Too late for one; too late for two
Rescue Me
Zephyrus Scary
This is suppose to be a vacation, two unicorn mares, Bearers of the Elements of Harmony, think to themselves for two very different reasons.
Why does Rarity seem to refuse to understand that I like reading? Twilight prevents herself from rolling her eyes, if only to keep them on the open book before her.
What was the point of coming to Mareami and renting a boat if she’s just going to do the same things she does at home? Rarity sighs at her friend’s seeming hopelessness, laying on the deck of said boat and soaking in the pure relaxation only a clear sky in the early afternoon and nothing but ocean for miles can provide. Such relaxing powers aren’t enough and are, in fact, rendered nearly useless by the simple knowledge that one of her best friends is below deck, absorbed in a book on sailing or some similar topic (Twilight had used proper terminology to describe the contents, and Rarity had bothered asking for clarification) instead of up here experiencing it for herself.
Though next to Rarity is a radio playing base-heavy beach and Sun music, she barely hears it, and not only because the volume is down low at Twilight’s insistence. Over the course of an hour, her impatience builds, until, with a jerk, she sits up and switches off the radio with a little burst of magic. The jostling of the radio against the deck is a small, but much needed splash of sanity: Rarity instantly reevaluates her original plan to stomp down the steps below deck. Not just so un-lady-like, but it certainly wouldn’t endear Twilight to try! No… I need a more sophisticated approach!
Standing, she rolls her shoulders, then hips, easing the life back into her legs—there are more negative effects to failing to relax than an uneasy mind. Rarity frowns and the numb, heavy feeling in her legs, for the tightening of her muscles had been too gradual to realize, and she blushes whenever a joint is returned to life with an audible pop. However, it’s not like I wasn’t being amenable before, but maybe I conceded too easily? I know I’ll need to change my approach someway, but how… “Hmph!” Twilight can be so… fickle! I’ll just have to play by ear!
Boosted by the short mental pep talk, Rarity saunters into the stairwell, where she experiences a sudden dropping feeling in her stomach strong enough to make her legs feel so weak she’s forced to cower down, the edge of a stair pushing painfully between her ribs. Not five seconds later, however, the moment passes, and Rarity pulls her now wobbly self back up, wondering what had made her feel so weak in that moment, no long so sure in her soon-to-be confrontation.
Still, Rarity forces herself onward into the bedroom—a “bed room” in the truest, purest sense, for there is no room for anything but the bed just large enough for the two of them—where, of course, she finds Twilight, but not reading. Yes, there is the book open before her where she lays, but she’s currently looking around at the ceiling, brows furrowed, but whether in worry or deep thought, it’s difficult for the other to tell. Only after Rarity coughs does Twilight blink and finally look down.
“Oh! Rarity! Did you… feel something just a second ago?”
Worry it is… Rarity’s heart begins to beat slightly faster upon seeing Twilight bite her lip, then, as if realizing herself, Twilight quickly rearranges her expression into what she imagines neutrality to be. “Uhm, Yes, Twilight. I felt… a-…” Coming down prepared to speak with Twilight about getting some Mareami sun and ocean air, her brain has trouble shifting to such a different gear, struggling to collect the right words.
“-a sinking feeling?” Twilight supplies, brow coming down again slightly. “-in your stomach?” She adds just as Rarity begins to nod, making her affirmation stronger.
“Indeed! How did-? Ywaa-eep!” Rarity cries out when Twilight leaps over her, the studious one’s face now edging past mere worry and more towards terror. Once more Rarity is struck frozen as her mind catches up to the present, but Twilight leaves her below deck. This time actually shaking her head to force herself past her confusion, Rarity follows, forgetting herself and taking the steps two at a time with a bounding gallop that Pinkie would have been proud of.
Any thing Rarity might have been thinking to say, indeed, all her thoughts, are wiped away by what she sees: a wall of water rushing towards them, and Twilight just staring at it, eyes wide, mouth open. Having received the shock of this sight first, Twilight recovers sooner. “Rarity, I can’t-… I can protect us from the worst of it, but-… Just hold on!” Twilight lowers herself, spreading her legs, bracing as she funnels powerful magics from her horn into a spherical barrier surrounding the ship.
For a few long, precious seconds, Rarity still stands, dumbstruck, after Twilight’s order. As she strains to pull her eyes from the terrifying sight before her, questions vie for prominence, only leaving fleeting images, destroying any opportunity for coherent thought. Twilight’s words can only inch along the fog-bound, quicksand-filled landscape of Rarity’s mind, but the severity of her message perseveres; finally, Rarity wraps her hooves, both fore- and hind-, about the deck’s railing—some deeper, untouchable instinct tells her not to go inside.
