Seattle Seapony

by Dekshuduph

Rating: teen
Tags: Original Character, Profanity, Violence, Sex, Lyra, Gore, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Dark
Length: 29554

Cala woke up in the middle of the night, stuck within a limbless body. Her skin burned horribly.

Lightning flashes and Cala sees her own body, but it is disfigured and horrible. She loses her limbs and sees scales in place of skin. Thunder booms and she can hear the sound of rain pouring outside her window. The thought of water scares her. A cry for help from her throat and a green unicorn torments her, reveling in the painful place she's in. A dive into the inner workings of the place she calls home and there's nobody around to stop her. A grounded seapony and new pet cat face the lonely city where humanity has disappeared and innocence becomes the death of her.

Part of the Ponies After People universe.

Published 2015-06-05 04:00:02 UTC
Last updated 2015-06-26 22:23:14 UTC

[2-1] Left

Part 2

Cala stared out at the rain.

A week had passed. After the first day with the incident down at the pool, nothing more interesting had happened. More of the usual crawling around and finding new things was what she spent her time doing after that. And there wasn't anything interesting left in the building of particular significance. Rooms had been looted by her. Discoveries noted.

She took a breath and it caught in her throat. Terrible sting. She fell over coughing hard for perhaps the hundredth time. Her chest ached. Her throat was raw.

She looked over at something beside her, to her right. A small bottle. She lifted it in her tail, bent over and pried the top off between her teeth. Held out a fin and shook the bottle. Two pills spilled out... eh, that'd do. She screwed it back up, set the bottle down and sat back up. The pills were tossed in her mouth and chewed on thoughtfully. Meant to just be swallowed whole, but she had grown quite fond of the bitter taste. The pain faded away and she looked out at the rain.

Yup. Discoveries. All those cabinets and the amazing gems kept from children sight. A shame, really; those worked really well to keep her calm, and why anyone would want to hide those away she could only wonder.

To her left, she looked at a bucket full of knick-knacks that she planned to take along with her when she could finally leave.

Her tail reached out and she pulled one object out from among the rest. It was bright pink and made of rubber; oblong and wobbling in her grasp. It was an adults' toy, she had concluded. Didn't know what it did. When she had tried to imagine what anyone could do with it... her imagination came up blank. It was just such a weird thing. Waving it around idly, she scratched her head with a fin. Just, absolutely strange.

A squeak sounded off behind her, then some spastic shuffling. Cala looked behind her to see Jasper on the receptionist's desk, playing with a quite beaten-up rubber ducky. He whacked it off, sending it flying in her direction, while himself falling off the back of the desk. He looked to be in quite the tizzy today. Silly kitty... they were such great animals, but sometimes they just acted really, really stoopid.

Cala picked up the ducky in her mouth, then got up and bounced her way over to the desk. She hopped on top and dropped it over the edge. Jasper scrambled with it then took off running down the hall.

"You're such a silly kitty, Jas. Hee!" she said.

She went back toward the window and lay down again. Her tail went to the bucket and pulled something else out. Salt water taffy. Someone had been hoarding bags of this stuff away, and she had gotten sick from eating too much of it... probably more times than she would admit. She only took a few out this time, though. No need to whip out the pain pills again after just a few minutes.

...

She yawned.

She glanced at the clock. Jeez, it's been... at least five hours since she slept last! She glanced back through the doors. The rain didn't look like it was going to stop anytime soon. She yawned again as she looked at the bucket. Not going anywhere. She picked up her pill bottle and left the room, heading for bed.

Bouncing on the base of her tail hurt a bit for her, but she had found it was the fastest way to get around. Besides, with that medicine it didn't really seem so bad.

"Come on, Jas. We're heading to bed."

The cat peeked his head around a corner to look at her, his ears twitching.

↷

Cala slept fitfully in her slimy bed. The sheets were coated from the pillowcase to the foot of the bed in oil, just the same as Cala's scales. Jasper slept on top of the comforter in a spot still relatively clean.

She woke with a little groan. It was hot and that made it hard to sleep.

She lay awake for a minute before she noticed the feeling deep in her gut. There was a twisting and something seemed to shift under the surface of her skin. It was one of those feelings that she had never had before the Event. It was still a bit unsettling to experience, and it kept happening more and more often.

She reached her tail up and gently pulled her sheets down, looking at her belly. She imagined that feeling she was having, projected it in her mind's eye at where her body extended slightly before narrowing into her curly tail. Could it maybe be... that... No, that wasn't right. It was just an odd thing. She pulled her sheets back up and closed her eyes, trying to get some more rest.

↷

The city was still dull. Lifeless. Gray.

It continued letting out a deluge from the sky, washing away. The rain was a never-ending barrier between her and the world.

She felt sick looking at it. She had been looking at that water for days. She had watched as it poured down upon the city and trapped her within a stinking, rotten building. It had done that for days. She just. She couldn't get the nerve up to face it. There was so much of it. It was everywhere.

Everywhere except where Cala sat, and she stared out at a city that she could never have.

This was terrible. Wretched. Her worst nightmare surrounded her and trapped her in the hell-hole she used to be proud to call her home. The place she had lived happily for all her life up until a week ago.

She wanted to leave so badly, but that was just too much to wish for. But still she sat there and stared out the window.

If only she could have left.

↪

[2-2] Right

She glared at the door in front of her.

It was hot. It was terribly hot. She hadn't really noticed how the heat had picked up the last few days, but it really was starting to get unbearable. She stared at the droplets of water running down the glass in front of her. It was so strange! It never got too hot or cold inside. When it did, if the power went out, it was at least the same temperature as outside. But she saw the world outside her apartment, and it looked cold.

