEPARTMENT, WHO DIED OF INJURIES SUSTAINED FROM A SHOOTING WHILE OPERATING AT A HOUSE FIRE ON DECEMBER 24, 2012, ON CHRISTMAS EVE AT 191 LAKE ROAD IN WEBSTER, NEW YORK