Twilight, in foresight, not only casts barriers, but magically glues herself to the deck, likely saving both ponies’ lives, for when the wave hits the barrier, it tosses the protected ship about like an unfettered buoy. The trapped ship and water inside whirl about like flakes in a snow globe, frothing like a rabid animal intent on taking those two lives.
Inevitably, the ship begins to crack, then break, as the swirling water tears at it and tosses it against the barrier. Neither unicorn can see what is happening, and their sense of gravity has long left them, and with their eyes shut so tight, they cannot tell if they are still on the ocean or truly transported to some watery Tartarus. They hardly dare to breathe for all the water that seems to endlessly batter their faces, and only when the deck gives up the ghost, spiting in two, breaking Twilight’s glue spell, does she gasp, only to be knocked out an instant later by a flailing and screaming Rarity. The barrier shatters then, suddenly plunging both entirely underwater.
Twilight blinks awake, her first thought is to curse the hot Sun beating her like an ever-present whip—only using the lightest of strikes, but the pain still slowly builds. Then the rocking of ocean waves and the sound of uneven breathing reaches towards her consciousness like curious but cautious dogs; their eventual touch shocks her into sitting up with a gasp, causing whatever she’s laying on to rock wildly. “Twilight! You’re awake, thank Celestia, but please be more careful.”
Looking down at Rarity laying next to her, Twilight’s eyes are quickly drawn to their impromptu raft: a particularly large chunk of hull. Turning around, all else that can be seen is nothing but the mid-afternoon sun, ocean, sky, and scattered debris—nothing near the size of this slab of wood. The silence left in the wake of such disaster makes Twilight feel deaf as she surveys the near-nothingness; something whispers that this calmness after destruction can only mean death, and it makes her spine and mane tingle even though she knows that she and Rarity, the only two on that boat, are still alive.
“What happened aft-?” Twilight begins to ask, more to fill the silence than any curiosity, but a sudden crack of splintering wood underneath them, though hardly loud enough to overpower the sounds of the ocean’s waves, still cuts off her words as effectively as a noose. Both sets of eyes turn to the forehoof Twilight had propped herself on, then follow the crack as it grows and splinters. Rarity whimpers when the one crack zig-zags under her, and Twilight is quick to order, words firm and the waver in her tone would have only been noticeable if Rarity had bothered to listen for it. “Rarity, don’t panic. I have an idea, but it’s going to sound… a little insane.”
Rarity, fighting to keep from shivering or shifting at the probably-phantom sensation of a splinter digging into her side, barely manages to speak through her uncooperative jaw. “Insane?! Why can’t we just teleport!”
“I need to know where we are, at least in relation to where I’d be teleporting to…” Twilight begins to sigh out her own frustrations at the limits of her magic, but the loudest crack yet scares her into holding her breath for a moment before continuing. “A-Anyway, I know a spell that can… turn a pony into an emergency life raft.”
Rarity’s reaction is about as good as Twilight expected: Her words serve to loosen the other’s jaw too much, leaving it to hang open before Rarity realizes and reins in control. “You mean some kind of transformation into-?” Twilight’s preemptive nodding leaves Rarity’s tongue wiggling soundlessly for a few seconds. “Twilight, that’s-!”
Twilight has to cut Rarity off before her tendency to ramble wastes too much time. “It’s the only solution I can think of right now!” Her cry is punctuated by another crack, this time accompanied by the chuck of hull bowing in slightly. “Ocean water is very cold, Rarity. If we wait too long, we could both freeze to death when night comes, but if you let me transform you, you won’t feel it, and I’ll disspell the transformation as soon as we’re safe. I’d transform myself if I could, but then I wouldn’t be able to cast the disspell…” She waits for an answer, but all that comes is Rarity squeezing her eyes shut and biting her lip. “Rarity… please, trust me… If I could think of any other solution-…”
Only when their failing rafts cracks further, now sinking slowly as water seeps through, does Rarity cry out, “Alright! Do it! Now!” Rarity keeps her eyes firmly shut, but can still feel the rocking of the hull piece as Twilight oh-so carefully lowers herself once more (so she doesn’t risk falling and her spell being interrupted at a critical moment). Then, a feathery touch envelops her, like the thinnest possible sheet, just at the edge of nonexistence. The sensation calms her, almost lulling her into drowsiness until, with a shock, the “blanket” squeezes skin-tight around her. She tries to call, scream, anything, but in the next instant, jolts surge through her, locking every muscle at their tightest—she’s left incapable of even breathing, and she’s sure her heart has been stopped.
