"Alright, who's got the wonky horn?" Billy asked that evening with a new shipment of parts.
"I do, matey!" Salty said. He tried to honk, only for a pathetic grating sound to come out.
"And...what're the ones in the green truck?"
"Oh, those would be my spares," Derek said. "I get the custom stuff, y'know."
"Your new heating system truly is a wonder," Den said.
"What 'e means is, it's a miraculous contraption," Dart clarified.
"Yeah, those people at EMD really know what they're doing."
"Yet they made me and all of my mental health issues," Diesel Ten muttered.
"Hey, those issues are learned, not built in."
"Not all of them..."
Derek cautiously decided to change the subject. "So...I heard you staged a failed protest by taking over the Steamworks?"
Diesel Ten groaned. "Turner and Hamilton, can't anyone let me forget about that? But yes, that was I."
"How did I get out of the fire?" Sidney asked.
"I took you down and stuck you at Vicarstown to watch the birds while I did my plotting," was the explanation given by the Battleship.
"Ah yes, the birds. Do they always fly south?"
"He's not a sharp one, is he?" Derek asked Diesel Ten.
"Give him a break, his engine was dropped before he was brought to life," Diesel Ten replied snappily.
"What gave you the idea to do something like that?" Billy asked. "The takeover, I mean."
"Well, it wasn't my first time..."
January 13, 1986. A new year, but the same old treatment that Nick was rapidly getting sick of.
"Diesel Eight, Diesel Two, there's a shipment of paint coming in tomorrow night, and I need you to take it in," the railway's manager, Mr. Slim Lawson, who was most decidedly NOT slim, said.
"Paint? But we've got enough paint to last until the Mayan apocalypse!" Nichole exclaimed. "Not that that's going to happen or anything, but we've got a lot of paint."
"This paint is for the steamers, obviously." Lawson left, shaking his head.
Diesel Eight, real name Rena, scowled. "It sucks that we can't have our own colors!"
"Most engines don't have good artistic taste. You wanna see a bunch of engines who look like mobile bananas? Or other things I'm not allowed to repeat?" Diesel Four, real name Enrique, asked. "Those Union Pacific guys, man, they don't look dignified!"
"My point still stands! We're being mistreated and no one's doing anything!"
"Yes, especially because before the days of Lawson's administration, everyone had the colors, steam, electric, and diesel alike," Alex said.
Nick was thinking during the entire clamor, and spoke up. "What if they couldn't wear their own colors?"
Everyone stopped talking. "What do you mean, dude?" Rena asked.
"The steamers used to be painted like us. And I remember Caroline complaining about having to choose her own livery once the change happened. So what if we changed it back? Look, let me accompany Rena and Nichole to the shipment, and we can hide it! And, and we won't give it up until we're all painted the same way! People will notice, people will fuss – but they'll be doing it for US for once!"
"I don't know...I think I'm too old for these shenanigans," Diesel Seven, real name Juan, said.
"And we could get hurt for this!" Schenectady yelled from his track. Nick sighed; they were right.
"I say do it."
Everyone looked at Cressida. "He's right. No one will listen to our plight unless we do something big. We've been wallowing in our sadness for far too long. Let's go out and do something!"
"...What were they putting in your fuel back in Pennsylvania?" Quentin wanted to know.
"Nothing but pure passion, my friend." She smiled at Nick, who blushed. "We wake at dusk."
"Hey, I'm due for a repaint, but where's the gray?" Angela asked two days later.
"I don't know...no one knows!" the maintenance guy panicked.
"You can't do this! Tell us where the paint is!" Lawson growled, his cronies behind him.
"Not until we ALL get painted the Mesa Roja colors, steamers included," Nick growled back.
"Hey, he's right, this red looks awful on me," Tim, the Timken Four Aces, mused. "I'd love to be blue for a change."
It worked.
It actually worked.
Now everyone looked equally uniform.
Nick blasted his secondary horn. "I did it!" he whooped. "No – WE did it! Come here, everyone!"
All the other diesels honked in joy. But Cressida honked the loudest of all.
Back in the present, Gordon groaned as he returned to Tidmouth sheds. "You okay?" Henry asked.
"Not really," Gordon winced. "I'm not as young as I used to be, Henry. Did you know I'm turning a hundred this Wednesday?"
"A hundred? I remember my centennial," Henry reminisced. "Fun times."
"Gordon, you're lucky to have lived this long," Edward said, "and still be in service. Everyone here is."
"I know, I am immeasurably grateful, it's just...I don't think I can keep running three expresses every day anymore. I wish we had someone who could pull it for one of those times so I could rest my ancient gears." Gordon moaned in pain as he came to a stop.
"I thought you got your gears replaced last November," Thomas mused.
"You know what I mean!"