Cala sighed and mulled over it for a bit. Maybe... she could just, open the doors. She wouldn't be going outside and getting wet. She would just be letting the cool air in from outside so that she wouldn't be baking there.

She suddenly imagined a burst of wind blowing right at her right when she opened the door, carrying with it hundreds of little drops of water. They would tear through her little body like bullets. She'd be dead. Instantly.

She shook her head; no, that was absurd.

She might — might — get a little bit wet, but it certainly wouldn't tear her apart. She slowly moved up toward the door, then reached up and grabbed the handle. Her prehensile tail easily slipped around it, gripping and ready to pull. But she lingered.

She sat there, holding onto the door and just staring out at the rain outside. The horrid maelstrom of acid.

A single drop running down a stream on the glass. A ball of billions of molecules of pain bunched up and tearing down the window, just like thousands of others before it.

The sweet tune of little drops pitter-pattering on the ground. The banshee's wail of the torrential downpour tearing the asphalt slowly apart.

The rain outside made her linger.

She continued to linger on the glass door that imprisoned her within the jail cell of heat.

She waited just. Just one more minute.

One... more...

...

She opened the door, and she gasped.

She was blasted by a wave of heat. She stared in shock at what she saw through the open door. The sun beat down on the dried streets. The air was perfectly clear. The sky was empty, not a cloud to be seen, shining a clear blue. She saw the yellow-hot sun and felt as its beams hit her skin.

As she sat there in a stupor, seeing what was truly outside, the door slowly drifted back closed. It shut and the world outside resumed pouring. Water coated everything again.

No... this couldn't possibly be real.

This wasn't right.

She opened the door again and saw, through the door frame, the fiery world outside the apartment. She glanced over at the other, still-closed glass-pane door that made the double doors. Through the glass she saw the wet world. A hot world next to a rainy one. She wasn't seeing right.

She turned toward her bucket. She pulled out something that stuck out the top.

It was a crowbar. Red and dangerous. Much more so than the filly who held it. She took it in her tail and crawled up to the double doors. The thing was heavy and she had to drag it along the floor. She slowly lifted it up and the dense thing wobbled in her grip. Heaving a few deep breaths, she swung it toward the window. Crack. It left a small spider-web behind and Cala looked at it. Through it she saw a warped image; it looked like the world outside was melting, flowing and hot at the same time.

The illusion faded and she watched as, from that crack, clarity washed over the entirety of the door. The nearby windows grew brighter as the sun began to shine in. The sound of rain falling began to grow hard to make out; not quiet, but seeming to fade from her very senses. A blink, and suddenly everything ceased to trick her. What she saw was no longer fake. The world was suddenly right. And that was so, so horribly wrong.

Cala bounced out of that building. She left for the first time in a week.

The sun shone down on her. The abandoned city welcomed her. The empty street greeted her as she stopped there, in the middle of it, and stood, looking around. There on the horizon was the famous Seattle skyline. She spotted the Space Needle among various other buildings. Directly around her were many small structures, a few stories high and still standing proud. She looked behind her at her rather large apartment building, how it loomed over many of the others. She looked all around her, growing angrier by the second.

There was not a single drop of water she could see.

It was all horribly wrong, yet oh so terribly right. She clenched her eyes shut and bowed her head. She sobbed once. The heat of the sun on her back drove her so fast and all-too-quickly towards the edge of her sanity. Everything everywhere around her reminded her that there absolutely wasn't any water, there wasn't any at all. And it frightened her. It scared her and made her mad all the same.

She threw her head back and screamed. It was a primal scream that vented out the frustration, anger and pitifulness that she had pent up from over a week of blundering around inside. She screamed for all the time she spent sitting in front of a window, watching the fake world outside carry on without any reason. It expressed her utter contempt for the horrible fate that the world had played on her. The scream was piercing and broke the eternal stillness of the world in her direct vicinity. But she just didn't care. Let the world hear her scream! Let the heavens acknowledge the blight placed upon her shoulders! Let everyone know that Cala didn't cotton well to being toyed with!

Her yell was cut short as her voice broke. She collapsed as she finally gave into her misery. She lay there in the middle of the street, sobbing and gasping a silent cry. She cried for the umpteenth time in that week, but this was the first time she truly wept to the tune of helpless deprivation. She wept for the crippling fate placed upon her, letting her go limbless and unable to ever walk again. She wept for the family that she terribly missed, that she had hopelessly been searching for forever. She wept for the pain inflicted upon her in the pool, for it had scarred her in more places than she could possibly count. She wept for the morally inept actions she had taken, beginning to steal all of the things she could find despite them not being hers. She wept because of the horrifying realization that she had been living a lie during all that time, because she found out that the world outside was not what it appeared to be.

Most of all, though. She wept because she hated how cruel her life was to her despite all of the effort that she put in just to find her mother, or her sister, or anybody.

She hated being alone.

↪

[2-3] Run

"Hey," it said.

Harper stood beside the weeping filly and nudged her with its hoof. She glared balefully up at that unicorn, lying on her back. Barking could be heard from down the street.

"Not to ah, heheh... rain on your pity parade or anything, but maybe you should stop with that. You've drawn a bit of attention to yourself." It motioned with its horn.

Cala looked and saw, about a block away, a collection of monsters had formed. They looked like dogs, but at the same time, didn't. Canine in form, they had a much more feral appearance, foaming at the mouth and jumping all about spasmodically. They all had their eyes trained on her. Waiting for... something.

"Now, I'm going to give you a fair chance," it told her, "and provide you with the means to abscond. There's just something I want you to remember. And keep this in mind as you flee from these strays and continue on further into the city.

"This is retribution for having rent the aegis null."

Its horn glowed.

And suddenly, all Hell broke loose.