What could have been a second or an eternity later, Rarity feels her fur and hair—every single strand—being pulled tight, so tight that she’s sure they should be ripped from their follicles until she feels the “sheet” get pulled even tighter around her, bringing a realization: Her hair and fur are actually being woven into the “sheet”. She barely has time to contemplate the meaning of this before the spell continues, now leaving Rarity with the sensation of tendrils sinking into her body, wriggling around in places where nothing has any right to wriggle: her belly, legs, back, neck, eyes, brain, and soon almost every part of her is filled with magic, but empty of everything else. Rarity would have gasped, now understanding that her body is not being invaded, but emptied, drawn into the “sheet” woven of magic, fur, hair, and now what had once been a living, organic body, now being slowly threaded into a nonliving, nonorganic inflatable raft.
As the spell works through her, Rarity feels her dwindling body crumple, even as she feels the new body her mind and senses are being fed into begin to grow and fold in on itself, not yet inflated. As the process seems to near it’s end, Rarity is instead shocked when it abruptly stops, leaving a potion of her old body still laying inside her folded skin-body, tentatively connected to the inside of the raft in a way that would have driven a pony insane to see: Red, still-living organs are pulled into sharp shapes by strings of something that can only be described as muscles in the form of a fibrous threads. These “not-muscles” twitch to life, pulling the remaining parts of Rarity-the-pony through the fabric-skin of Rarity-the-raft, where it hardens upon contact with the air, and Rarity can feel the last of her body being twisted into a complex mechanism—what she now knows must be the device to inflate her. Transformation complete, Rarity doesn’t yet realize she’s closed off nearly completely to the outside world, with all sense of sight, sound, smell, and taste destroyed, and she doesn’t question a sudden overwhelming urge to be inflated.
Seconds earlier, when Twilight released the spell, she gasps from the unexpected drain of magic, confused for a moment before recalling the shield that had taken such a beating from both the waves outside and from the boat inside. A twinge of panic flares at the realization her magic reserves are more depleted than she expected, but she forces her magic to remain at the tip of her horn as she watches over Rarity, ready to intervene should something go wrong. Her worry here is for naught, as she stares at the cocoon of fine “wire” mesh her magic had formed, perfectly matching the description in the book. The rest goes just as expected, though Twilight only sees it from outside: The mesh shrinks, encasing Rarity’s body before drawing fur and hair, twisted through the mesh until until an only vaguely pony-shaped blob sits there, white with a purple stripe running a complete circumference, which begins to grow and lose its pony-definition as it wrinkles, yet inflated. Once the transformation finishes, Twilight wastes no time in pulling the handle that had formed on the hard plastic box that had formed last, switching on some mechanism inside that begins to draw air in, and it seems they are just in time—the hull finally splits, dumping Twilight into the ocean, but leaving the now-lighter Rarity-raft on one chunk.
As Twilight treads water, all Rarity feels is a sudden “jerk” of something inside her, then, finally, motion: filling. It is not a sensation of filling of any distinct type or space, but all and more—there is not just the sense of continually breathing in, but also her stomach, bowels, and uterus, and all other spaces that simply shouldn’t be, and which have no meaning or no longer have meaning: Rarity not only senses her head expanding, only dully aware that she has no “head” any more, but also feels the space between her left flank and right foreleg grow, again only barely knowing that those two parts shouldn’t be anywhere near each other, then the next second she wonders why she had ever classified those parts of her as “head”, “flank”, or “foreleg” in the first place. I’m not a pony, or anything like that, of course! Just a raft, with simple parts like… stern and starboard… Come to think of it, what is a “head”, and what does it have to do with a “pony”? What is a pony, anyway? Rarity’s thoughts becomes more sluggish and less aware of her previous self as she continues to inflate, her new body taking on a more defined arrow-like shape, the purple stripe running bow to stern. Watching her inflate, Twilight notes that Rarity had lost her Cutie Mark in the transformation, but shrugs, dismissing it as the simple fact that only ponies have Cutie Mark, naturally, and (for the moment) Rarity is not a pony. I’m… a raft. Rafts aren’t supposed to be sa-… to be able… to think. I’m a raft. I’m not supposed to be able to think… What am I doing? I’m saving… a pony’s life. That’s… what rafts-… What’s “saving”? What’s-?… What’s-?…
Twilight, so fortunately unaware of her friend’s mental degradation (for she would have been unable to do anything but anguish over what she’d done if she did know) paddles up to the fully inflated raft and pulls herself in, instantly just letting herself flop onto her back, dimly aware of the strange feeling of the unnatural “fabric”. The pump, not merely attached but actually part of the Rarity-raft, had switched itself off by detecting a certain amount of tension in Rarity’s new “skin”; had Rarity been capable of any more rational thought, she would have hardly been able to focus on anything except the incredibly tight and bloated sensations.