Percy laughed. "I'll be sorry to miss this mess," he said, "but I gotta do the mail. I'll be back, don't worry, and don't spare any details."
"You got it!" Rosie grinned, looking at Gordon deviously.
"If engines have past lives," Gordon groaned, "whatever did I do in it to deserve this lot?"
Percy arrived in Knapford Yard and was surprised to see Lady still up. "Lady? Shouldn't you be asleep?"
"Normally, yes. But Hatt wants me to do the mail with you so I can learn the line," Lady replied. "Since everyone else is asleep, I don't have to worry about getting dirty looks from everyone else."
"That's not gonna happen, kid," came a raspy voice.
"Who was that?" Lady asked.
"That would be Donna," Percy said, smiling as he puffed over and coupled to his loved one. He pulled forward, revealing the NWR's sole Lifer mail coach.
"Oh! You're a girl...you know, at Muffle Mountain I knew a PRR T1 who transitioned, but–"
"I'm nothing of the sort," Donna explained. "I just got caught in a fire is all. Damaged whatever I use to speak permanently."
"Ooh," Lady winced. "Rough. So how are we gonna do this?"
"Normally, you'd be behind me and I'd pull, but you're shorter than me, so you're going in front," Percy explained.
"Okay. Super."
As they traversed the line, Percy said, "Don't worry, here we discourage the kind of bullying you got back home."
"I know, it's just...old habits are hard to break. Especially if you're me. I mean, I'm a clone of a failed experiment, modified with 60000's pistons, built as the final product of the dying Baldwin Locomotive Works. In a land of mass-produced engines with classes numbering in the thousands." She sighed. "You wouldn't understand."
"But we do!" Percy protested. "Take me! I'm an Avonside Trojan crossed with a GWR 1361, built 1944 and brought to life twenty years later! And Henry, too! He's not an original Black Five, you know."
"He's not Five's brother?"
"Who's Five?"
"She works at the Golden."
"Oh. Well, Henry actually started life as a Gresley A0, a stolen copy of one of Gordon's rough drafts, mixed with an LNER C1. He got rebuilt into a Black Five after a horrible accident that almost cracked his smokebox [which for steamers is a death sentence], which is also why he was afraid of everything for a few years."
"I know that feeling. Ever since my first day at Muffle Mountain I've had a horrible phobia of being covered in slime. Even soap triggered it for a while."
"And there are other misfits too," Donna added. "Like me. Most live mail coaches are, well, males. My full name's Doncaster because my builders thought I would be too until I came to life. And many of the engines weren't brought to life until after steam had died, like Thomas and Emily."
They talked through the night, during which Lady remembered.
April 9, 1984.
"Lady, I have some...bad news," Burnett Stone said as he approached his engine in the switching yard. "Our financiers did some dumb stuff and bought more than they could afford. Because of them, one of the engines is being sent away because we can't afford to keep as many anymore."
Lady processed this. "Who is it?"
"Cressida. They sold her to a heritage railway in New Mexico."
Lady gasped. "Why Cressida? She's a hard-working, kind engine!"
"You WOULD sympathize with her," Kim growled as she passed with a prominent freight train. "You oil-burners are practically half-diesels yourselves. Ugh, it's miscegenation, I tell you."
Tears ran down Lady's face. "When did she leave?"
"Two hours ago. I just found out now."
"And they didn't tell me?..."
"No. I'm sorry." Lady sniffled, then bawled.
As the years passed, without Cressida around, the spark from the young tank engine's life faded, and she grew quiet, distant, and aloof. One night in 1991, Mitch and Fay, the USRA Light Santa Fe, looked out into the yard as Lady dutifully arranged the passenger trains. Unbeknownst to them, she heard everything.
"She's never been the same since Cressida left, has she?" Fay asked.
"No," Mitch sighed. "My brother Juan lives at Mesa Roja. From my last contact with him in '88, the railway's gone to the dogs. Diesels aren't even allowed to use their own names."
Fay shivered. "That bad? Oh, I do hope Cressida is alright."
"From what I've heard, she's become quite close with the diesel purchased after her. He's an experimental British Railways Class 42 replica with a more powerful engine and a roof-mounted claw. His real name is Dominic, but the railway calls him Diesel Ten. He's very young, in fact Lady's only two years older than him. And from what I've heard, he's a lot like her, too. Perhaps we should organize a get-together between the two railways so they can meet." Mitch sighed. "Pipe dream, I know."
"Speaking of, I have a train of pipes that Lady just switched that I need," Fay said. "See you later, Mitch."
Lady sighed a little. Cressida had apparently replaced her.
She was worthless.
"Okay, one last truck," Billy said. "Wait, these are for Philip. He doesn't normally go to the Dieselworks, does he?"
