Author's Notes:

Aren't multiple definitions of the same word fun?

WARNING - a small section of this chapter contains mild graphic references (gore)

EDIT: Sexy new horizontal rules! I am in the process of editing them in to the rest of the story now.

Iroh emerged from a side street into the town square. For a moment, much of the activity stopped as the local ponies turned from their efforts at taking stock of their supplies. Many of them had been displaced, their homes rendered uninhabitable by Spike's draconic rampage that morning.

With a shout of glee, several ponies broke from the crowd to talk to him.

"Iroh!" sang out Lyra, her coat now mostly back to it's normal mint green.

Close behind her came Bon Bon and Vinyl, followed shortly by three more ponies he didn't recognise immediately and a fourth that he did.

While Lyra did her level best to tackle Iroh's legs from underneath him, the other five slowed to a halt a more comfortable distance away.

"Oof!" Iroh groaned as he took a mare to the thigh, causing him to turn slightly on the spot to accommodate her momentum.

"Where did you go?" Lyra demanded. "I got my color back and when I turned back to look at you, you were gone!"

"And a very good color it is," Iroh placated the excitable mare while the others caught up.

"I was invited with a chat with your lovely mayor and then a unicorn was MOST insistent on... Well, not speaking to me so much as studying me. Doctor Stable and Nurse Sweetheart rescued me a couple of hours ago."

"Rescued?" some of them exclaimed at the same time.

Iroh paused and looked at the pegasus stallion in the back of the group, a camera hung around his neck and a fedora atop his head. He thought he recognized him as the pegasus who had been flitting around after him taking photos almost non-stop.

"The name's Eff Stop. Who did you say Doctor Stable rescued you from?" the pegasus grinned at him.

"Oh pony feathers!" blurted Vinyl Scratch. "Dude, don't say another word!"

"Ah come ahhn!" Eff Stop's Manehattan accent started to shine through strongly as he realized he was about to be denied a story.

Iroh's brow furrowed and his mouth turned down as he recognized the pegasus who had been following him around and flashing that small but very bright light at him. "Who exactly are you? I saw you following me around while I was helping around town and you never did anything to help."

"He's a reporter for a newspaper," Vinyl growled. "Trust me, dude, just zip the lip and catch up with us later."

"Fair enough. For now I need to find some food. The good doctor told me there would possibly be some food for sale here that I should be able to buy and eat."

There was some muttered suggestions from nearby ponies, many of them including dishes that were their own speciality one way or another. Then, from the back of the crowd, there was a trio of excited high pitched cries.

"CUTIE MARK CRUSADER CATERERS, YAY!!"

The effect was immediate, a dozen pairs of eyes shrank to pinpricks, while several ponies bolted for their homes, stable building or not.

Vinyl rubber her ear with one hoof. "Yeesh! And ponies call me loud..."

Then she turned and saw the looks of the faces on four of the five other ponies that were closest to Iroh.

"Uhh, girls? Something we should know?"

Lyra turned to Bon Bon. "Where do we hide? The house is half wrecked!"

Octavia looked confused. "Hide? Hide from what?"

Bon Bon turned a haunted look on her before the blue earth pony spoke up for the first time. "The spa didn't get damaged..."

"To the spa!" hollered Lyra, Bon Bon and Vinyl in unison.

As the rest of the group turned and raced off, Octavia and Iroh were left side by side scratching their heads.

"What was all that about?" wondered Iroh.

"I have no idea. Do you think we should follow them?" replied Octavia from the side of her mouth, the eyes not leaving the sight of the rapidly retreating ponies.

"It might be for the best if everyone reacted like - WOAH!" Iroh's reply was cut off as he was bodily lifted from the ground and started moving.

Beside him, Octavia sighed from within a faint blue aura and gestured towards the madly grinning heads of Lyra and Vinyl Scratch. "Unicorns..." she grumbled as she crossed her hooves in front of her.

A minute of floating and running later had Iroh and six ponies inside the entry area to the spa.

A couple seconds more floating and a slammed door later found a very disgruntled Eff Stop ejected from the building and muttering vile imprecations about stubborn DJs.