Eventually, as the Sun descends from afternoon to evening, having dried Twilight but leaving in her coat and hair a nauseating amount of salt, the remaining unicorn drags herself back to her hooves to once more look out. “Still nothing… except maybe a little less debris, not that there’s any reason to expect anything else… yet.” Twilight sigh just before the last word, letting her vision float across the doubtlessly just-as-empty sky, from which rescue would come… eventually.
Once returning to herself, now with twilight approaching fast, she considers the debris. “Maybe I could fashion some kind of paddles or- No.” She shakes her head and sighs. “Too many sharp edges; I’d rather not risk popping you!” Twilight playfully pats the inflated floor under her, momentarily bring Rarity to wakefulness, but only enough to register the increases in pressure inside her body. “That and… I’m ashamed to admit, but I not familiar with the stars around Mareami, so… I wouldn’t know where to go. By chance I could go in the right direction, but I could also make things worse by going further out to sea!” With a shiver down her spine, Twilight chuckles nervously. “Ponies know we’re out here, around this area, though. We’ll be safe soon enou-” A rumble from her stomach interrupts her.
“Ah… right. Just how many hours has it been? You’re lucky you don’t have to worry about eating! With all our food at… the bottom… of… the ocean.” Taking great effort to keep her breathing even, Twilight still can’t stop her gulp of fear. “-and no fresh water. If that tidal wave was going towards, instead of away, from Mareami, then ‘soon enough’ might not… be!” Putting a forehoof to her chest, she tries Cadance’s breathing exercises, but she can’t shake the thought that this is the time to panic, if ever there was. “No, Twilight. Stop! You do… have a last resort. You do! Rafts don’t have to eat or drink, after all, and rescue ponies are sure to notice something odd about us, even as rafts! Heh heh! Yes! No panicking, Twilight! No… need.”
Twilight lays down as night truly comes, pulling away the blanket of the Sun’s warmth, but she doesn’t pay any mind, as the events of the day had already dragged her into a dreamless sleep. The tsunami had, indeed, hit Mareami, and its receding from land gently turns Rarity and Twilight away from safety.
Blinking into the morning Sun, Twilight grimaces, pulling a leaden hoof over her eyes. “Guh… Rarity, did you drag me above deck or-?” The events of the previous day finally themselves wake and whisper to Twilight’s inner thoughts, slowly bringing back to life the horror of their situation. “Rarity!” Twilight leaps off the pony-turned-inflatable-raft, quickly noting the purple stripe though the otherwise barely off-white color, before landing with a light bounce. A… too light bounce, she soon realizes, turning then to their surroundings. “Land!”
Truthfully, what the two find themselves on now is barely worthy of being called a sandbar, with no other land in sight, and the only life being one hardly bush and a few struggling tufts of grasses; the highest elevation on the string of “islands” is not even two feet above sea level, but the connecting shallows are at least not too deep to navigate.
A grumble from within the unicorn reminds her of her forgotten and lost lunch and dinner, all but forcing her to stare at the meager vegetation. “Should I eat it, or save it for a signal fire?” She bites her lip. “Well… rationally, I’ll die of dehydration long before starvation, so there’s only one rational answer, isn’t there, Rarity?” Heh heh… yes. Naturally there’s only ever one rational answer! That’s the definition of ‘rational’!”
Setting off the landed raft, A sudden gust ruffles Twilight’s salt-heavy mane and tail, and out of the corner of her vision, Rarity-the-raft, now empty—unburdened—is lifted slightly off the beach. Twilight’s pupils don’t have time to shrink in panic before she’s already jumping back into the raft. “NO!” She lands barrel-first on the cylindrical “railing” with an, “Oof!”, and from there bounces back into the raft; once more, Rarity’s consciousness is briefly awoken, and she would have cried out in pain at the pressure if only she could understand what she felt as “painful”, then as quickly as consciousness came, Rarity slips back into veritable nonexistence.
Regaining her breath and rubbing her aching ribs, Twilight is content to lay for a moment, reconsidering the situation. “Okay… I’ll need something to keep Rarity weighted down if I want to go out and collect the plants. -and something to keep the plants from blowing away, too. Think, Twilight: What are the resources available? Magic, but… not much, and not for long—I’ll need to keep a little to light the fire and… for ‘Plan Z’. What else? What else? What else, Twilight?! Water? I guess, and s- Sand! I can fill Rarity with sand and bury the grass until I need it!”