"Not at all," Norman replied. "He doesn't like it here that much, so we have to take the parts to him."
"True laziness," Dennis remarked. "I admire that in an engine."
"Of course you do," Billy grumbled. "Diesel Ten, wanna come with?"
"Sure thing, Tangerine, but it can wait until the morning. I'm pooped."
"Me too," Billy admitted. He puffed into a siding in outside yard, while Diesel Ten left for his private shed.
"Didn't his shed use to be inside the Dieselworks?" Paxton asked.
"It got moved outside after the old one burned down," Norman explained.
The next morning, two paths were about to converge. While Percy and Lady were returning from their mail run, Billy and Diesel Ten were going to drop off the parts truck at Philip's shed.
"Good morning, Diesel Ten!" Stanley called as he shunted Gordon's coaches out of their siding.
Diesel Ten honked back. "Back atcha, Stan!"
"Hey big guy!" Carly the coach chirped.
"Hey yourself."
Not too far away, Percy pulled into a siding. Lady was uncoupled from him. "Thanks for the tour, but now I gotta go take a nap," Lady groaned. "I'm not used to this late-night stuff."
"I've heard that newer electric engines have an easier time staying up late," Percy groaned.
"They'd have to be the newer ones, I personally can't," Stafford confirmed as he arranged a flatbed train for more catenary lines.
Lady was heading away when Charlie noticed and took control from his crew. "Wha– hey!" his driver exclaimed.
"Hey Lady! What's small and smells of oil?" Charlie asked, pushing a coil car whose coils weren't too terribly secured.
"Uh...a fish?" she asked.
"Nope! YOU!" Charlie biffed the coil car hard enough that one of the coils fell out and slammed into the supports of the old diesel fuel station, crushing them. With nothing to hold it up, the derrick tottered over, and Lady realized, too late, where she was standing. Burnett Stone hastily got out as the wooden oil drum shattered on impact, drenching her with black sludge.
Lady realized what happened and shuddered, frozen in place.
September 17, 1982.
"Hey Lady!" Kim grinned maniacally. "Your paint could use some work."
"What do you mean?" Lady asked.
"Yeah, what do you mean?" Taylor asked.
"You know what I mean, you idiot!" Kim snapped.
"Oh yeah, I do!" Taylor, Miley, and Kim grinned at Lady viciously.
"Your paint needs work because it's...GARBAGE!" And with that, Kim rammed into Lady, knocking her into an old sewage treatment plant. The sewage drum broke...
Lady couldn't handle her flashback anymore and sobbed. "Yeah, that's right! I'm the real purple engine here!" Charlie gloated as he reversed onto another track.
But everyone had seen everything. Diesel Ten growled and motored forward, luckily being on the same track as Charlie. "Get 'im," Tabitha muttered.
Charlie continued to laugh at Lady's misfortune, until something cold pressed against his buffers. He opened his eyes and gulped.
Diesel Ten leered at him. "And what do you suppose you're doing?"
Charlie backed up. "U-uh, it was just a joke!"
"A JOKE?! That wasn't a joke! That was bullying! She was severely traumatized by something like that, and you know it!" As Diesel Ten spoke, his voice began to deepen.
"What's going on?" Percy asked nervously.
Diesel Ten blinked once, and when his eyes opened again, his scleras were lava red, his once-green irises a flaming orange, and his pupils burned yellow-white-hot. "YOU ARE A DISGRACE TO ALL ENGINES HERE! YOU ARE A SLACKER, AN IMMATURE CLOUT, A BLOODY POOR EXCUSE FOR A STEAM ENGINE!" While he was saying this, he was moving towards Charlie while the latter reversed, the diesel's claw snapping erratically and routinely making sweeping passes at Charlie's face. "YOU HAVE CAUSED NOTHING BUT TROUBLE TO THIS RAILWAY, AND YOU HAVE ATTACKED AN INNOCENT ENGINE! I NEVER WANT TO SEE YOU NEAR LADY EVER AGAIN, AND IF YOU DARE HARM HER, I WILL PERSONALLY SCRAP YOU MYSELF! IS THAT UNDERSTOOD, MANNING WARDLE? BECAUSE SO HELP ME I WILL VIOLATE MY OWN PRINCIPLES JUST TO SEE THAT YOU GET WHAT YOU DESERVE!"
Charlie screamed as he ran out of Knapford Yard. "AND DON'T COME BACK!" Then Diesel Ten belted out a terrifying noise, both horns blaring combined with a low, guttural roar. It was heard everywhere on the island.
Sir Topham Hatt stumbled into the yard, trembling. "What the Dickens is going on here?" He saw Lady, still shivering and covered in diesel fuel, and Diesel Ten, breathing heavily as his eyes returned to normal.
"Charlie was mean to Lady," Stanley said quietly. "And Diesel Ten...flipped it."
