NOTE: This is derived from the "Swept Away" RP continuity which started in 2007 and has continued in various forms and spinoffs ever since, first on the old Hillbilly Hell forum and presently in Wingnut City. I'm sure it's not the first or only "Humans in the Carsverse" thing that ever came up, but boy, has it had staying power. By the in-RP timeline, the events of Planes 2 would be taking place perhaps 6 years after the humans' arrival.
Disclaimer: Don't own no canon characters. They belong to Disney. Weesa be makin' no money offa dis!
NOTE: Okay, might as well officially call this a crossover now, with all the Chronicles of Amber elements in it.
"Mii's eyes fluttered open, and the sky above was a blur of late-afternoon blue, clouds... and smoke. She heaved herself up, and while her head might not have been split, it sure felt like it! A wave of nausea swept through her, and she promptly vomited up whatever she'd had for breakfast.
""Whoah!" Wally's voice rang through her head. "Not so fast, kid. You took a bad hit to the ol' braincase there."
""Where's my horse?" she looked around for N'Sheki.
"The horse is fine." Wally assured her, "I didn't let her get far." The mare was ground-tied about twenty feet off, standing hipshot as she rested with lowered head and splayed ears. Mii'Auww massaged her forehead for a moment, then slowly forced herself to her feet. Her shoulder ached about as much as her head, but after another minute she was able to walk over and check out her mount. N'Sheki twitched her tail, but didn't pin her ears. Exhaustion, for the present, had overcome the mare's orneriness.
Mii's fingers tugged at the girth, finally working it loose. She pulled off the tack and the blanket and started rubbing the mare down with handfuls of plucked grass. N'Sheki would need water by and by; they would have to find a source that wasn't choked with mud and ash. "Haven't seen anything of Nick?"
"Not yet." Wally said. "Starting to get a little worried."
Mii set N'Sheki on a tether and looked back in the general direction of the mine. "I don't like it." The place was burned over, but still smoking. She poured a bit of water out of her canteen into her cupped hand, and let the mare lick out of it before taking a swallow for herself, hoping she wouldn't throw it up again. Something felt a little out-of-kilter on the top of her head; she reached up and felt her structural fillet, frowned, and then pulled it down and out to see.
It was broken.
Mii didn't know where the helmet was, it must have come off in the fall or after. But the fillet in her hair had also taken much of the shock of the fall, enough that she had come away with no more than a concussion. While she finger-combed her hair, the first of a series of thudding noises came to her on the wind. What was that?
"They must be trying to break out." Wally darted ahead.
Following after him, Mii'auww broke into a run, in spite of her throbbing head. In her perception, Wally was now a glowing streak, plunging straight through the trees and rocks that Mii had to dodge or climb over. The ground was still smoking in places where the burn had gone through; heat was already seeping up through her boot soles. She wouldn't even think of expecting her mare to traverse this mess.
The next instant, another spectral blur was in her face. "MII!" She was almost bowled over before some synapse in her mind made the connection. "Nick!"
"What happened to your hair?" Nick looked at her quizzically. "Where's the thingie that was under it? And your helmet?"
"What happened to Dusty and your friend?" Mii shot back.
"They're gonna be out in another second, I think." he answered. "They're both still moving, but Blade... I dunno. The paint on his port side was bubbling, and it was hurtin' him like hell. But... Dusty didn't roast... HEY!" he turned as Mii bolted past him. "What are you, loco?" Nick streaked after her, with Wally close behind. If her head was still aching, Mii was now oblivious to it as she dodged charred trees and smoking hot spots, until she stopped just short of the mine's clearing. She dipped and took a knee behind a large, fallen snag as there was one more THUD! from the mouth of the shaft. Nick and Wally caught up with her as a helicopter's nose battered its way through the debris. The rest of him struggled through, heaving like a stallion that was winded, but unbroken. Nick hadn't been exaggerating about Blade's injuries; the scorched and bubbled paint looked to Mii like third-degree burns, and she shuddered involuntarily at the memories of the battle-slain of her tribe, brought in bearing just such hideous burns. How much more painful for the people of this world as hers?
Dusty struggled out right after; Mii was not so close that she could make out what they were saying, but their body language was saying, "get the hell out." Both revved up; Dusty's engine sounded all right, but in Blade's there was a note of wrongness that even Mii could pick up on.
Wally grimaced, "What the hell..."
"Blade, NO!" Nick exploded. "You ! #$ pendejo!"
The three could only watch, frozen, as Blade attempted to follow Dusty into the air, but in his present condition, his tail rotor was just not keeping up with the rest of him, and she cringed as he immediately started to spin... then fall. It was only a few seconds, but the interval seemed to dilate into the lightyears between Earth's solar system and the nearest star. Attenuated... yet inevitable.
Mii buried her face in her elbow as his impact shook the ground beneath, and kicked a shower of dust into her now-loose hair. She raised her eyes as Nick left an aura-wake behind him, speeding towards the now-inert form of his old friend, now laying partially on his side. Several rotor blades were snapped outright, and thin curls of smoke wafted from his engine compartment. Blade's eyelids fluttered for a second or two, before falling like darkness in autumn.
Dusty, now airborne, circled frantically as he called back to the base; the scanner hanging off Mii's sash was full of his agonized voice, and the dispatcher's response. She could already guess who would be coming – the other night, in the lodge, she had froze inside her hiding place as that massive green skycrane paused, inhaled – and then curled his lip. What was his name... something to do with wind. It wouldn't take him long to get here.
But even then...
