One good turn deserves another - a good samaritan winds up with superpowers as a result.

One good turn deserves another - a wai

[AN: O noes! Looks like an accidental premature submission. I shall do what I can with what there is…]

(#00311)

It took her two hours to reach the accident site. By then, most of the fires were out, and most of the people who had survived the crash had perished.

Nothing to be done about that. The authorities were days away. Things rarely fell from the sky, and when they did, they never hit places like Tullagawupwup. And you certainly never heard of them hitting the scrubby back paddocks of a cattle farm out in the boonies of Tullagawupwup.

But here one was.

Darla didn’t bother with what it was. She soaked her hat and clothes before getting close enough to the fires to put them out with some all-purpose C-O-two. She didn’t bother with the dead, yet. They didn’t need helping.

There. One moving body. Darla extinguished the flames before she went for the big medkit. She got the survivor free and into the shade of the ute before she noticed the poor blighter was not from this planet.

He was not your typical X-files alien. He looked more like a lost dinosaur than a Grey. “You’re gonna be all right, mate,” she soothed. “Gotta clean the wounds, bandage ‘em up.” She worked as she spoke. “I know, there’s not three chances in Hell that you understand a word I say, but a calm voice works wonders, eh? I can tell you’re not from around here. Judging by the way you aren’t fighting, you can tell I’m good people.” She patched up what there was obvious to patch up and let the poor bugger have a drink of water. Water was safe. Couldn’t let him have anything else until some kind of communication barrier was broken.

“You are… very good people,” said the dinosaur.

Well, shit. “You’re pretty good at English,” Darla managed. “I’m Darla Wolanggu.”

“Ch'chezrith,” said the dinosaur.

Lots of things got sorted out in the shade of that ute. Including the fact that Ch'chezrith knew he was dying, and that Darla couldn’t do anything to stop it. He put a pendant around her neck as compensation for her time, and told her that she could use it to help better the world.

And then he died.

She didn’t want the world knowing about alien dinosaurs, so she got on the CB and told the authorities that it was a light plane crash. No survivors. And that she would get more local help with the bodies.

What she got was three cousins and a back-hoe to very quietly place the bodies in the earth, and turn a loose panel from their craft into a ground-level marker.

Ch'chezrith and his crew. They boldly went, and now they’re gone.

They finished with beers and a camp by the wreckage.

“Dun’t look like no plane,” said cousin Merv.

“Nuh,” agreed cousin Blue.

“Reckon we could strip it. I know a fella. Bit of acetylene and Bob’s yer uncle. Can’t tell two bits of buggered scrap apart.” Cousin George finished his insights with a sip of beer.

“Wish I knew what t’ do with this bloody thing,” said Darla, indicating the gift pendant.

Half the wreckage literally tore itself apart and re-assembled into a sort of demountable science station. The four of them poked around in it, but it became pretty clear that only Darla could make it do anything.

Ch'chezrith had given her the keys to his sufficiently advanced technology.

And among the many things it could do for her was control local weather patterns.

The Drought Ender was born.

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