Practically grinning at her ingenuity, Twilight climbs halfway out and suddenly purses her lips, critically examining the sand. “Don’t want to use too much magic, but… there doesn’t seem to be anything else for it. I’ll just have to be careful—every unnecessary ounce of sand is magic wasted… I probably don’t need to use my entire weight in sand, but how much-? Guh!” Forgetting measurements in the realization she can’t know how much is needed, she pulls up glob of sand about equivalent in weight to her trunk and, swiftly so as not to burn any more magic than necessary, dumps it into the raft.
Finally able to leave the raft, Twilight goes about gathering the grass. Always is the conservation of magic on her mind, as well the worry that every single bit might be needed, so she carefully, with nothing but hooves and teeth, pulls every blade of grass and as much of their roots as she can save. Once her mouth is full, she returns to Rarity and buries each clump near her, ultimately ending up with five such clumps of grass, plus the bush; she also finds a few sticks of driftwood that look as if they had come from their wreckage, and buried them as well.
With her work done, Twilight, feeling as if she has now done everything that can be done to ensure their survival, finally allows herself to relax, which leads to one more realization as she settles into the sand beside Rarity. “I lost my books, too,” she moans out to the emptiness, flopping about in misery and absolute boredom—one accidental hoof hitting the raft is enough to calm her. “No books. No paper or quill… not even a pony to talk with.” Twilight turns to face Rarity and strokes her a few times until the strangeness of the act brings her back to herself, and she turns away, blushing. “Nothing to do… expect be by myself… -be by myself…”
Twilight tries to pass the time by focusing on the minute differences in how the Sun hits her body as it travels, occasionally dozing, which leaves her quite awake when night comes once more. Shivering slightly, she considers burying herself, but quickly dismisses the idea when she has to admit that, without magic, she would only be able to cover half her body. “Not… worth… the effort,” she mumbles, staring at one randomly chosen star. Rested or not, the absence of stimulation allows Twilight to lose consciousness every so often.
The light of the sunrise, however, still strikes an inner alarm clock, rousing a subconscious Twilight into stretching and standing before recalling her situation. “Mph… hm… Maybe some more driftwood landed, or something more useful?” Twilight asks, though she doesn’t really believe the possibility. Before setting off, she smacks her lips once, instantly stopping and cringing at the sensation like sandpaper scraping against itself.
It only takes about a hour to search the entire sandbar, and Twilight returns, indeed, with a couple more pieces of driftwood. Spitting them into the sand near Rarity, she grimaces at the little beads of blood the rough wood had drawn from her lips and tongue, and decides the still slightly water-leaden wood needs to dry a bit, so she leaves it out instead of burying them immediately.
With nothing else, it’s easy to decide to play a game of “watch the wood dry”, but it’s interrupted by a flash of light, then another and a third and fourth. The fifth finally draws Twilight’s lethargic attention, and she squints into the horizon, and only the sixth flash draws her to realize what must be happening.
“Rarity! Rarity, they’re searching for us! A rescue boat right there! They’re coming!” Twilight performs a little hopping dance before turning to the buried grass, but she quickly shakes her head. “The light of a fire would only be useful at night, and any smoke would just be lost in the light of the Sun behind us…” Shrugging, she turns back to the raft. “Just a moment, Rarity, and I’ll have you out of there!”
Calling forth the dregs of her magic, Twilight silently recites the disspell, grinning at the build up of power waiting to escape her horn—little as it is, she had never gone so long without using any kind of magic. Disspell finished, she waits a second, then ten more, but the magic doesn’t leave. Frowning and opening her eyes, she feels the unused magic trickle back into her reserves, then looks over the unsurprisingly not-untransformed Rarity. “I don’t get it. I know I have enough magic for the disspell!” She tries once more, then a third, but the result is the same. Little does Twilight know that the ancient book in which she had read this spell contains, as most books do even when published, a typo, and in this case that typo had so unfortunately fallen into this disspell—Twilight, unfamiliar with such drastic magic as inanimate transformations, does not realize the “disspell” she speaks doesn’t make sense, and instead is quick to blame herself.
“Rarity!” She cries as she hugs the raft as best she can, voice crackling. “Rarity… If you’re… even in there… and I didn’t just k- k-… I’m sorry. I don’t know what I did. I don’t know what went wrong. I hope, whatever’s happened to you, you can-… you don’t blame me.” Gasping, she looks up, and realizes that the horizon is once more empty—the searchers actually hadn’t seen them. The hopelessness pulls at Twilight’s tension, and she flops, motionless, back onto the sand.
