Nothing's More Important

Justin tilted his head. "I'm afraid I don't have any contact with… Um, do you want to go back to town?" He pointed back through the darkness. "You're probably right, sir….? I'm Justin, Justin Thyme. Nice to meet you."

The man considered the pony for a moment before deciding that he had nothing better to do than roll with it. “Bruce Martin,” he said, offering an open, gloved hand toward Justin. “Are you the one that saved my butt from that fire?”

Justin quickly bobbed his head. "I just happened to be close by and heard you." He rose up to his hooves with his breathing under control. "Can you walk? I can give you a ride if you need one." He looked back at his supplies, frowning at the cloudy state many of the vials had reached.

Bruce groaned a bit as he struggled to his feet, but thanks to the fire repellant clothing, and Justin’s fast action, his injuries were primarily smoke inhalation based, plus an impressive collection of first degree burns. Those were painful, to be sure, but wouldn’t keep him down. With no smoke or flames around, he took his helmet off, revealing sooty but otherwise blonde hair, and a light skinned human face that smiled down at the shorter pony. “I think I’m okay. Though I don’t know where there is to go without crossing that fire, and I’ve already done that more times than I’d like to.”

The pony looked over the human curiously a moment before a thought came to him. He fished out his little pony statue and held it out on a hoof to him. "Do you know what this is?" It had nothing to do with getting either of them to comfort, but curiosity won out.

Bruce looked at it and frowned. This hallucination was getting far too meta, and self-referential. “It’s a My Little Pony doll… my little girl has a few of them. That one’s… Applejack, I think? Can I see it?”

Justin lifted the hoof an inch higher in a clear sign of agreement. "I found it. Uh, this evening's been a little confusing, but I'm glad I saved you, so it wasn't all a bust." Why did he have a little statue of a former Element of Harmony? That was so creepy! "I'll show the way to a warm bed."

Bruce rubbed off a bit of the soot with his sleeve, and cleared up the belly of the figurine, aside from where some writing had been carved in it, and was now stark black from the soot stuck in the small crevice. “Isabelle,” he read aloud, before offering the figure back to Justin.

"Isabelle" repeated Justin. Was that the name of the… smoke girl? So many more questions rose up, demanding answers, but he saw no way to get an answer. He sniffed the little statue of the celebrity. "I'll take care of her for you, Isabelle." With the promise made, he moved to tuck Applejack away.

“You found her!” said the apparition of the little girl, suddenly standing beside the two males and glowing faintly. “I knew you would! You’re best pony!”

Bruce opened his mouth to comment, but decided his hallucination didn’t need a play-by-play description of itself and simply shut up.

Justin took a step back in surprise, but smiled quickly. "I did. Are you alright, Isabelle?" Was she Isabelle? He hoped he was getting it right. He'd never talked to a… was she a ghost?

“I am now,” Isabelle confirmed. “I finally got to meet a really, real real life pony!” She gave Justin another hug, just as weird feeling as last time, but for better and worse it didn’t rip him out of this world and into another one this time. “It’s what I really, really wanted…” she said as she faded from view.

All the pieces fell into sudden place as Justin's mind worked overtime. "Oh Celestia…" He collapsed to his haunches. "I…" He looked up at Bruce with the start of tears forming. "I was her final wish…"

Bruce sat down beside him, resting a hand gently on his back to comfort him, just letting the moment stretch on quietly until he came up with a startling revelation of his own a minute later. “Holy shit, you’re real!”

Justin tilted his head at the sudden exclamation. "Of course I am. I pulled you out of a fire!" He rose back to his hooves and began to slowly circle, new thoughts coming. "Was this her home? Was this your home? I… get the idea… my home isn't that way." He pointed a hoof towards where he had originally come from and then set it on the ground, slowly and calmly, only to begin prancing in place, working into a full freak out. "Where am I?!"

"Justin! Calm yourself. Take a deep, slow breath..." Bruce advised. “You’re in Idaho, and the only thing dangerous in these parts is the fires, and we're pretty safe from them here. You won't find a way home by panicking."

Justin gave a shaky sort of nod. "Right right… panicking never solved anything at all." He rubbed over his snout a moment. "I'm guessing your house isn't looking so good, and I don't know where mine is anymore. Where should we go? Do your authorities give out houses?"