The dogs barked madly and began charging at her. Points of glowing light appeared on her shoulders and hips. The beasts covered the ground faster than a canine had any right to. The lights extended into four bars of golden energy. They leaped upon her. The magic beams each bent in three spots and crumpled up to her body.

Monster teeth met scaly flesh.

❗

Things tore away.

Thrashed. Rolled onto left side.

A part of her breast. A part of her fin. A part of her ear. A part of her face was worst.

Rolled onto her belly.

A part of her tail. A part of her back.

Unfurled new things and stumbled forward.

A part of that thing. Another part of her tail.

Stumble forward faster. Walk. Trot.

Canter.

Gallop.

A part of nothing else.

Run run run run run and ran and ran, she ran until she could no longer feel her fresh injuries.

She ran until the barking slowed down behind her. She ran and she ran on her unknown new appendages, following her instinct to throw each limb forward in sequence and propel her onward down the road.

This is retribution for having rent the aegis null, she thought, and while she didn't know what any of those words meant, it was the only thing she could think as she ran and she ran and she ran.

↷

Cala ran.

She ran until exhaustion washed over her, and then she ran some more.

Cala tripped.

She tumbled forward and rolled and bounced to a stop. She laid there and gasped and gasped and gasped.

She finally caught her breath and found she was lying in the middle of a road but she didn't know where she was. Nothing directly in her eyesight was familiar.

As her adrenaline wore off, she began to feel the fresh pain her body was enduring. There were missing pieces of flesh all over her right side and the fresh marks stung painfully with each breath she took. There were streams of viscous red fluid running down her body. A tear on her face felt particularly bad, and she realized that her right eye was clasped shut from it.

She looked down at the new appendages she bore. They were the healthiest-looking part of her body. The scales were bright pink and fresh as if an outer layer had recently molted away. They were stubby things, short and unlike any animal's. She turned over one of the forelimbs and looked at the hoof on the bottom. It might have been like a horse's legs, if they were pulled from a giant horse fetus and stuck onto her body. They were also covered in a fresh coat of slime, unlike the rest of her body which was covered in a meager sheen of oil.

They also hurt like all get-out. From shoulder to fetlock and from haunch to cannon they all ached with a fierce soreness that made them feel like something had stretched them like taffy for hours.

Yet she had only just been running for a few minutes. She groaned as she lay there, unwilling to move any muscle on her body. She now had a bunch of meat hooks to weigh her down and they hurt like Hell. Her body was all scratched up and torn, and she bet doing just about anything would irritate them. So she lay perfectly still, just breathing as her heart caught up with her body and hoped that the pain would fade away in time for her to move again.

She felt yet another itch. It was her throat. It was dry. She cursed herself for forgoing drinking anything that morning; stupid fear of water...

So she started coughing again.

Old injuries and new injuries alike mixed together and formed a pain cocktail that roiled through her very form. Some more of those pain pills would've been great right about then.

↪

[2-4] Fun

Those thoughts.

She started getting sick of them.

They kept stealing her mind away in favor of a meaningless riddle that she couldn't make any sense of. It wasn't just those words that were crowding her brain, either, oh no. There was a feeling of spite. That something or someone had done it to her for no reason.

She also couldn't stop thinking thoughts of a strange toy that she remembered from her childhood. As she stared up at the sky, the corners of her vision fading, she focused on those thoughts rather than the others, because they held no ill intent in her mind.

The world swirled away.

↺

"You can't make trains fly! That's impossible!" Brooke said.

"But I can't get it across here. You took the track!"

"Hey. I needed it to make this part over here. You already have all those pieces, so do something about it!"

Cala stared at her sister, who was crossing her arms. She narrowed her eyes. After a moment, she said, "I don't wanna."

Brooke gasped. "Don't you da—"

"Mooooom!"

She sighed, holding a hand up to your forehead.

"Play nice," someone called from the other room.

Cala grinned and went over, taking her pieces of the track back from her sister. She went about repairing her own area. She already had about two thirds of the toy wooden train tracks, and had built a sprawling design of interlocking track pieces.

After a few minutes, Brooke said, "You know what, I don't care. These trains are for babies anyway. Have fun being a baby, baby!" And she took off out of the room.

Cala silently cheered, going over and taking Brooke's train. It was the last one they had that worked because she had broken the other two. She set it on her track and turned on the power switch, watching as it started moving with a mechanical whirring sound. It approached an intersection in the track, and she reached over and turned it so the train would go under her bed.

She went over to the other side of the bed and waited as the toy went through the 'tunnel'.

Suddenly there was a flash of light and a magic popping sound from under the bed. Cala gasped and looked underneath it, wondering what just happened. The train rolled out from underneath the bed and Cala stared at a new addition. In one of the little cargo carts, near the back of the train, there was a toy she had never seen before. Certainly not something she had put there herself. It was a little unicorn. Its coat was an aquamarine color, its mane and tail light teal with white stripes running through. Its little golden eyes looked incredibly lively as they stared at her, piercing her soul and tugging on her heartstrings.

She picked it up in her little hands and turned it over in her grasp. This was absolutely perfect! The best little toy for the best little girl. She had always wanted a My Little Pony toy. The commercials all made them look so great.

She looked at its haunches and saw there was a picture. A glowing, golden harp. She liked music. She listened to music just about every day with her mom. She looked at it and thought, before lighting up with an idea.

"I think I'm going to call you... Harper!" she said.

Its little golden eyes shined in amusement.

↬

Within a day, Harper had become Cala's favorite toy. Within a week, she had started bringing it everywhere with her, from home to school and to anywhere she went out. Within a month, Brooke got sick of her immense fascination with it, and began spending her time pursuing activities more common for an adolescent. Within another few months, their mother was exhausted and still couldn't figure out where it had come from, so she just let it be.