When night comes, Twilight dimly realizes that now would be a good time to light a signal fire, but her self-blame beats the idea to a pulp, shouting in her skull all the while about how, if Rarity is dead, then she deserves to die for killing her, unintentional as it was. Another dawn, however, brings another idea. “Prin-…-cess… Princess Celestia! If anypony can-!” A sudden coughing fit cuts off her exclamation, but her thoughts are clear enough: Even if there is the smallest chance of Rarity still being stuck in the raft somehow, then surely Celestia would be able to help, and if that’s the case, I have to save myself first!
She would have gulped in fear if her throat hadn’t been stuck shut with dryness, for she knows that as soon as she releases the spell, she’ll be left completely at the mercy of the elements—a wave or gust of wind in the right place could mean she’ll be lost forever, but she just repeats to herself, This is my last chance at survival!
Standing, hooves spread, bracing, she stares into the Sun for what she believes could very well be the last time, then closes her eyes and prepares every last drop of magic she has left. Reciting once more the transformation spell, she releases it before she can allow herself to hesitate, and instantly the cocoon forms, but it’s incomplete; though Twilight cannot see it, her magic had not been quite enough. The mesh contains holes.
Soon enough, the suspicion that something had gone wrong begins to sink in as the mesh shrinks around her body. Twilight had expected to be encased, legs pulled tight to her body, as Rarity had been, but instead she feels the sheet of magic conform around her body and, unknown to her, it doesn’t squeeze her body quite as tight, allowing her to speak. “Does this mean… I’ll be a deformed raft?” Just when she finishes asking this, the mesh surges into her mouth, and other orifices: nose, ears, anus, vagina, urethra, and even miniscule pores, covering every cavity of the body, no matter how deep or small, and conforming to flesh. Quite unlike Rarity, Twilight is quite able to gasp at the invasion of parts strange and sensitive to the touch—the slight discomfort of her sinuses filling, once faded, gives way to the more lasting feeling of some stretching and tightening between her legs… and further.
Shivering and falling to the sand from the unexpected pleasure, she doesn’t notice immediately as her coat and hair is drawn into the spell until it tightens down. The shock that had frozen Rarity’s muscles fails to go off, allowing Twilight to wiggle her tongue as she feels the spell try to draw the nonexistent hair or fur into itself, almost tickling; this sensation flows down through her body, seeming to intensify as it hits the delicate place under her tail, sending a shiver at the feather-touch of bliss like she’s never felt before.
When the sensation recedes, she realizes that, indeed, something must have gone… “different” with this spell, but she hesitates to call it a mistake. After all, the purpose is to prevent dehydration and starvation, which this should achieve perfectly well, miscast or not. Cancelling out all thoughts of pleasure, the tendrils come into existence, their alien drilling causing only an emptying “non-feeling” as they rearrange Twilight’s body from solid to hollow. As the tendrils mine deeper, Twilight begins to feel a vague disconcertion; daring, Twilight opens her eyes and instantly realizes what she should have suspected, though it is a bit difficult to see as her emptying body folds in on itself. While the magic mesh keeps her in the form of a pony, the drawing of her insides into her new skin-body is actually making her grow.
Thankfully for Twilight, the final part of the transformation does not fail to trigger: With just a tiny portion of Twilight’s original body left, the tendrils—now fibrous not-muscle—pulls the clump of organic material to Twilight’s back, forming the pump there. Blinking, Twilight soon concedes that the miscast transformation is complete, and somehow hadn’t killed her, luckily enough.
Pulling herself up as best she can on mostly-deflated legs, she looks over herself, and notes a couple differences between her and Rarity’s transformation besides not being a raft. Firstly, where Rarity’s mane and tail have been turned into one continuous line, the colors that had once been Twilight’s hair only cover the back of her neck and the places behind and between her hindlegs. Secondly, while Rarity’s Cutie Mark had disappeared, Twilight’s remains, though it appears shrunken in light of her new size—quickly calculating an estimate, she guesses she must be almost three times as large as she had been: she’d be taller than Celestia, fully inflated.
“Inflated…” She tries to say, though it comes out like a whisper on the wind, barely recognizable as an attempt at language. The idea had slowly been worming into her mind, and it takes the opening, now filling all the former-unicorn’s thoughts—if it had been a physical force, it would have been forcing her to look at the new pump on her back. The next thing she knows, her teeth (strangely hard, though they’re as empty as the rest of her) are gripping the lever and the mechanism is already pulling air in.
