Least Noticeable could have gotten to the next hill by galumphing on her numerous elephantine legs -- "galloping" was hardly the accurate term for her high-speed gait -- but she was in a hurry. The little flappy thing might be seriously injured, and its attacker might come back if she did not reach it quickly.

So she reached out with her senses, wriggled her long infra-pink hair in a special fashion, summoned up her strength and emitted a tone. A Gate opened before her and she stepped through. She emerged on the top of the adjacent hill.

This was a simple thing to do by her standards. Her twin sister could do the same thing, only with much less finesse. Claire wasn't as good at making ponies smile as was Pinkie, but she was a lot better at Gate-walking. With a little preparation, Least Noticeable could have opened a Gate to the Lunar surface, but she doubted she would have liked the climate or -- based on what she'd seen a couple months ago -- the inhabitants. With a lot of preparation, she could open a Gate to the extradimensional realm that contained Paradise -- which was of course the main purpose of her existence.

Least Noticeable peered down the hillside. There were a lot of trees and underbrush in the way -- it was the height of summer and the vegetation was luxurious. She couldn't directly see the little flappy thing by means of infra-red or ultra-violet, her most normal sensory bands. Through a magnetized lattice that ran through the undercoat of her fluff, however, she could hear radio-frequency distress cries. She focused her gravitic senses down that bearing, and could see the sputtering of contra-gravity from the little flappy thing's effectors. It was very obviously hurt.

Her instinct was to go gallumphing down the hill, shouldering aside any trees or other vegetation that got in her way. Her intelligence told her that if she did that she'd have a good chance of pushing a tree right down on top of the little flappy thing she meant to save, which would not be good for the creature's well being. She could have Gated, but there was no clear area near the flappy thing which could accommodate her. So instead, Claire picked her way carefully down the hill, taking the path least blocked by major boles and being very precise about where she put any trees she did have to break to allow the passage of her immense body.

Doing this was, of course, unavoidably noisy. Least Noticeable was fairly light on her multiple collapsible hooves, in part because she kept some of her mass coiled up in other dimensions, but she still weighed as much as a small elephant, and there was no way she could get through all that vegetation quietly. Thus, as she descended the hill, her passage was accompanied by the rustling of leaves and snapping of wood as she stepped on the forest floor or crushed whole bushes under her hooves, and the creaking of live wood as she pushed past trees.

The little flappy creature stuck its head up and stared at her. That head was vaguely equine, with a large cranium surmounted by two antennae which waved in her direction. The eyes were multifaceted and protruding, with a wider field of view than that of a Pony. The jaws were powerful, and terminated in an array of sharp fang-like teeth. It was slightly larger than most Ponies, and Claire might have found its appearance frightening were it not much smaller than herself.

It stared at Least Noticeable. As its antennae waggled, she felt herself painted by active radio emissions and, though she could not be sure, it seemed as if she was also at least somewhat visible to its eyes as well. At the sight of Least Noticeable it shrank back in obvious alarm, and cried shrilly in the shortwave radio spectrum. It hopped up -- its wings flapped in a manner that showed that one was broken -- and contragravity stuttered as it attempted a vertical launch and toppled back down to the ground.

Claire winced. That looked painful.

Apparently accepting its inability to take flight, its next action was to leap up the side of a nearby tree. Long sharp claws on both its fore and hind legs bit into the wood, and the little flappy thing ascended with considerable alacrity as Least Noticeable approached the base of the tree. It was a rapid climber, but seemed somewhat unsteady, perhaps because of its injuries. It grasped a high branch with one foreclaw -- then the branch snapped under its weight. The creature nearly fell with the branch, then managed to hold on to the main trunk. It seemed a bit dizzy.

Claire smelt something unpleasant and realized that the ground at the base of the tree was soaked in a reddish-black ichor, and more was dripping from the flappy thing. It was hurt badly, and she feared that in her attempt to save it she was causing it to harm itself further.

She made soothing meeps at it, but it did not appear to be listening. She wasn't sure that the noises Ponies liked would even appeal to it. She realized that she needed to know more about this thing.

Claire concentrated and touched the part of Paradise within her. While her anatomy was not configured to make the sounds of Equestrian speech, she could transmit coded electromagnetic and gravitic signals across a wide frequency band, and she hoped that Paradise would know some signal which the flappy thing would understand. Even Claire could not really speak to Paradise most of the time, but what she could do was gain knowledge from It by a means which felt like recalling distant memories.

The understanding of a simple code came to her, one often employed by the Cosmics themselves and hence universal through a wide reach of spacetime. It was not suitable for complex communications, but it might convey her non-hostile intent.

"Friendly," she transmitted at the little flappy thing. "I-help-you. No-harm."

The little flappy thing reacted to her transmission by squirming around on the bole and looking straight down at her.

"Friendly ..." it started to transmit back, and then it slumped in position and plummeted right toward the ground.

Least Noticeable gasped and shot out half a dozen of her long, prehensile tongues to catch the creature before it could fall to the ground. As she did, the little flappy thing burst into a frenzied struggle, one of its razor-sharp talons actually severing one of her tongues, before it slumped into unconsciousness.