After a year, it was starting to get worrying for everyone involved. Cala had spent nearly every day at that point practically glued to the little unicorn figure. She often talked to it like it was listening, and could almost swear that it wanted to respond to her, though it had no way to actually speak. All of her friends at school had accepted that she was strangely attached to it, and they even went along and played with it with Cala. But her mother had started sending her to a counselor to try and sever the bind, claiming it was unhealthy. The counselor was simply baffled that such a thing could happen to a young girl. Brooke didn't want anything to do with her sister, and it had very much strained their relationship.

The unicorn had been through a lot in that time. The color in its mane and tail had completely faded, leaving it a bland white. The image on its flanks was fading, and if you didn't know it, you might not have been able to tell that it was a lyre. Its eyes still shined with that lively light in them, but no longer with that youthful vigor that had first enraptured the girl.

Cala loved Harper. But a point came that it had to be put to an end. So what her mother did, is she put it up on a shelf in Cala's bedroom. She said to Cala, that she could have an hour every day to play with it, and no more. Over time, she lowered that threshold; it began to be only a half hour, and then only fifteen minutes. Cala agreed at first mainly because her mom's word was law, and it still allowed her to enjoy the toy. Near the end, she gave up and simply decided to leave it there on the shelf for good. And so she stopped. She moved on from that stage in her life because she eventually realized that nobody liked her when she played with that unicorn toy.

It was left alone, there on that shelf in the open closet of Cala's bedroom. It was piled behind other junk over time, gradually being obscured from sight and forgotten. But it didn't forget. Harper was still there on that shelf, experiencing every second of that eternal solitude. It was left there for years.

The light in its eyes had began to appear a bit manic.

↝

[2-5] Stun

Honk!

That was the sound of an air horn. Cala moaned.

Minutes later, the sound of something approaching.

"Ooh, that doesn't look good," a man said.

She felt the world turn around her, and — disoriented as she was — Cala slipped back into unconsciousness.

↺

She was back in her flooded, rotting room.

She had already been through most of that building. The places she hadn't been, she merely hadn't bothered breaking into them yet, and they remained locked up and untouched since the Event. She only sat in her former room because it was familiar to her, and also so she could be near Jasper, who was usually inclined to stay in or near his own former home.

So bored. There was nobody to talk to. Nothing really interested her anymore.

She bounded over to her closet. Those shelves were mostly cluttered with old junk, but maybe she could find something there to take her mind off how lonely she was. She leaped up onto her dresser and started digging. This was all familiar to her. She pulled out one of the bigger cardboard boxes and took a look inside. It was full of wooden blocks. Oh, this was... yes! The marble tower! Oh, she had completely forgotten about this little gem. Guess what she'd be doing for the next few hours~!

And then something caught her eye.

That's not... no. That can't be right. She reached out and scooped up a pile of broken plastic from the back of the shelf. She knew what this was.

She found a particular shard and held it before her. There was an eye painted on it. It was a green bit of plastic that had an eye on it, and it was dark. Lifeless. It kind of crept her out a little bit with how still it looked. Not at all like she had remembered.

She slowly set it down next to the other pieces. Harper shouldn't have died. It was a resilient little toy. It had been put through so much. Nothing she did to it had managed to even put a chip in its hoof.

She had a suspicion, though. Maybe it had left along with everyone else around her. Nobody wanted to stay home during a flood.

They had all left. Went on vacation. Leave the girl to clean up their mess...

She considered for a moment gathering up those shards and putting them in her bucket to take with her later. But... nah. Harper was dead now. It was a part of her past. She pulled on the box of wooden blocks and sent it tumbling down to the floor. Time to have some fun with marbles!

↝

"Woah," a woman's voice said, "that's the strangest one we've seen yet. Where did you find her? Why is she so...?"

"It was where I heard the barking coming from," the man said. "I guess the dogs did it."

"The poor thing... I'm surprised this is the first time they got to her. It's already been so long."

"Here"— the world spun, and for a second Cala lost track of the conversation —"go track them down. See if I can find out where they came from."

"Good luck. Those mutts are impossible to exterminate. The best we can do is keep them miles away from here." The woman stood there as the man was heard walking away, before a door shut. She sighed. Cala felt her start moving, and felt the different body that now carried her.

It was a much slimmer form, rocking Cala with a gate that swayed her back and forth. Under different circumstances, it might have felt calming, but at the moment all it did was make her feel nauseous. She almost longed for the hard, steady back of the man who had been carrying her earlier. She groaned.

"Shhh. We're going to get you all cleaned up. You look like you've lost a lot of blood," the woman said.

It was a few minutes before they got to where the woman seemed to be going. Cala felt the world tumble one last time before she rested on a still surface. It felt cool on her skin, curving upward behind her head.

As she heard a door being closed, Cala peeked open her eye. The room she was in was... pale, but it was difficult to make out since her vision wasn't focusing. She took a breath of the stale air of the place and could almost recognize the smell of it, something bad, but it wasn't like anything at home.

She felt something take her head and turn her face to the right. No longer in the blind side of the vision, Cala saw who must have carried her there. The woman pulled her forelimb back and simply looked Cala in the eye.

She had striking eyes of her own: a deep, rich purple. The color of her coat was impossible to make out. It was desaturated. Not gray, but neither black nor white in any one place. She looked to Cala's left and reached over to do something when Cala's eye finally focused and clearly made out black stripes on a white coat.

Then Cala heard a horrible sound.

In one fell realization, Cala understood where she was and what this woman was doing. She was in a bathtub. She had been brought into the bathroom and was expected to be... cleaned up!

"No!" Cala began to move her limbs, trying to find a way to crawl out of the tub and get away from the water.