She sighs at the strange pleasure, best compared to eating a delicious, filling meal, but a jolt of rationality finally hits. “I can’t be filled with air; I’ll get blown away!” She turns, frantic, back to the pump, but the only thing on it is the lever, and it only switches on—designed for use on a life raft, it wouldn’t make sense to have an “off” switch that might be hit accidentally during an emergency. Thinking quickly, she pulls her still mostly-uninflated body into sea, and the mechanism gurgles as it fills instead with water; normally, this would have automatically shut the pump off, but the miscast had left Twilight with a malfunctioning pump. Not that she complains, for her plan had been to fill herself with water anyway, not stop her inflation.
The pump works slowly, struggling against moving something it’s not designed to work with, and Twilight sighs once more, now fully relaxing, even giggling at the odd feeling of the little bit of air inside her bubbling up to her head as her body takes on the definitive shape of a pony. -a giant pony. Yet another difference from Rarity, Twilight does not experience her ability to think degrading as she fills; indeed, it seems to release her mind as the pressure to be filled is replaced with the physical joy of actually being full. Still, she allows her mind to remain empty for the moment, smiling at the strangeness of being nothing but a thin skin of life floating between two waters, one contained and slowly growing, the other shoving at her futilely with rhythmic waves.
However, her smile is wiped away by the inevitable tightness of nearing full capacity. “Wait!… Sto- ugn Stop!” She squeezes her eyes shut against the bloating pain, limbs twitching as best they can, slowed by their own heaviness. Twilight bites her lip as hard as she dares, and just as she thinks of biting down, tearing herself open to relieve the pressure, it finally stops. Blinking, she stands and looks around, realizing she had been drawn deeper underwater, she begins to work her slow hooves up the slope.
A moment of panic touches her heart (wherever it ended up on her skin-body) as the sand instead gives way under her first few steps, but soon she manages to gain some traction with the help of a wave hitting at just the right moment and at just the right angle, and she eventually breaks the surface, somewhat surprised to find the Sun high at noon. Pulling the rest of herself out remains slow going and only gets slower as more of her body becomes no longer supported by surrounding water.
Once fully out, Twilight looks over her new, finally “completed” body. The first thing she notices is how her body sags from the water, with her legs growing fat from water closer to the hooves, and her belly hangs lower than before, turning her once cute chubby frame to something better described as simply “fat”. Pulling up a forehoof to touch her belly, she watches it ripple at the tap before noticing how, as she lifts and moves her leg, the water is displaced, ballooning at the joints instead, making Twilight unexpectedly giggle.
Looking up at the hot early-afternoon Sun, she notices that, without real eyes or skin, neither the light nor the heat bearing down from the Sun hurt—if anything, the heat, no matter how high (or low), remains comfortable, or so Twilight thinks, for her brain is merely filling the details because she can no long feel heat. She flops to the sand with a great boom, sending up a little flurry of sand, and while Twilight would have giggled at this, too, she’s distracted by the waves she’s caused inside herself. The water sloshes back and forth, causing strange, distorting bulges across her body that appear and disappear rapidly, and all the while her skin-body creaks dangerously… but holds.
Only when the water mostly settles does Twilight dare to move again, running a forehoof in circles around her belly, she slowly comes to realize the numbness of the sensation, and what she “feels” is only what she knows she should feel. A few tests and Twilight quickly comes up with a new hypothesis: no smell and no taste, but very definitely a surge of ecstasy from between her legs that makes her jerk back as if burnt. “I can hear, too… Not that any of this really matters since, as a miscast, this result is effectively unreproduca-ca-cabl-llllle…” Twilight yawns, then smacks her tongue and lips with the sound of sloshing water and fabric-scraping-fabric. “Hmm… Not even close to evening, though… Guess turning yourself into a half-raft, somehow-still-living-but-not-made-of-anything-organic ‘creature’ takes a lot out of a pony?” Chuckling not only at her joke but also at realizing the strange almost-underwater-like quality of her new voice, Twilight pulls herself back to her hooves, stomps (unintentionally, thanks to her new weight) to Rarity, then lays herself on the ground, this time more carefully than before, encircling Rarity with her legs.
The next morning starts hot, which Twilight remains blissfully unaware of until a sensation like sweat trickling down her brow causes her to eyes to flicker awake, seeing before she’s aware. Reaching a hoof up, she swipes at what she expects to be sweat, but this doesn’t help. Taking in a deep, awakening breath, Twilight is halted by a sudden bloating pain all over that is relieved only when she breathes out. “What… is-…?”