“Sometimes, but luckily for me I don’t live around here. One of these belonged to my wife’s family, though, and they’re in for a rough time. They have another house on the other side of the flames, which is going to get awfully crowded if it manages to survive,” Bruce answered before looking around. “There isn’t much shelter around here at the moment, aside from those trees. I wonder why they didn’t get burned.”

The pony looked at the trees curiously a moment before he shook his head. "I don't think we can get much rest in those." He ambled towards a tree despite his words and began looking for any salvageable herbs. Maybe he'd find something! Oh… He stopped with an abrupt thought and dug out his field guide of common mixtures and potions. "Thank goodness I brought this."

Bruce followed along, still feeling like he was in a dream or something, despite the obvious. The trees they approached weren’t enough to qualify as a forest, but they could perhaps qualify as a grove. The plant life within was quite varied, and some of it seemed to match things in Justin’s book, even though much of it was definitely not.

Justin Thyme got himself busy collecting herbs. He even looked happy while doing it. His bags soon became full of things he knew, and things he didn't but was eager to try things with later. "There's so much here. If I had a grove like this by my house, I would barely need to go anywhere at all."

Bruce started to get a little nervous as they got deeper, looking over his shoulder frequently, but not seeming to find anything relevant. Before long they found a small cave, one shallow enough for them to see its entirety before entering. There were some scattered animal bones in the cave, and a depression in the dirt that looked just about the right size for Justin to curl up there comfortably, if he so chose.

“I’m starting to think you might be right about not getting much rest here,” Bruce commented.

Justin looked around the cave before turning away. "Um, no, that's probably not a good idea." He put his deductive mind to work, practically appearing above his head in a thought cloud. Cave + Bones + Space for a pony = Hungry predator about the size of a pony. "Um, let's find somewhere else…" He moved away from that cave and its potentially deadly inhabitant.

Further exploration found a small stream, which managed to have clean water it in. Or at least not obviously polluted.

Justin wandered up towards the stream, sniffing at it once before he sat down beside it and pulled out a mixing bowl and pestle to grind things with. "Is it alright if I make some things for us? Being prepared will help keep us safe."

“I’m all for being safe,” Bruce consented, before taking the time to start washing the soot off his face and hands. He looked at the water a bit dubiously after that, as if trying to decide something before sitting down to alternate between watching Justin and looking around at the woods.

Justin began with some fresh water in the bowl, then began adding plants carefully and grinding them up with patient motions of his hooves. He held the pestle between the hooves, the top of it being flattened to let his hooves get a good grip, and he churned it like butter. "So, tell me about, uh, this? Where are we?"

“We’re in Idaho, a uh, pretty rural area. They grow a lot of potatoes out here, and some other stuff. It got really dry this summer, and then some lightning strikes lit it up, so… yeah. I came to help the in-laws do their best to contain the fires, but as you can see there’s more than we can really deal with. I almost…” Bruce got quiet as he reminded himself how close he came to dying, and just stared at the flowing water for a bit.

Justin lifted an ear at the thoughtful looking male. "You did what you could. I'm glad we're both alive to worry about it." He pulled the mixer to the side to peer into the mix, then added a third plant. The entire thing began to turn red quickly as he ground it up, and stop being a paste and more of a gel. He gathered a vial and it obediently allowed him to collect it into it, filling it with the red goo. "There. How are the burns feeling? You can use this."

“They’re constantly reminding me that I’m alive,” Bruce said with a pained grin, before reaching out to accept the vial. “Should I rub this on the burns?”

Justin quickly nodded. "It'll soothe the pain and help you heal. They don't look that bad from here? I'm not a doctor, but I make a lot of things that could help." He was already hard at work on his next potion, this one apparently involving more heating as he labored to get a little controlled fire going, which proved far easier in theory than in reality.

Getting the fire going proved to be beyond Justin's ability, to his mounting frustration. Maybe everything was just too damp from the creek? It was as good of an explanation as any.

Justin grunted softly and abandoned the effort. There were other potions to make. He stuck his head up defiantly as he got to mixing the next. With the human as company and audience, he slowly refilled his stock with about four new potions made from the herbs he knew the properties of.

Bruce shed much of his clothing, leaving on only a pair of black boxers as he got to work spreading the gel on his reddened skin. He had to spread it pretty thin to cover as much of his body as possible, mostly on his extremities where it seemed to be the worst. But when he had finished, he sighed with a bit of relief, enjoying the cool night air on his exposed skin, so pleasantly unlike fire.