The woman gasped as Cala flopped over the edge of the bathtub and onto the floor of the bathroom. Cala stared up at her, shocked that someone could even think that doing something like that to her was even remotely okay.

Cala glared at the woman. "No. I'm not taking a bath! You're not gonna make me!"

The woman looked at Cala oddly, then reached over and turned off the faucet. "Well, if you insist. I don't really like wasting the fresh water, but you look like you haven't had a bath in days. Your coat looks caked... with..." She did a double take. "You look like a fish! You don't even have a coat! How could you not want to take a bath in the state you're in?!"

Cala squinted at her. Glared at her. Tried to bore into her with a look.

Then she heard someone open the door to her blind side. A new voice said, "Renée, what the fuck is going on in here?"

A beat.

"What are you doing to that thing?"

⇥

End of Part 2

[1-0] Prelude

Three souls slept in an apartment flat.

Lights shone in the window of one bedroom, ever flickering as cars drove by on the street below. Dull noise hummed through the walls; never urgent, not disturbing, just the ambient murmur that had always been seated in the small city.

Two lumps on separate twin beds rose and fell slowly with the breath of two girls sleeping peacefully. The younger girl rested beneath a pale red comforter. Not a jarring shade of pink. On the other side of the room was a slightly larger bed. In it slept a grown, more shapely teenager, curled up and with her face slightly under the covers. A glow might have been seen coming from it, if anyone were awake to see it.

Up on a shelf, there was all sorts of bric-á-brac collected over years of living. Behind the more recent clutter lay dusty childhood memories. Old toys and figurines, left behind and forgotten; not entirely non-existant. In the back of it all was an aquamarine unicorn toy. A child's phantom friend trapped within plastic, shining eyes begging to be freed. Yet it, like the rest of the old junk, was dusty and old and left forgotten.

The world shifted.

Aquamarine shards of broken plastic lay forgotten on the back of an old, dusty shelf. After years of living, it had been buried behind loads of newer objects, accumulations more cared about. The old childhood memories of torn toys were left behind and remained buried there.

Two beds were fitted into two other dark corners of the room. On one lay dark sheets, strewn off and messy, left behind as though its occupant had vacated abruptly. The other, smaller bed by the window looked less empty, but certainly not comfortable. A twisted, wrangled form struggled under the thick red comforter, as if grasping for air. Then it stopped, and shifted into a slack position. If someone caught a glimpse, they may have seen how soaked the sheets were underneath.

A steady light shone down on the prone form through the window. It was a dim light, lifeless and dull as the city that emitted it. There was a fierce hush in the city, encapsulating the world in a choking silence. It bathed the former home in a fierce enervation never before known to it.

A single soul lay in the apartment flat.

↪

[1-1] Crawl

Part 1

Thunder boomed. A filly woke with a jolt. Listening to the deluge of rain outside, and feeling quite wet herself, she was fully awake in moments.

She screamed.

While the piercing squeal rang throughout the room, she jumped out of bed and fell to the floor with a thud. She craned her neck around to look back up at her bed. She swore the rain was pouring right on her bed for it to be so wet. The light from the window created a silhouette. She would have to get up and take a better look.

She didn't move. She looked down at herself, trying to re-orient with the ground. Lightning flashed. She caught a glimpse of a scaly spiral, the twisted image burned into her retina for a moment. Thunder boomed. The pattering of rain was noticed once again. It wasn't drowned out by the sounds of cars moving around on the street below.

"Mom!"

From where she was on the floor, the filly was staring at her sister's bed. The sheets were pulled down and it was empty. Not unusual; her older sister would often stay out late at night. All the more excuse for her to call out, and she was becoming very scared.

"Mooooooom?"

She tried getting up again. She flopped on the floor. Her skin rubbed against the carpet and started to hurt real bad — like when, as a child, her sister had shoved her and she fell over, sticking out her elbow to catch herself. Only this was much worse. The pain was spread over half her body, and it was getting more and more irritated the longer she lay there. She began to wiggle back and forth, but instead of getting anywhere she only managed to scratch herself all over. Her breathing and heart rate increased and tears ran down her cheeks.

She bawled. She had no idea what kind of nightmare was overtaking her but it hurt and it itched terribly on her wet body and she just wanted to curl up and surrender to the pain.

Her mom still hadn't responded to her cries for help.

Lightning flashed. She glimpsed the grotesquery her body had become. She looked like a slimy reptile, her lower body tapered into a noodle that wound up against her belly. She saw no arms or legs to speak of. Thunder boomed. She felt the tears running down her face, the salty fluid doing nothing to soothe the burning she felt all over.

She flopped around some more. Her tail unwound and thrashed a bit, bumping into something. She could feel around the object, and wrapped her tail over a hard metal pole. It wasn't easy; the object felt all kinds of wrong to the touch. There were parts sticking out in places. Some of it was cold and smooth to the touch, some bumpy and abrasive. Still she grasped it. And then she pulled.

Her body dragged over the scratchy carpet as she slowly pulled herself across the floor. Her skin burned. She cried out at a point and quit moving, catching her breath. And then she went on. She pulled, and then she had made it to...

Lightning flashed. She saw the corner of her bed. Under the corner of the bed frame was a wheel that her tail wound tightly around. Thunder boomed. The sound of rain splashing above and below the apartment she was in and the flow of water running down a gutter wafted into the room. She hated how dry it felt in there, longing to feel the sweet touch of water on her skin to cool the burns she had all over one side of her body.

She looked around her room. It was hard to see anything in the dim light coming through the window. She oriented herself. Craning her neck, she was able to make out both her and her sister's beds in two corners of the room. There was a closet full of dressers and shelves in the other corner nearest her own bed, and the door to the room was in the corner opposite her bed.