To inspect herself, Twilight rolls onto her back an looks down at the first thing that she sees: her belly. As distended as it had been before, Twilight can now practically see her skin-body straining against the water filling her to what she knows must be past safe capacity. “H-wha-? -but I couldn’t have taken any more water or air in… The pump would have automatically shut itself off, like before, not to mention I’m sure it turning on would have woken me.” Shrugging at the unanswerable question, then grimacing at the new series of groans from her straining skin-body, Twilight lays back again and gauges the time. “Hmm… near noon? Late morning, probably.”
Lifting her hooves up in readiness to swing them around to get her overinflated self on her belly, Twilight notices the quality of the small bit of air that rushes up her legs, and her pupils shrink at its meaning. “Evaporating! The water inside me is evaporating, and with nowhere to go, the pressure is-!” In a panic, Twilight makes one mistake: sitting up. The water displaces from a more spread out arrangements fully up and down her entire torso, to surging down to her buttocks, making them swell to ridiculous (probably attractive) proportions before the expectant rip rends both the air and Twilight’s nether parts.
If she had any blood, Twilight would have blushed, the pain forgotten for a moment in embarrassment. It only takes a few seconds of futilely plugging the hole with her forehooves before she gives up. “Oh… well. I don’t need to be inflated. I-” That’s when the pain hits whatever Twilight’s brain had been turned into, and her curling around her belly in agony only forces the water to flow out the tear more forcefully, causing more pain. Shivering, wracked by fresh surges of stinging pain with every movement, Twilight forces herself to lay out straight, first hindlegs, then torso, chest, and forelegs.
Finally letting her head flop back to the sand from the effort, pain now more distant by will alone, Twilight’s eyes, by chance, fall upon Rarity, and a grumble from deep inside her connects with the dots of her having felt how the mesh had worked its way deep in body… down her throat. Twilight pulls her still-deflating self next to the raft. It might have Rarity’s colors, but why would her Cutie Mark disappear unless it wasn’t “her” anymore? Why wouldn’t the disspell work unless there’s nothing to “call back”? It’s just a raft now. Just a raft… She tells herself this over and over as she tongues a good portion of the raft into her mouth and, with surprising ease, tears through the material with a pop. Yes! Why else would I be able to so easily bite and chew this raft unless this body, though made by a miscast, was meant to eat it as designed by the same miscast!?
Almost instantly, as soon as Rarity’s body loses it’s tension from being inflated, her mind returns, and with nothing but pain. Huh? Wha-?! Gaaaaaaahhhhh! What’s happening to me?! she cries silently, but even if she had some way to communicate, Twilight had already eaten most of her “head”. However, even separated, Rarity remains in full awareness of her entire body. Every grinding of the teeth and lick of the tongue and swallow that heralds the tightness of an esophagus is Rarity’s torment and confusion. Wait. Twilight turned me into a raft. What eats a raft?! Twilight! Where could you be? Please, Please don’t tell me you were eaten by whatever this is, too! If I’m doomed, please, at least you survive, Twilight! I-!
That is her last coherent thought before Twilight tongues the pump box into her mouth and tentative crunches the hard plastic between her teeth and finds it breaks as easily as edible glass. One last swallow, and she places a deflated hoof over her half-deflated belly, capable of feeling as her new “metabolism” works the material, breaking it down into apparent nothingness in less than a quarter of an hour. Another quarter of an hour later, and a tingle hits deep inside, between her hindlegs. Determinedly, Twilight blocks out any pleasure the sensations bring, instead focusing solely on the trickling water slowly thinning.
Once it stops, Twilight relaxes all her not-muscles, determinedly laying perfectly still, not even speaking to herself or allowing herself to cry for fear of causing something else detrimental. Night comes and passes uneventfully, and day brings a new worry. The wind picks up, pulling and pushing her nearly flat, fabric skin-body, but the remaining water, still significant in volume, keeps her in place. The falling of another night quiets the winds, bringing some relief.
The next day finally realizes Twilight’s last hope: The morning Sun glitters off something once more, calling her attention, this time to something much closer than before. “It’s… a blimp?” As she stands and watches, she notices it has an odd coloration: sky blue, with a rainbow stripe circling all around, top and bottom. Her brow crinkles in confusion as she watches it come towards her at speeds a blimp shouldn’t be able to achieve; she knows a blimp can be sped up with the aid of Pegasus magic, but there are no pegasi flying around it. When she finally catches sight of Rainbow Dash’s Cutie Mark on the blimp’s side, she falls to the sand, crying out everything that had happened over the last six days. This was suppose to be a vacation…
Author's Note
Yeah… … … … …
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I dun’no. More than half of this was written by my insomniac zombie alter ego, but that doesn't excuse the rest of it.