"Yow!" cried the head from which that tongue had extruded, and Claire withdrew the stump, feeling twinges of pain as the member started regenerating. That smarts, she thought. I'd best be careful handling the little thing until it calms down, she reflected.

Rearranging her hold on it so as to prevent it from biting or clawing her further, she cushioned it in what she hoped was a comfortable manner on her back-fluff, sucking it into the fluff enough to cover it entirely and provide it with protection from any branches she might brush by or snap off in her own passage.

She climbed the hill again, sighted on Granny's farmhouse, and Gated.

Granny Pie would know what to do. She always knew what to do.

"Claire-bear, what you got there is a Byakhee," Granny Pie said.

They were in the barn which had been Claire's own home until last year, when she got a bit too big for it to be comfortable. A big table upon which she still sometimes took the tastier parts of her meals was serving Granny as an examination table. Granny had taken one look at those long sharp talons and the array of teeth in its jaws, and had insisted on tying the creature very firmly down.

Claire hadn't minded, since it meant she could finally relax her tongues, but she wasn't totally sure if restraining it in such a manner was entirely friendly.

Claire made a series of modulated meeps and piffles at Granny. There were exactly three Ponies who could understand Claire's attempts at Equestrian, and Granny was one of them. In this case, what Least Noticeable had said was the eternal plea of kind-hearted souls finding unusual beings in the woods:

"Can I keep it?"

Granny frowned, stroking her chin with one hoof. "Now, Claire, I don't reckon as that's such a good idea."

"But he's little," Least Noticeable pointed out. "I can give him some of my food."

"Now that's one of the problems," Granny said. "Byakhee are carnivores and haemovores. They could probably eat some of your food, but they'd also need meat and blood as vittles."

Claire thought about that. "It's not much bigger than a Pony," she said. "We could feed it chickens. I could pay for the chickens. I'd work harder." The Least Noticeable Daughter of Quartz Pie earned a good allowance from her adoptive father for her valuable contributions of the Pie Farm as a living piece of heavy equipment: she could easily move boulders that the whole rest of her family working together could have barely budged. The price of regular donations of chickens would have strained her current resources, but she could probably offer to do extra chores for extra allowance.

"That'd do for the meat," Granny admitted. "But what about the blood? They need more of that than they need meat. And they have big appetites."

Claire meeped and fluffled herself. "There's me," the noises meant.

"You want to let it drink from you?" Granny at first looked horrified, then mused on it. "Well, actually it probably can't drain enough to hurt you much," she said, "provided that you're well fed. But you don't know where that thing's been -- you could get sick."

Claire raspberried scornfully. "Never been sick a day in my life."

This was true. Claire's ability to regenerate, coupled with her immune system's access to the vast knowledge of Paradise, rendered her pretty much proof against any known disease. Granny had once told Claire that her unusual metabolism made it likely that Claire would never die, short by considerable violence.

"Second problem," continued Granny. "You may be more or less invulnerable to this thing, but we ain't. Byakhee are predators, and this one could be extremely dangerous to our family. Think of what would happen if this critter went for one of your little sisters."

That brought Claire up short. She loved her family.

She thought about this for a while.

"It can't fly now," Claire meeped. "I can nurse it, make friends with it."

"Mebbe," allowed Granny. "You could tend it at the old stone tower the Quartzes used to have at Lightning Hill. Nobody goes out there. And you said you can talk to it a bit ... but you should keep it confined for a while until we can figger out if we can trust it. When it's healed, it probably won't want to stick around and hunt anyhow, if it's been well-fed.

"Remember," Granny continued, "it ain't just about us Pies. The Byakhee cain't be allowed to harm any ponies. It's just common decency, and besides -- how long would folk keep liking us if we acted like evil witches out of one'a the old tales?"

"I won't let it hurt anypony!" Claire promised.

"There's one final thing," Granny said. "That ain't an 'it,' and it ain't no dumb animal you can turn into a pet. That's a 'he' -- I know it because nopony ever sees female Byakhee -- and he's as smart as anypony. Byakhee don't build things -- they're nomads and they live to fly -- but they're smart just like Griffons or Dragons. Meaning they don't think like us, but they think as well as us. You forget either of those two things, and you'll come to grief. You understand that, Claire Quartz Pie?"

Granny only used Least Noticeable's formal full name when she was being very serious. Claire gulped, gasped, and meeped her agreement.

"Okay," said Granny. "I think I can splint this wing so it heals proper. The other hurt ..." she indicated where something had taken a big bite out of the Byakhee's side "... would be beyond aught I could do were it not that it hasn't gone deep into the abdominal cavity and these critters are damned tough. My herbs should keep the rot out and if it don't fuss too much and gets enough vittles it should heal. You need to treat him gentle-like, hear?"

Claire indicated her extreme gentleness as a nursemaid.

"Really need a hospital," Granny muttered, setting to work with sticks, cords and poultices, "Cept I don't think most hospitals would know what to do. Crazy to try this at all. Ah well, Claire, at least we raised you right. What kind of Quartz or Pie would you be if you didn't help a stranger in need, eh?"

Claire made happy assent.

She was going to get to keep the little flappy thing. At least for now.

Author's Notes:

The sight and sound of Claire coming to the rescue is pretty terrifying if you don't know she's a nice Pony.

Granny's using John W. Campbell Junior's definition of "an alien."