Live Fire

August 2, 2023

Tomoko was on campus, which was largely empty due to it being summer vacation aside from a few resident students who did not return home for the vacation and some club activities, when she suddenly felt her pager vibrate on her hip. She looked at it and remarked in annoyance at being interrupted, “Ugh, a medical right now?”

She had clipped it to her skirt on her school uniform, and as she listened in on the call, she realized that not only was it a medical call, but it was on campus in the dorms. “Harukawa Fire Brigade,” said a dispatcher on the air. “Respond to the Harukawa Girls’ Academy dorms, Room 27 on the second floor. BLS response for a sixteen-year-old female who fell in the shower. Time of dispatch is 12:04.” Doing paperwork in the student council room, she jumped up and immediately grabbed a first aid kit that was kept in the room before rushing out into the hallway to go to the dorms.

About three minutes later, she arrived at the dorms and raced up the stairs to the second floor. She knew based on the fact that the fire brigade had been toned out that the paid fire station’s ambulance was out of service and the brigade’s ambulance would still be a few minutes out while a crew got assembled at the station. She soon reached the dorm room and saw that another student was already standing outside that she recognized. “Hazuki-san,” she said to her. “Is it Maeda-san with the emergency?”

“Yep,” said the girl, a second-year at the school as she opened the door. “She’s in the bathroom.”

“Thanks,” she replied as she walked in. She then set the first aid kit down and opened it, putting rubber gloves on, before walking into the bathroom to meet the patient. “Maeda-san, it’s President Morishima from the Student Council. Are you here?”

“Yeah,” replied a girl who was sitting in the bathtub and covering her otherwise naked body with a towel. “Is the ambulance here yet?”

“No, not yet,” she replied. “It’ll be here soon, though. While they’re on the way, I’m just gonna ask you a few questions and get you checked out. I heard that you fell in the shower.”

“Yeah, I did,” the girl in the bathtub replied in an awkward tone.

Tomoko looked her over as she pulled back the shower curtain and asked her, “Does anything hurt? Like, do you think you broke, tore, or pulled anything?”

“No, no, not like that. I’m not that hurt.” She seemed rather elusive about what the problem with her was, almost as if she was embarrassed about it. “It’s… Different.

Tomoko, confused, asked her as she shut the door to give her some privacy, “So… What did you call 119 for, Maeda-san?”

“I, um…”

“Be honest with me,” Tomoko insisted. “Please.”

It was at that moment that the girl came clean to Tomoko despite her initial hesitancy. “There’s a shampoo bottle inside my ass, Morishima-senpai.”

Stunned, Tomoko replied with a nod, “Oh… Okay… And you fell on it?”

“Does it really matter how it happened?”

“On second thought,” Tomoko admitted. “No, it does not. Let’s take a look and see.”

The girl sighed and awkwardly got up as best as she could, taking the towel off to show Tomoko what was wrong. “It, uh… It’s right up there.” She was clearly deeply embarrassed about what was going on based on her tone of voice and her beet-red face. “God damn it, this feels so humiliating.”

“Don’t feel bad,” Tomoko assured her as she began to assess what was going on. “It happens, Maeda-san. The most important thing now is taking it out and making sure it doesn’t damage anything up there. G-I bleeds are not fun to deal with. I can tell you from experience, unfortunately.”

“G-I bleeds?”

“Gastrointestinal bleeding,” she replied. “It refers to when someone is bleeding from their intestines or rectum. It’s a pain in the ass to deal with, no pun intended. So, on that note, did you bleed at all?”

“No,” she assured her. “I didn’t see any blood.”

“Alright, that’s a good sign. Has this ever happened before to you?”

“No… I hope it doesn’t happen again.”

“How long has the bottle been inside of your rectum?”

“About fifteen minutes before you got here.”

Then, they heard a knock at the door, followed by Yui saying from the other side, “Tomoko-chan, are you in there?”

“Yeah, come on in,” she replied to her. When she walked in, she told her, “Maeda-san has a bottle of shampoo stuck inside of her rectum. She’s not bleeding at all, thankfully, and aside from that, there’s nothing else wrong with her. Is the ambulance here yet?”

“I think they just left the station when I walked into the dorms,” Yui replied as she put on two rubber gloves. “The paid fire station’s out on a cardiac arrest in Inoue.”

“Damn,” she replied. Inoue was the town south of Harukawa, part of which the Harukawa Fire Station was also responsible for alongside Inoue’s own volunteer fire brigade. “I guess they didn’t send the tanker here since it’s a low-priority medical?”

“Yep,” Yui confirmed with a nod.