Slowly and deliberately, Mii pulled herself up to her feet. Then she vaulted over the log and sprinted across the clearing, towards Blade. Nick and Wally watched, stunned for several beats, before pursuing her. Wally called hoarsely after her, "Kid, what are you doing? Are you #$%* crazy?!"
"I'm not #$%* crazy." Mii'Auww shot back.
Nick spared a second to glare at the Orion-ghost. "Some influence you are."
"Aw, shut it!" Wally snarled as he turned back to the chase. "What does she think she can do now?"
Nick turned towards Blade, and his face grew very still. Wally came to a stop, and uttered some even broader profanity.
"He's... going. Up." Nick could also see the aura seeping upward from the Agusta mix's form. "Wherever he's going, he's even leaving US."
"Mii was there now, both hands against the side of Blade's head. "No. Not now." The memory of her grandmother's rituals was once again concrete to her, and her hand fumbled in her sash for her knife, until her fingers finally closed around the handle of the little dagger and she brought it out shining in the late afternoon sun. First, she sheared off a ragged lock of her hair, rather more than strictly necessary, but she wasn't taking time for particulars. Then, she pressed the edge into her other palm, until the blood flowed.
Her shaking hands then traced a swirling, triskellion-like shaman's sigil on the metal skin of the helicopter, almost lost against his own red pigment, but that didn't matter. Mii then took out a strike-anywhere match and held its flame to the lock of her hair, until it flared and burned. Holding the hair-smudge aloft, she called out her grandmother's song, and the countertones rose. The volume increased, the pitch and counterpitch grew farther apart, and it became something almost inhuman. The two ghosts hung back, not sure exactly what they were seeing, except that there was a field of aura-light extending from Mii'Auww now, and the rest of the hair on her head was rising up as if caught in an updraft. That which had risen from Blade's body was caught in the smoke of the smudge, and began to travel down along its curling tendrils into the lock, which began to glow white. Mii turned to Nick and Wally. "Help me call him back."
"Blade!" Nick shouted, "It's not time yet! It's not YOUR time! You still got some business to take care of, man! Get the #$! back there!"
"And you were all over ME for swearing!" Wally growled. "OK, dammit. Blade, I'm sorry I snarked at you over that poker game Maker knows how many years back. I had no idea how sore you still were about... whatever... just don't die on us!"
"Blade, if you leave us, I'm gonna eat all the chocolate Ho-Ho's and there's gonna be none left for YOU!" To Wally's flummoxed look, Nick spat out, "Inside joke. You had to be there." They turned back to Mii'Auww, to see her cradling the locks which now seemed to be burning like limelight, though there was no radiation of heat. The last of the spirit-aura was sucked within, and Mii then pressed it into the center of the symbol she'd drawn in blood.
At that instant, Blade's body contracted and shuddered like that of a human heart attack victim under the paddles of a defibrillator. Mii was knocked back about fifteen feet, where she lay gasping. A bodily reflex forced Blade's landing gear out, bringing him to a standing position though his eyes remained shut. But the main thing was, whatever Mii had put back in Blade's frame was going to stay there...at least for today.
"Oh, slag." Wally looked up as another chopper's engines dopplered in. "That's Windy. Kid, you OK?"
"She's not getting up right now." Nick checked out the heaving form of Mii'Auww. "She got the wind knocked right out of her."
"We ain't got time for this." Wally descended on the girl's form. "Sorry to take liberties with your person here, but we gotta get you out of sight." Mii's body was lifted several feet off the ground, by a vortex that also wiped out all tracks and traces as it moved her back across the clearing and into the edge of the woods. "Y'know Mr. Hollywood, I got the feeling we're gonna be explaining ourselves to some other folks VERY soon, except YOU'RE gonna be the one doing the explaining, because she's in no shape now and YOU'RE the one who got her into this! Hope you got your speech ready."
"Right..." Nick gritted his astral teeth. He lingered just long enough to see Windlifter making his descent, lifting gear at the ready. At least having Blade up on his undercarriage would make it the skycrane's job a bit easier.
At the same time, miles away but a little closer than before, Elena squatted on a wide dirt trail, peering closely at a few long blades of grass that had been broken for some time. Behind her, Moonstone fluttered his nostrils and pawed the ground. Moonstone was a tall, lanky animal, almost maneless and sparse of tail, yet his pale, spectral-gold coat had the lustre of watered silk, his eyes were like tropical water, and his neck was as slender and high-set as a swan's. He was descended from horses brought to Amber from the Kara Kum desert, a thousand years before. This breed was famed not only for its glowing coats, but its phenomenal endurance, and Elena was going to need every bit of it this day.
The tall, cornsilk-blonde woman held up a blade of grass, looked down at what appeared to be a patch of long-disturbed earth, and frowned. It could just as well be some off-road vehicle as a horse, without some more definite sign. She took her mount's reins and led him further up the path, scanning the ground with raster-like precision. After another forty minutes, she finally stopped to regard something almost half-obscured on the shoulder of the trail... a half-crescent in dried mud, days old... but definitely the impression of an unshod horse... the toe and quarters of its off-side forefoot, to be exact.
Now that she was sure of approximate direction, Elena remounted and turned her charger's head back downtrail, and prepared for a brief hellride jump that would take her back to Ash Mountain's border. If that girl had been spirit-led, she'd need the grandmother's help in finding exact direction and destination. If she knew that old woman, she'd already have her best horse saddled and her bags packed. Shayla would be bound and determined to tag along as well. There would be no holding back a Harrier. They'd have trouble enough keeping Mii'Auww's mother out of the way.