Justin set his mortar and pestle away after rinsing both off thoroughly, then approached Bruce with a hopeful smile. "Feeling better? We really shouldn't stay in the wilderness like this, it isn't safe at all." He pointed at himself. "Are all of your ponies like you? Are they alright with ponies like me?"

Bruce took a moment to try and make sense of what Justin was saying with his overuse of the word ‘ponies’. “We’re called humans, and yeah, all the ones that can talk are like me. We have some animals that look kind of like you, but they don’t talk, or make medicine, or anything clever like that, and most of them are a lot bigger. As for being alright with someone like you… well, I’ll vouch for you.”

Justin nodded. "That'll have to do." What would they do? Chase him out of town? "Are there any laws I should know about? I don't want to get into trouble for walking on the wrong side of the street or something. That would be silly."

Bruce laughed a bit. “There’s a ton, more than anyone can keep straight, but the really big ones are pretty simple. Don’t steal. Don’t attack anyone. Don’t have sex with anyone without their permission. Though if we get into a bigger town, we’ll have a talk about where to walk safely.”

Justin seemed to count on his one hoof at each crime was mentioned, until the sex one came up and he coughed. "Who would even dream of doing that?!" He set his hooves back on the ground and stood up. "Walk safely? Are the roads dangerous?"

“Anyone who would dream of such a thing gets locked away for a very long time,” Bruce said somberly. “As for the roads… you don’t want to get hit by a car. Stick to the sidewalks, and cross when it’s safe and legal to do so, and you should be fine. But that isn’t really a consideration way out here, right now.”

Justin bobbed his head quickly. "It's just like Manehattan. Alright, stay off the roads if you don't want a carriage to run you right over, got it. This doesn't sound so bad…" They weren't ponies, but they had laws that made sense, and the one he met seemed nice enough. "Lead the way."

Bruce thought a moment, looking longingly at the water in the stream once more, before deciding he still wasn’t thirsty enough to risk whatever microorganisms might be living in the water. He climbed to his feet and put on his normal clothing before gathering the firefighting gear that had been over it into the coat. “I guess it’ll be fine to sleep under the stars, near one of those burned out houses for the night? Or we could go see how the fire’s going before we decide,” he offered.

“Don’t go,” said a gruff voice from the woods, it came from far enough away that they couldn’t see the source in the shadows of the starlit night, and sounded more commanding than asking, with the slightest hint of growl.

Justin closed his mouth, aborting whatever he was about to say to instead peer at the voice/growl and back up towards his human companion. "Did you hear that? It wasn't just me was it?"

“Show yourself!” Bruce demanded of the voice, anger quashing his fear for the moment. “If you don’t want us to leave, explain yourself!”

“The pony stays,” the voice said before adding “as my guest.” The growliness of the voice made it hard to take that as comforting. “If you leave now, you can go home, human, but don’t return. Once I show myself, you’ll be my guest too.”

Justin glanced up at Bruce, then towards the ominous voice. "If it's all the same, I think I'll go home with the, uh, human here." Yes, that certainly sounded like a safer route, all things considered.

“I’m afraid I can’t allow that. You’ve both been haunted, that’s reason enough to bind him as it is,” the voice said. “But you, little pony. You don’t belong in their world anymore than I do.”

Bruce as getting a really bad vibe about this whole thing, and started crouching a bit, like coiling a spring. “Get ready to run,” he whispered to Justin.

Justin gave the briefest of nods. "I, um, made the little ghost girl happy. Why would she want anything bad to happen to me?" He huffed at the voice. "You're being mean for no good reason."

“Such ungratefulness when I’m going so far out of my way to protect you,” the voice said with an extra irritated growl at the end. “The man might be dismissed as delirious from smoke inhalation, but you’ll endanger all of us out there. And the next one who finds you might not be so gentle in her efforts to protect you. Or even see you as worth protecting...”

The words confused Justin, and made him curious as well. He took a hesitant step forward. "What are you protecting me from? I'm sorry, you're just… kind of scary sounding. I'm not trying to be ingrateful, please tell me." A lot of things stopped making sense in the last day, and he hoped that would change.

“Make your choice, human. Stay and be bound, or flee now. I see your ring,” the voice said. That was incentive enough for Bruce and he took off at a dead sprint, fleeing like his life depended on it. Which seemed likely enough.