Hatt sighed. "Botheration! Can't this railway have a single day where nothing weird happens?" He groaned. "Percy, find Charlie and bring him back here. I have a few words I'd like to say to him. Lady, you need to get cleaned up. Nick, try not to lose your temper like that, I know it's hard, but you have to try. Stanley, once Gordon gets his coaches you're helping us clean up this mess, I knew I should've torn down that derrick a long time ago. Everyone else, proceed as usual."
Diesel Ten sighed. "I hate the Deep Voice," he muttered as he buffered up to Lady. His coupling chain latched onto hers. "Hey, shh, it's okay, I'll get you cleaned up."
"...Thank you," Lady murmured, her lips still quivering.
"That was really scary," Molly shivered at Knapford.
"Ah, please! We're engines! In a fight against a monster, we can win just by running them down!" James retorted.
"Not if that monster is an 85-ton diesel locomotive with a claw strong enough to crack granite," Jamie reminded him.
"Yeah, you're right. Can't believe Charlie did such a thing, though. What a jerk. Guess Edward was right when he said his behavior was getting worse."
"His work ethic was horrible when he got here," Molly agreed.
James' guard whistled. "Anyway, I gotta go. Stay safe, Molly."
"You too."
After her brother left, Jamie chuckled. "If he had more sense, he'd be a decent man."
"W-what are you implying?" Molly stammered.
"Not much."
"And...could he?"
"Hughes yes, he would. James and I lived much of our early years in a scrapyard, just two engines of many. We all had similar names, too. Jimmy, Jamison, Janice, Jamal, Jimbo, Rupert...and we all looked really alike, too. I was sent to Switzerland in 1954, but James stayed there longer, presumably until he was bought for the NWR in 1981. It...really stuck with him, not having much of an identity, not being able to do anything. So here, he's really protective over being able to do things he likes to do.
"And he's been so sheltered he hasn't been able to mature as much. Engines don't age like people do, so our maturation process is based on experience. Like Thomas; he's been alive since the 1960s but is mentally thirteen. I myself am only mentally eighteen, and I'm pushing ninety."
"Oh, that's...really interesting," Molly said. "Hey, do you wonder where Thomas is?"
"Eh, probably off on some shenanigan again."
Thomas had found Crana. "Crana, are you alright?"
"No! Two more Lifers, dead!"
"Edward mentioned BoCo mentioning an 'Anti-Life' movement," Thomas recalled. "Do you think it's them?"
"Perhaps," the coach replied. "If they are coming for Sodor, that would seem likely. Stay sharp, Thomas."
"I don't know if I can. Call me crazy, but I'm actually starting to get sick of all the adventures. It's time someone else got to be the hero."
"It was time for someone else to be the hero a long time ago, Thomas."
"What's that supposed to mean? ...Anyway, the reason I came is because of Diesel Ten, uh, Nick. What exactly...um...how do I say this...was up with him becoming a demon thingy?"
"Ah, the Deep Voice," Crana nodded. "A defect in his building process has allowed him to channel the emotions of Lifers who have passed on. Specifically, those who were treated like him, bullied and abused. He can channel their collective rage and strength if sufficiently provoked. It's not easy to control, however, and he seldom likes to use it."
Which is exactly what Diesel Ten was thinking as Lady was getting cleaned up.
"You didn't have to do this for me," Lady said.
"I did, and I am, so there." He sighed. "I hate using the Deep Voice. Sorry if I scared you."
"No, it's fine. Charlie was a buttface." She looked up at him. "Why do you hate it?"
"It's not easy to control being angry. And for personal reasons. The first time it activated...I got kicked off my old railway."
"Oh, wow. What for?" Although Lady, in fact, figured she knew the reason, for that reason was also her own.
"I don't want to talk about it." He sighed. "Why, oh why, am I designed this way? Everyone's afraid of me. Especially you, Pinchy," he said to his claw.
"I'm not afraid of your claw." Diesel Ten's eyes widened as he looked down at her, absolute seriousness in her silver eyes. "I'm actually really jealous, my bunker itches and I don't have the hands to scratch it with."
"You'd be...the second Lifer who wasn't afraid," Diesel Ten sighed. "Thank you."
Lady yawned and fell asleep. Diesel Ten looked down at her and pondered. "Could I? ...I don't know, Pinchy. I don't want to forget..."
The Deep Voice is Diesel Ten's TATMRR voice, BTW.
Now we see the fury of a diesel scorned. (Well, not really scorned, but you get the gist.) And we're getting closer and closer to the reason Diesel Ten is the way he is.
Will Diesel Ten and Lady continue to grow close? Will his past stand in the way? How will Charlie be punished?
All this and more in the next chapter – Geriatric Gordon!