She faced the door, twisting her body and turning towards it. She pulled her tail under her body and wound it up tight. After a few moments of crouching there, heaving deep breaths, she pushed forward with all her might, uncoiling her tail to spring forward. She pounced and she landed on her face. Her snout hurt and her tail ached from the odd position and the exertion it took to make the leap.

She rolled on her other side and looked down at her bed to see her progress. It looked like she'd made it a couple feet away from the bed. She could stretch out her tail and touch the corner post of the bed she had latched onto before. The window continued to shine a steady, dim light down on her from above her bed.

She looked up at the door still far across on the other side of the room. It almost seemed to be farther away than before.

"Mooooooooooooom!"

Lightning flashed. Thunder boomed. Rain poured.

↪

[1-2] Bath

The filly slowly twisted her body, moving to roll over onto her belly. She paused there, gasping for air. She lay in the middle of the hallway, her bedroom door to her left and the bathroom door to her right. Small miracle it was just across the hallway. The door had been left ajar.

In one quick surge of motion, she turned onto her right side, facing away from the bathroom door, then continued to rotate her body around. Her body weight was enough to push it open and she ended up laying on her left side, laying on the metal divide between carpet and vinyl flooring. She caught her breath and then rolled onto her belly again.

The cool vinyl flooring was soothing to her skin.

Still, she felt it wasn't enough. She continued rolling her way into the bathroom.

↷

Using the tip of her muzzle, she nosed at the handle above the water spout. Once it was pushed up a small ways, a stream of water trickled out from the faucet.

She collapsed.

She lay back in the bathtub, feeling the water pour over her. After a minute she breathed evenly, sighing at the cool stream of water playing over her parched scales. She simply lay there for a while, drinking in the reward for her laboured swimming. She had, indeed, swam across a sea of carpet and tile and dryness and friction to get where she was at that moment.

And then she had a thought. How much better would this be if the tub was full of water?

She looked around herself: sitting on the ridges of the tub, within her reach, were a few things. Bottles of shampoo. Various toiletries. A bar of soap. She looked above: some loofahs hanging on a hook and a shelf full of toys that she played with when she had baths. A shelf of toys for baths...

And the drain plug. That was up there, too.

She glared up at the shelf hanging above her. She seethed at her own stupidity. How dare she put things out of the reach of... whatever she was? This mistake would have to be rectified.

She banged her tail against the wall. The shelf rattled. Bang. Rattle. She banged again. A rubber ducky fell on her face. She reached her tail up and grabbed the toy, then flung it at the shelf.

Nothing happened.

She sighed and laid back in the tub, simply staring up at it. This was hopeless.

Something happened.

She felt a presence in the room with her for an instant, but then before she got a chance to turn her head to look at it, she saw something strange. There was a faint golden shimmer above her. Then the entire contents of the shelf spilled out on top of her.

She was stunned for a moment, but then she looked out the tub at the bathroom around her. In the very minimal light coming from the bathroom window, she couldn't see anyone in there with her. She looked down at the toys piled on top of her and around her. She wiggled around a bit, shaking them all off, then found the plug and tried to grab it with her tail. No luck. It was too small and slippery to grasp.

And then she had an idea. She stuck her tongue out and made a sick noise. She looked down at it... and then she bent and picked it up in her mouth.

She squirmed around until she was facing the drain. She dropped the plug and pushed it in with her nose. She reached up, then, and turned up the flow of water, tilting slightly to the warm side while doing so but not minding one bit. She laid back and finally relaxed, glad that she could have a real bath for herself. She put the trials of the night behind her. Maybe if she was lucky, none of this was real and she was just having a terrible dream; one rife with vivid detail and painful experience, sure, but surely that was possible.

She closed her eyes and listened to the soothing sound of the water faucet filling up the tub.

↪

[1-3] Harper

Thunder boomed. The sound of rain pouring came from outside. The filly felt soaked inside and out in lukewarm water. Not in a miserable way; rather, it felt quite good, as though she was one with the water. Her eyes slowly cracked open and she examined her surroundings.

She was still in the bathroom. Above her, gray light filtered in through the long window near the ceiling. The tub she had slept in was full to the brim; it was overflowing, in fact, and water still poured out of the faucet, gurgling on the surface. She poked her tail into the stream and it felt slightly colder than the rest of the tub.

Over the edge of the tub, she saw that the floor was covered in a few inches of water. It flowed out in a sheet, pouring onto the floor of the bathroom. The door was open; the whole apartment flat must have been drenched.

Sitting up, she looked down at her reflection in the water. She could see herself clearly now that there was daylight. She gasped; she had such a cute face now! Giant hazel eyes looked into her own, shiny and expressive, making her heart clench. There was an itty little proboscis of a muzzle which stretched wide as she smiled at herself. A spiraling shoot extended from her forehead, lying dormant yet standing out sharply from the rest of her features. All this was framed by pink fins coming out her head, complementing her salmon-tone scales.

Looking down at the rest of her body, she found herself to indeed be a sort of fish, as she had imagined in her half-baked thoughts the night before. If a seahorse grew to a few feet tall, she imagined this might be what they looked like.

All of this seemed familiar, somehow. She couldn't quite put her fin on it.

She looked back out at the bathroom around her. All the ground was covered in water now. She was a fish. That was water. Fish swam in water. So the filly swam in the water. She leapt out of the tub and splashed onto the ground. She wiggled a bit and found it much easier to move now. So then she did.

Her first destination was to the kitchen. She made it out into the main room and stopped, looking around. Usually her mom would be out here well before daylight, and have breakfast ready by the time she woke up for her and her sister.

She heard the bathroom door behind her being closed. She turned around.