In the cellars of the Ponyville Hospital...

"Oh my poor little pony..."

Celestia looked sadly down on the as yet unidentified pegasus, who now lay on a sheet covered table. Her wings were almost completely devoid of feathers and the vast majority of her fur burnt from her body, the exposed skin sickeningly blackened and cracked.

She looked up to the stoic Doctor Cribber, a dowel rod of maple hanging from the corner of his mouth like a cigar or a pencil.

"Can you tell me anything about her?"

Cribber nodded before turning to a series of clip boards on the wall. He selected one and levitated it down to examine it for himself.

"Tha repor' 'ere says she was hi' by ligh'ning during tha dragon rampage. She was foun' by Eff Shtop an' Big Shot. Ya know, da pho'ografers?"

Celestia's ears pricked forwards as she did her best to decipher the doctor's nearly impenetrable speech.

"Did you say 'photographers'?"

"Yep, pho'ografers. They shaw 'er get hit an' went ta get 'elp. Nat dat it done 'er no good..."

"Does it say anything about who she is?"

"Nnna! Nat a shing! We go' 'er cullas, bu' dere's nopony in da record what matches 'er."

Celestia sighed with frustration. Even after more than a millennium of rule, it still hurt her to see one of her subjects die before their time.

"Very well. When the report is ready, please send a copy to Black Marble in Canterlot, if she is not identified by then, I have no doubt that he will be able to assist us."

As Celestia turned to leave, she there was a distinct clatter of wood hitting the floor.

"Wait, your highness!" Doctor Cribber's voice was much easier to understand as he had spat his dowel out - an almost unheard of thing for the pony who was the hospital's primary pharmacist.

"Doctor Ostler has a couple of other notes I think you need to hear."

Celestia's interest piqued, she turned and nodded for Cribber to continue.

"Big Shot, who was the one what signed her in gave a witness statement. He says the lightning bolt that hit the mare came from the West, from the other side of Ponyville to where she was and - and it came from the ground."

Celestia froze, she knew that she had been killed in some manner by Iroh, but not that it had been with lightning! She had assumed, wrongly, that Iroh had been throwing fireballs, as would have fitted his apparent talent.

"Given that, Doctor Ostler did a little bit of asking around. Apparently, the lightning bolt was launched at the dragon, but missed him and hit our mare back here. Just about every pegasus who was in the air at the time will tell you though, the bolt was crazy powerful. They were saying at minimum it was over a hundred and twenny thousand amps."

Cribber looked down at the clipboard one last time.

"Look, I'm just not trained right for morgue work, that's Dogger's job. Trouble is, Doc Dogger's up there in the wards helping with all the injuries and he's hurt himself. If ya find out who the fool was that was playing with sparks, give 'em a good swift buck from me, will ya?"

Doctor Cribber floated the clipboard back over to its peg, and seemed to remember something.

"Oh, and if you see this human that's got Doc Stable all giddy, tell him me and the other docs here owe him a lot of thanks. He saved a serious number of lives and injuries with that fire magic of his."

Celestia's frown deepened. There were very few ponies, pegasus or otherwise that she knew of that had both the knowledge and the power needed to create true lightning on this scale. She was starting to wonder what to make of this Iroh.

His purported actions spoke volumes of his willingness to help her citizens, but on the other hoof, his abilities were very dangerous. Demonstrably so if he had already accidentally killed a pegasus in the course of trying to help chase away a dragon. For that matter, what happened to the dragon?

Celestia bade the slightly ragged Doctor Cribber farewell, even as he hunted for his beloved chewing stick and left the hospital deep in thought.

She stopped near the two armored stallions that made up her honor guard for the day.

"Find me the human Iroh. He apparently looks a bit similar to a minotaur or a diamond dog. Do not speak with him, just find him and tell me where he is," she commanded.

"He is in the spa building, your Highness," the guard on the left answered immediately.

Celestia's head snapped to the side as she looked at the stallion in surprise. Looking back down the hill, she noted the clear line of sight her pegasus guard had to the building in question, where she could see a pony sitting outside scribbling on a notepad.