Tomoko then turned back to the girl and asked her, “So on another note, do you have any medical conditions that could cause excessive bleeding, like hemophilia?”

“No,” she said as she shook her head. She asked them, “When will the ambulance get here?”

Tomoko assured her, “They’ll probably be here in another minute and a half or two minutes. Two and a half minutes tops.”

The girl told them in frustration, “This shit wasn’t supposed to happen. I feel so stupid. Why did I think this was a good idea?”

Feeling bad for her, Yui told her, “Can I give you some advice, not as a firefighter, but as a woman, Maeda-san?”

The girl sighed, “Alright, what is it?”

“I assume you used it to pleasure yourself?”

Tomoko looked at her with a frustrated expression, replying, “Yui-chan, wha-?!”

“Okay, yes, I did,” the girl finally admitted, feeling remorseful for lying. “I should have told you the truth. I’m sorry.” She then told Tomoko, “It’s fine, Morishima-senpai. I’ll come clean.”

Yui, feeling sorry for the girl, told her, “I’m not a prude, alright? I’ll admit that I’ve used sex toys before. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. I would recommend that you use something with a flared base next time so it won’t get stuck. It’ll save you a lot of trouble, Maeda-san. You got lucky this time, but the next time, you may cause some serious damage to your rectum.”

The girl blushed rather intensely, not used to hearing such a topic discussed so openly. “Oh, uh, I…”

“Trust me,” Yui assured her. “You’ll save yourself a trip to the hospital next time. Like I said, there’s nothing to be embarrassed about, Maeda-san. It’s important to talk about things like this so that we can avoid situations like this from happening again.”

Then, two other volunteer firefighters walked in, both dressed in blue jumpsuits and carrying more advanced medical equipment. One of them, who was Masako, saw Tomoko and Yui and asked them, “Oh, you guys got here first?”

“Yeah,” Tomoko replied. “What’s the highest level of care we have on the crew, Lieutenant?”

“SFAC,” Masako replied. SFAC was the level between FAC-1 and ELST, and was considered an intermediate level between them. “Do you think we need ALS?”

“No,” Tomoko shook her head. “We have a sixteen year-old female who inserted a small shampoo bottle into her rectum. Her name is Maeda Chika. She insists there is no bleeding, and neither me nor Yui-chan found any signs of bleeding when we inspected the area before you got here. She also doesn’t have hemophilia or any other conditions that make her susceptible to excessive bleeding according to her. She says the bottle was inserted while she was masturbating, and it’s been there for about eighteen to nineteen minutes by now.”

Pleased with Tomoko and Yui’s work, Masako replied to her, “Alright, we’ll take it from here. Thank you for coming. Do me a favor and help bring the stretcher up here with Koda-san.”

“Got it.” Both Tomoko and Yui then walked out of the dorm room, and as they did, Tomoko told Chika’s roommate, “The ambulance is here. We’re gonna get the stretcher for Maeda-san now.”

“Thank you guys for coming,” she replied. “I got so scared when she told me she fell in the shower.” She was clearly unaware of the true nature of Chika’s emergency. “Falls like that are no joke.”

“Yeah, uh, I can see why,” Tomoko replied, fighting back the urge to laugh at her cluelessness. Both she and Shiori then walked down the stairs to get the stretcher.

As soon as they were both outside the building and walking towards the ambulance, Yui let out a short laugh. “She really has no clue, does she?”

“Not at all,” Tomoko replied with a grin. “What were you even doing here? It’s summer break.”

“I was with Naoko-chan in the pool,” she replied. “I just got changed back into my school uniform when the pager went off. She told me she had some stuff to do at home, so I went instead of her.”

…

Later that day, many of the brigade’s firefighters gathered at the station in their blue and orange uniforms for a training night, including all seven of the student firefighters. The brigade’s captain, Hideaki, was leading the drill, which was conducted at the paid fire station on a pad behind it containing a small brick house and a four-story drill tower. As the eighteen firefighters all gathered around to hear what the captain had to say, he told them, “Tonight, we’ll be doing hose advancement with and without SCBA. I have with me Lieutenant Onoda Yushiro from the Yoshimatsu Area Fire Department, who will coordinate with us tonight. He is the on-duty officer for Station Four right now, and he has graciously let us drill here tonight. Make sure you clean up after yourselves if you make a mess. Now, go ahead, Lieutenant.”

