Home On The Range (Ranger Emily backstory)

HOME ON THE RANGE: HERO! Magazine meets Ranger Emily

The first time Emily Kaywinnet Priest's father knew she was a hero was when he got a call from her high school. She'd been fighting, and he fully expected to have to discipline her - until he met her victim in the hall.

The fourteen-stone hulking bully was still swearing blind he'd have revenge as he was wheeled away with two dislocated knees. Alan Priest took his battered, bleeding, but defiant eleven-year-old out of school, showed her the principal's stern warning letter...

...and had it framed. It's next to her desk in her Legion workspace.

"The only thing he said", she says with a smile and a sip of coffee, "was that I shouldn't let them hit me that hard. So he taught me Tae-Kwondo".

Any visitor with preconceptions about what a hero looks like is going to be disappointed by little Emily. At five foot two, dressed in rough, practical leathers lined with Diamantium Kevlar, she doesn't look the type to gracefully soar out of the Paragon sunrise. The green flak jacket proudly displays the Forest Service Ranger patch and her sewn-on nametag, but gives away little else - other than the scuffs and patches.

Her utterly relaxed pose draws a few disdainful looks and coughs from the Talos Island commuters, with muddied boots up on the back of a nearby chair, a huge travel mug of black hazelnut coffee in one hand and idly waving as she tells stories with the other. But what they don’t know is that every single one of them is alive – and the same shape – today, because yesterday she stopped the Devouring Earth releasing an intelligent plague dubbed “Unity”.

“And what people don’t know”, she smiles, “can’t hurt. S’pose that’s my job. Our job,” she says with a smile and a wave to a fully spandexed hero – who, despite having magical gauntlets, a sword nearly as long as he is tall, and rippling chest muscles, still has to wait in line for his skinny latte. He shrugs with a theatrical frown and she breaks into a laugh. "People knew a tenth of the stuff that we do, the sane ones'd run a dozen mile 'fore they look back."

It’s when that smile cracks through the grime and the green eyes suddenly flash with fun and energy that you get what she’s about. From the shock of rough red hair to the tips of the tiny combat boots, Em’s an adventurer. A Tom Sawyer tomboy, for whom fame and fortune are minor distractions compared with saving lives and protecting her beloved parks and forests.

Born in the quiet town of Tusayan, Colorado, Emily’s playground was some of the most spectacular scenery on Earth. “Living on the edge,” she says of her Grand Canyon home, “gives you a different perspective to city folk. It’s older than you. It’s bigger than you. It’s seen more than you’ll ever see, and it’ll still be here when you’re gone.” She fondly recalls long summer days spent with her Hualapai friends – the reason for her fight with the bully was an attempt to cut one girl’s sacred flowing locks – rafting and scrambling around the rocks, running free in the forests, and learning secrets at the feet of the elders. “Under the mud, no-one could tell me apart.”

Her parents – a fire ranger and a botanist – instilled her with the love of nature and the outdoors, and also with the skills to save lives. At fifteen, she rescued a party of stranded hikers, lost and weak with hunger and thirst, from the foot of the Canyon, dragging them each a half mile to her raft and taking them down over grade 5 rapids to Diamond Creek. She seemed vaguely puzzled by the attention, and forgot the TV crews were coming when she heard that a new baby deer had been born nearby.

It’s still a problem for news crews keeping up with her today, and she’s only here for the interview because this is where she stops for coffee each morning before checking in with the NFS office and the Legion. She breaks off mid-chatter, eyes aglow, to frantically wave over Gennaro the owner. “They’re back”, she whispers, and gestures to a pair of squirrels quietly stealing a preoccupied businessman’s croissant. “Shiny”.

Emily’s parents were delighted when she went to study botany and animal biology at ARU, but the rough-and-tumble country girl didn’t sit well with spoilt, groomed cheerleader types and fidgeted constantly in labs and lectures, still feeling the call of the wild. An answer came when the college’s Army cadet corp opened up recruiting, and she soon proved the equal of any crewcut jarhead wannabe. Following her bachelor’s degree, she signed up for the Airborne Ranger officer programme and came near-top of her class, with a prized Sniper qualification. And while other women had to fight to get onto the Green Beret course, Cadet E. Priest was never in doubt.