"Well done indeed," she praised. "Come, it is time I spoke with our most recent guest."

"Please stand guard here. I will hopefully not be long."

Eff Stop looked up from his notepad just in time to see Princess Celestia - Sweet merciful Celestia! the Princess herself! - striding through the door of the spa.

He tried to stand and call out to her, only for the door to close behind her and the two guardsponies to close ranks and block his path.

Inside the spa, Celestia noted that there was nopony at the desk. The sounds of voices and faint laughter could be heard from within the spa itself while the aroma of charred turnip, carrot and potato could be smelt over the normal floral scent of the building.

*Fwoosh!*

The sound of a small plume of fire being released was followed by the laughter of several mares.

"You think that's funny?" came the brash sound of one mare's voice. "I bet if you get him in the right spot, it'll blow out his other end and burn his tail off!"

Two of the other mares laughed uproariously while a third more cultured voice gasped in shock.

"Vinyl Scratch! What a terrible thing to say!"

A much deeper voice chuckled. "It is quite all right, Miss Octavia. After all, I have already burned my tail off. Yeowch!"

"You can't fool me," a quiet voice chided. "You never had a tail to begin with or you would have had a very different lower back."

"And a very nice lower back it is," one of the mares grinned lecherously. "Wagh!"

Celestia rounded the corner just in time to see a green mare remove an expertly thrown towel from her face.

A giggling Lyra opened her eyes as she dropped the flung towel on the floor next to the hot tub she and three of her friends were currently enjoying.

Four mares watched as Lyra suddenly stopped laughing and her eyes went as wide as dinner plates, her jaw falling slack from sheer surprise.

Slowly, the others turned and fell silent.

"Is something the matter?" asked Iroh from his prone place on the massage table as he felt the heavenly hooves that had been working the kinks out of his back slow and then stop their steady motion as the room fell silent before the hooves fell from his back and fell to the floor with a soft clop.

"Good afternoon, my little ponies. Is there room for one more?"

Iroh had heard that kind of voice before. Memories of his mother, Ilah, washed over him like a tidal wave and he was just barely able to reign himself in enough to raise his body up to his elbows and look to the source of the voice.

The alicorn that stood in the doorway and filled it almost completely could be none other than Celestia.

*Splash, splash, splash, DONK!*

The five ponies in the room bowed to the princess out of pure instinct. Unfortunately for the four ponies in the spa, this meant that three of them had just dropped their faces into the water while Vinyl Scratch miscalculated her descent and wound up hitting the edge of the spa horn first.

Celestia eyed the ponies, one of them trying to stifle a moan as she nursed her jarred horn.

In front of the massage table, the heavy ceramic bowl had been moved from the sauna. A makeshift frame and wire mesh plate had been placed atop it, holding the cooking tubers she had smelt earlier.

"You may rise," she commanded, lest her subjects in the spa grow a sudden need for gills.

Celestia turned and pinned Iroh with her gaze. "Iroh. I would have words with you about your actions today."

Iroh sighed as he pushed himself upright and cinched the towel around his waist tighter. "It would appear the party is over, girls."

"Not at all. Lotus Blossom, may we use your office?"

Lotus blushed as she looked down. "I'm sorry, your highness, but the two of you would not fit in our office. Perhaps the sauna would suit your needs?"

Celestia nodded her assent. "That will have to suffice. Come, Iroh, we have much to discuss."

Iroh sorely wished he had brought his pack into town now, but decided to make the best of the situation. He walked towards the door to the sauna room, snagging his inner robe from a hook on the wall as he went past and shrugging into it.

He held the door open and sketched a shallow bow as he preceded Celestia.

While Celestia lay down on one of the benches, Iroh sat on one on the opposite side.

"Now. I would hear from you exactly what you have been doing today and why one of my ponies lies dead by your..." Celestia glanced down at Iroh's arm for a moment. "...hands."

Iroh winced visibly before steeling himself and launching into his tale, his long years in the Fire Nation army came to the fore as he fell into the old pattern of giving a report to a superior. Something that, admittedly, he had not done in almost thirty years.