With the door closed, she had a view of the whole hallway now. At the end of it was the door to the second bedroom, next to a closet. The door to her mom's bedroom was closed; odd, because she always left it open in the mornings. She swam over and opened it up, using her tail to turn the doorknob.

Like her sister's bed, this one was vacant. Also similar was that the sheets were strewn about. But it was strange, because her mom always made her bed after getting up. She started glancing about the room but found nothing else out of the ordinary.

That's, now, three things that seemed unusual about this. And three was the magic number. It always signified something. In this case, something had changed, and she now needed to do something about it.

Tears spilled down her eyes as she clenched them shut, took a deep breath, and screamed out of the top of her lungs.

"Moooooooooooooooom!"

Echoes of the name were thrown about the room, and she gasped for breath. Nothing happened, though. Calling had always worked for her before, but now... it didn't. Her breath caught and she suddenly felt spooked out of her depth.

She felt something warm on her shoulder.

She turned her head and saw a green unicorn next to her, its hoof on her shoulder and smiling a reassuring smile toward the filly.

"Don't look so spooked, Callie. There's nothing scary here. Why were you shouting?" The unicorn with the white mane stared into the filly's hazel eyes with its own piercing gold ones. They were inquiring, yet seemingly conveyed a calmness, that the unicorn was sure of the world around it.

"H-Harper?" the filly said, tears still streaming down her eyes.

"Cala," Harper said in turn. "Why don't you come and have some breakfast? You must be starved after what you went through last night." It turned and walked out the bedroom door, going off down the hallway without seeming to wait for Cala to follow.

The sad little fish looked back at her mother's vacant bed, then turned to follow after it.

↪

[1-4] Nextdoor

...Gone on vacation. Who would stay home during a flood?

⇹

Cala dug through the refrigerator. She looked for something to eat but nothing appealed to her. It was packed full of the kind of junk that just accumulates over years of living. In the door were bottles of condiments and boring old butter. There were also drawers filled with vegetables and fruit; yuck! Various foodstuffs lay before her, a large assortment of goods and yet she didn't want any of it. She stared at the leftover beef stroganoff from last night, sitting next to the milk on the bottom shelf. It was one of her favorite meals, actually. She enjoyed it every time it was made, last night no exception, and even packed leftovers for lunch on occasion. Maybe she just wasn't feeling it because it wasn't really a breakfast food. She sighed and pulled it out, letting the fridge door slowly shut.

She looked at the microwave. She looked up at the microwave. She looked way up near the ceiling where the microwave was suspended above the stove. She looked down at the plastic-wrapped bowl of noodles.

She grabbed it with her fins, tore off the plastic with her teeth and took a bite. It tasted bland, even for how cold it was. She kept eating.

The sound of a cat's wailing ripped through the flat.

Cala dropped the bowl in the water. She didn't like it, anyways, so she left it and decided to go investigate. She paddled over to the apartment door and looked up at the handle. It was locked. She had to stand upright on her tail and stick out her tongue to twist the switch that locked the door. She fell over, then, and made quite the splash.

She reached up and turned the doorknob. It was difficult to pull this door open; not only was it heavier, but it was also blocking the water. As soon as it had opened a crack, water started rushing out into the hallway. She pulled harder at it still. It swung open and a lot of water started rushing out of the room. After a minute the flow had evened out enough that most of the hallway had slick carpet. She crawled into and examined the hall. She could see six doors, including her own. On one end there was an elevator and at the other end the hallway turned right.

The sound came again, a begging call. Cala wiggled her way down the hall towards a door near the corner. This was her friend's place. She had visited a few times before, and fondly recalled meeting their cat once. It was an orange tabby. Friendly. She reached up.

This door was locked, too.

Cala screamed her frustration and banged on the door. Another call from inside. She looked around, searching for something to help her. Everything was pretty bland in this building. There were lights and a window. Bare white walls and doors all over. Beige carpeting. No magically appearing keys.

She went to try the other doors. She pulled the handle of the door just across from the cat door. Wouldn't budge. She went back down to the door across from her own. It opened up to her tail's command.

The inside of this room was horribly messy. The light was dim, filtering in from a curtained window. There were boxes in the corners, and rags and clothing covered the floor. She could barely see how stained the floor was. The walls were dented in places and covered in muck. But, perhaps worse of all: a terrible, reeking smell came from the bed. Cala didn't recognize it and didn't want to go near it.

She went around the outside of the room until she found something that sparked at her imagination. There was a ventilation grate in the floor. The cat called out again and, putting her ear up to the vent, she could hear the echoes.

She licked her lips and got herself ready for a challenge.

↷

"Meow!"

"Why hello kitty-kitty! Hi!"

"Mreow." A cat looked at her from the other side of a plate of thin metal bars.

"Who's a cute little kitty-kitty? Who?!" Cala lay smooshed in a vent, cooing at the cat she saw.

"Meooow!" he said.

"Okay. Really, though, cat. I'm stoopid. I'm trapped in here now."

He purred and licked at one corner of the vent cover.

"Could you. Can you help me?" The cat looked at her for a moment, then reached up with a paw, pulling off the grate. He leaned in and nuzzled Cala's face, getting a patch of his fur slimy.

This cat was smart. This cat was super smart and super deft and it obviously wasn't a normal cat.

"You are such a smart kitty-kitty! You're a super cat!" Cala resumed cooing. Then she fell out of the vent, flopping onto the floor. She whined as the rough, hard, dry carpet of the building reminded her that it hadn't stopped existing.

↷

Cala happily munched on dry cat food next to her new best friend.

After another exhausting trial of crawling toward a door over the evil, unforgiving carpet, Cala was able to make the water flow into the neighbor's living room. Nobody was awake yet — or else they were staying in their rooms and ignoring the sounds coming from outside — so she decided to feed their cat herself. She was trying to pour the food into the dish, but the container was unwieldy and she had to hold it with both her tail and her mouth. She accidentally got some in her mouth.