But it was at this point that she had a new fight on her hands, one she never expected, and the one time she thought to throw in the towel. Prepped and ready to field an anti-drugs detachment in the fields and jungles of Colombia, with the chance to see dozens of new species, she suddenly found a new set of orders in her pigeonhole. Ones that she grew to hate. She was transferred to DC as an honour guard and PR worker for the Army, and hated every minute of the “cushy tushy” post. She even took to tackling muggers and leading clean-up days to try and keep out of the office.

“Speaking of which”, she says, “’scuse me a second.” I’ve been lost in the story so long that I hadn’t noticed a scream behind us. Without missing a beat, Emily idly tosses a (recycled) plastic ball onto the floor – gluing three triumphant Warriors to the sidewalk as they sprint past. They look around furiously but suddenly pale, seeing Emily’s smile... not to mention, of course her infamous Bauer And Drescher Multi-Functional Ordnance launcher “Mal” resting quietly between the tips of her boots on the chair back, pointing right at the leader’s crotch.

There’s a beat as they weigh up their chances. Then Emily simply coughs, lifts the barrel a tiny bit, and gives a pointed look. Resigned, the leader hangs the stolen handbag over the tip and is treated to another flash of that dazzling smile, followed by another pointed look. Even more resigned, the boys drop their money clips into the handbag and Emily hands it back to its owner. Lesson learned, Emily goes back to her coffee and mercifully lets them slink away.

Truth was, the camera loved her face, her figure, and her bright, homespun style was exactly what the forces’ spin doctors and branding agencies wanted. But repeated transfer requests and promotion review boards got her nowhere – until the last straw, a request for a calendar shoot. “Hell, no-one’s pawed me since I took my first step in uniform, and now they wanted to offer me up on a platter. Not happening.”

Suffering from depression and never wanting to see another desk again, she applied to the Forestry Service. A friend of her father’s found the application and pulled some strings, and she was finally free – joyously throwing her scratchy dress uniform out of the window as her pickup fled the capitol at 100mph.

Fate had one last trick in store, though. Emily was training as a “smoke jumper” – the ludicrously dangerous job of parachuting into the centre of a fire and stopping it from the inside out. She was assigned to a forest fire near Paragon – and found holidaying Hellions at the heart of the blaze, laughing as they destroyed all around her and chased animals, firemen and heroes with darts of flame.

They didn’t laugh much longer.

Battered and bruised but triumphant, Emily drove a fire truck with sixteen miscreants duct-taped to the side – and one unlucky spandex hero in the back seat - out of the smoke and into the daylight, “and the rest, as the movies say, is history.”

Now permanently assigned to Paragon and the Forestry Service’s first sanctioned hero, tempting offers to come back to DC and front the Army Advanced Assault hero program have been waved away, all with that dizzying smile. She has friends here now, a new home with one of the city’s foremost hero groups – the Liberty Legion – and all the physical and intellectual challenges a young hero could want.

Drawn to the subject of her recent success, she’s shy about the Unity plague – but lights up when she begins to explain the technical details, blinding me with the science of intelligent microbes and guided DNA. Perhaps mercifully for this reporter, just as she gets onto the amazing forensic scientists she worked with and the techniques she learned, her phone rings.

Listening intently, she nods, smiles, and says simply, “On my way”. She doesn’t even say anything, just points at the phone, twists her face up a little bit in wide-eyed apology, and smiles again. A second later, her gravity belt whines into life and she’s gone, soaring away over the crashing waves. Gennaro bustles up, picks up her tip and her forgotten coffee mug, and tucks it behind the bar. He looks at the green dot receding into the distance, and cracks a smile. "Good kid."

She doesn’t wear a cape except on honour days, and has a running feud with an Icon store owner who still thinks she’d look better in a basque. But she’s every inch – all five foot two of them – the hero.