“Thank you,” replied Yushiro, a man in his mid-thirties who wore tan bunker gear with orange stripes. Unlike the volunteers, his gear had separate pants along with a coat. “We’re gonna be using both the burn building and the drill tower for tonight. For those who are SCBA-qualified or are training to be, you will advance an uncharged hose line up all four flights of stairs, after which you will come down and then advance a charged hose line into the burn building, which will have a small fire set in one of the four rooms inside. We will do four rotations of three firefighters each, and we will rotate which room has the fire so that you can put each fire out completely. Captain Kitagawa will accompany each crew. The rest of you will flow water on the outside towards the creek next to the fire station, where I will accompany you.”

“Now,” Hideaki said as he got out a clipboard. “Group One will be Lieutenant Yamada and Firefighters Kitagawa and Morishima Rumiko. Group Two will be Lieutenant Washio and Firefighters Morishima Tomoko and Suwabe. Group Three will be Firefighters Okubo, Koda, and Tamura. Group Four will be Firefighters Honda, Amano, and Nojima. Group One will start the evolution first. Group Three will mask up and accompany me as the ignition team inside the building before retreating and standing by while Group One goes up the drill tower. Groups Two and Four will stand by. Now, let’s go. You all got two minutes to don your gear!”

All twelve firefighters who would be doing the SCBA evolution replied, “Yes, sir!” They all then quickly began to don their turnout gear and SCBAs. Once their turnout gear was on fully, they all turned their air packs on. Several of them put their air packs on by going over their heads with them, while others put it on from the side. Within less than two minutes, all of them were fully geared up and masked up, but stopped short of hooking their low-pressure tubes into their regulators.

Once they were done, Hideaki told them, “Groups One, Two, and Four, take your masks off. Group Three, keep your masks on and follow me.” As the other three groups stayed behind, Hiro, Shiori, and Ayumi followed Hideaki to the burn building, which was a small one-story brick structure with five rooms, four of which were meant to be used for live fire training, and a small pitched roof to train firefighters on vertical ventilation and gaining roof access at fire. At the rear entrance to the burn building, Hideaki took his helmet off and put his mask on before then grabbing a portable torch and telling them, “We have three rolls of hose. Roll them out and hook them to Engine 31.”

“Got it,” replied Hiro as he and the other two grabbed the rolls of hose on the ground. As they all rolled them out, he asked the captain, “Where’s the nozzle?”

“Wait, it’s not there?” Hideaki then looked around and realized he had forgotten the nozzle back on the fire engine. “Shit. Sorry about that. Can someone go back and get a nozzle for the safety line? When you’re over there, can you also hook up one end of the hose to the pump?”

“I got it,” Ayumi volunteered, walking over to Engine 31 and opening up a compartment to grab a nozzle before then hooking up one of the hoses to the pump of the engine. When she walked back, she asked Hideaki, “Is the hose all set up?”

“Yeah, we got it all connected.”

“Alright.” She then hooked the nozzle on the other end of the hose, which was forty-five meters long once all three sections were hooked together.

Hideaki looked over at the pump operator in Engine 31, who was Shinichi, and twirled his one hand around while telling him, “Charge our line! We’re going in to light the fire!” Hideaki then hooked his mask up and began to breathe pack air before opening the door and walking into the hallway. He then came to the first room and opened the door to it, finding a small pile of wood and paper in a corner. “I’m lighting the fire!” He then walked over to the paper, which was largely crumpled newspapers and paper towels, and lit it on fire with the torch.

Meanwhile, Masako, Yui, and Rumiko were advancing an uncharged hose line up the stairs in the drill tower. Their hose line was sixty meters long and composed of four sections they had rolled out. Rumiko was on the nozzle, while Masako backed her up and Yui pulled the hose half a flight of stairs behind them as they advanced up. Rumiko asked Masako, “How much longer?”

“One more floor,” she told her as they both took a deep breath. As they all went up the last flight of stairs together, Masako told Rumiko, “I’ll have you go first once we get up there.” She then turned around and told Yui, “Make sure you pull enough hose to make a loop on the last half-flight of stairs, Kitagawa!”

“I know,” Yui replied as she pulled some extra hose as Masako instructed.

At the top of the tower, Rumiko took a deep breath and asked Masako, “How long do we stay up here?”

“I gotta let them know we’re ready to come down,” she replied before she looked out the window. Once she saw Hideaki come out of the burn building, she yelled at him, “Captain, we’re at the top!”

Hideaki took his mask off and gave her a thumbs-up, yelling up to her, “Got it! Come on down! The fire’s just been set!”

“Coming down!” Masako then told Rumiko and Yui, “Let’s head down.”

“Got it,” Yui replied as she began to pull the hose while carefully moving down the stairs.

As all three slowly walked down the stairs, Rumiko asked Masako, “Do you still want me on the nozzle?”

“Yeah. Since you’re the newest firefighter in Group One, I want you to get some time in on the nozzle.”

“On an unrelated note, uh…”

Masako asked her as she reached the third floor landing, “What‘s up?”

A bit worried about what her reaction would be, Rumiko timidly asked Masako, “What do you think of the principal’s idea to get rid of us?”

“Oh, that?” Masako chuckled and told Rumiko, “Fuck him, and fuck his idea. Who the Hell does he think he is anyway? You guys aren’t undertrained at all. The fact you’re doing this tonight should be all the proof he needs, but that bastard won’t listen.”

“I really hope he doesn’t go through with it,” Yui added from below. “He’s gonna screw the brigade over. Almost a third of the people participating in this drill are student firefighters.”

“I completely agree,” Masako nodded. “We’d be screwed during the daytime, since the school lets you guys out if it’s a serious call, not to mention the early evening when people are commuting back from work but you guys are already out.”

About a minute later, the three of them emerged from the drill tower and began to drag their hose line to the burn building, which by now had some smoke pouring from the closed doors and windows. Hideaki, who was waiting for them, told them, “Mask up and head on in. I’ll open up the door, but I need one of you guys to take a hand tool in so you can open up the window in the burn room when you get in.”

“Got it,” Masako replied. She then told Yui as she took her helmet off, “Yui, grab a tool.”

“I got one right here,” Yui replied as she picked up a halligan bar from the ground. “Will this work, Dad?”

“Yep. Perfect.” As all three got their masks on and then hooked their masks in to breathe pack air, Masako told Rumiko, “Is this the first time you’ll be on the nozzle for a live burn?”

Rumiko clarified as she put her helmet back on, “This will be my first structural live burn period.”

“Damn, nice,” Masako replied with a chuckle.

“This’ll be good for you,” Hideaki told her as he showed her a thermal imaging camera. “It’s getting pretty hot in there. Don’t panic, trust your crew, put the wet stuff on the red stuff, and you’ll be fine.” He then radioed out to Shinichi, “Engine 31, go ahead and charge the attack line. We’re heading in.”

“Received. Here comes your water.”

“Let’s get ready,” Hideaki told Rumiko, pointing to the hose.

“Got it,” Rumiko nodded as she picked up the nozzle and the hose filled with water, becoming heavier and more rigid.

“We’re ready,” Masako said with a thumbs-up as she got behind Rumiko on the hose.

“Head on in,” Hideaki said as he opened the front door and smoke billowed out. “Go low and go get it!”

Rumiko and Masako both got down on their knees and crawled in, the smoke quickly reducing the visibility of the building. As they advanced down the hallway, Masako looked over and managed to see an open door through the smoke, as well as a faint orange glow. “It’s in there, Morishima! Go in there!” They both could feel the intense heat of the fire as they got closer to it. She thought to herself, “Kitagawa-san wasn’t kidding! It’s really hot in here!”

As Rumiko and Masako moved into the first burn room, Yui came in behind them with the halligan bar, feeding them more of the hose as they advanced. “Is the door already open?”

“Yeah,” Masako replied to her. Once Rumiko got through the doorway, she told her, “Open up on the nozzle and hit it!”

Rumiko then pulled back on the bale of the nozzle and began to flow water onto the fire. As soon as she did, the room cooled slightly, but the visibility got far worse and smoke and steam filled the room. She continued to flow water as she inched closer to the fire, quickly knocking it down. “How am I so far?!”

“You’re doing great! Keep hitting the fire!” Masako then turned around and told Yui, “Get in here and look for a window! Force it open as soon as you do to vent the room!”

“Yep!” Yui then moved into the room and began to search for a window along the wall, and once she found a fake window, she called out, “I got one!” She then used her halligan bar to pry open the hatch that acted as a fake window for the burn tower. As soon as she did, the smoke inside began to flow out of the room, and the visibility became much better.

Masako then told Rumiko, “Switch to a fog pattern and flow water out of the window. The fire’s out!”

“Got it,” Rumiko replied before shutting the nozzle down and turning it to change the pattern from a straight stream to a fog stream, or a pattern that flowed a cone of water out of the nozzle. She then aimed the nozzle at the window and pulled the bale back, and as water flowed out of the window, the amount of smoke that flowed out increased as well, being pulled by the water flow.

From the outside, Tomoko was watching as she adjusted the straps on her air pack. She smiled, telling Sumire, “My sister's the one on the nozzle. She isn’t bad for someone doing their first live burn.”

“This’ll be my first, too,” Sumire pointed out. “I’m a little worried.”

“You’ll be fine,” Tomoko assured her with a pat on the shoulder. “Lieutenant Washio will be right behind you, Suwabe-san.”