It was delicious.

She didn't know if it was the strange brand of food their neighbors used or something else, but this was much better than any cat food she'd tried before. That... not to say that she had. Actually. She just, didn't expect that it would taste this good.

They finished up their meal, the cat yawning and Cala with a satisfied belch. The cat went off somewhere and she was left sitting in an unfamiliar room, alone with nothing to do.

Cala looked at the open door. She could leave now and come back later with no hassle. So that she did, and she went to her room to find something to do today.

↪

[1-5] Pool

A tongue lapped at a smooth surface.

A chinking sound. Colorful little morsels fell into place.

The tongue swiped across the phone screen. Two sounds of bursting candy; a combo. More fell down.

She lay on her front in bed, a phone underneath her muzzle with a game on it. Over an hour had passed like this, the filly wasting away her time on the device, blasting away at a silly grid of arcade marvel.

The screen went black then, showed the Apple logo for a moment, then shut off. She sighed. She reached up and bit down on the power button, hoping it would light up the screen like it did when she found the phone. Nothing. The battery was dead and she would have to find something else to do now.

↷

The elevator descended.

Cala sat, staring up at the dial showing the floor number. On her left there was a bucket full of water. On her right was a tabby with a rubber ducky in its mouth.

While she had been filling up the bucket in the bathtub, the cat had come in and examined the toys strewn across the bathroom floor. Not enjoying getting his paws wet, he had taken one of the toys and left quickly enough. She had then struggled for a while pulling the bucket across the floor. Not an enjoyable chore, but necessary for her to go somewhere new.

Ding! They arrived at their floor and the doors opened. The cat was quick to leap out, having stood on the wet floor of the elevator long enough, and wandered off somewhere with his new toy. Cala watched a moment as a little bit of the water spilled out onto the floor of the basement level. This ground was made of bumpy concrete; she had forgotten about that. But of course there wasn't any carpet on this level, due to its nature. She looked left at the water she had brought along to help her. Might as well.

She tipped the bucket over. Water splashed into the hallway. The floor became wet.

She crawled across the floor to the entry room of the pool floor. There was a small desk where someone was supposed to be managing the pool every morning, but they were gone. She went ahead past it to the direct access doors, and they looked out on a dark room. Very, very dark; no windows to illuminate it. She went back to the desk and took a minute to find a light switch, then to the doors again.

There. That was the sight of the day, for sure. It used to be a boring place that she would visit every so often, because she didn't really appreciate swimming as much as she could. But now it was a haven. To be able to finally swim freely in the new form she was gifted with. She couldn't imagine leaving after she went swimming around in there, other than maybe in search of a larger pool.

She went inside and up to the side of the pool. She was about to dive right in, but then something caught her eye. On the other side of the room was a diving board. She was never allowed on it before. But now she was alone.

There was no decision to be made. Her first time in the pool as a seapony was going to be radical.

↷

She lunged upward and her teeth nabbed the final rung. She gasped a moment, then released her tail's grip, slowly hunching up and wrapping it around the next bar up. She tensed her muscles and lunged. Her upper body flopped onto the end of the board. The vice-grip her tail had on the ladder slacked and she lifted it up to grasp the final rung below her. She pushed herself further onto the board, then finally relaxed her body as she lay there.

She was getting a workout just trying to accomplish what seemed like mundane tasks to her. Crawling around on the floors all the time, dragging a full bucket, climbing a ladder, navigating a ventilation system... No, scratch the last one; that had been pretty epic. But if she knew how hard it would have been to do that, she wouldn't have started. Once she was halfway up the ladder she hadn't had a way back down.

Now she was on top, though. She wiggled to the end of the board and looked out on the pool. It was a small, dinky thing, really; a low end over there and a deep end under her. There were probably a hundred of these across Seattle alone. Right below her it was fifteen feet deep, and she was several above the surface. Her red reflection looked back up at her from the still water. The pool was usually rippling all over, with at least a few people basking in it or swimming laps back and forth on one side. But now there was nobody around — seriously, people, it's the weekend! Where'd you all go? — so the water was still, and she gazed into her own soft, amber eyes in the still reflection below her. She smiled as she psyched herself up for the dive.

She dropped.

Her nose hit the water first, and the rest of her narrow form slid in after, her elongated tail stretched straight and slipping easily in at last. Her whole body was encompassed by sweet, plentiful water around her. Her skin felt tingly at it all, like she had finally made it where she belonged and her body was thanking her for the relief.

Her breath was still held and her eyes shut closed out of habit. She opened her eyes, and looked around at the space around her. At her own body, floating in the water, suspended without being held flat by a bathtub. Her eyes, too, tingled at the water; she had never been able to open her eyes underwater before. She stayed like that for a few seconds, her heart racing.

Her breath fell short. She understood that she could probably breathe underwater, but she had never done it before, so she continued to compulsively hold it in. But then, it was too much, and she let it all out. Little bubbles and big bubbles flowed out her nose and mouth, and she relaxed and let the water around her embrace her.

She breathed in.

❗

Burn!

Burn fire hot burn sting!

Breathed water, filled gills. Poison! Hurt respiratory!

Skin tingled; skin stung, skin burned. Skin hurt bad! Bad bad bad bad!

Hurtness!

Eyes popped open wide. Muscles all contract. Writhing.

Ants crawled; termites; scorpions burrowed in encapsulating scales. Lungs fire — magma — molten. Reacting to heat!

Saw terrible fortune. Vision: green, white, gold. Pierced. Glow.

Everything glowed goldeny and all hurt and everything! Pain! Paaain!

Black.

⇌

[1-6] Hurt

Puke.

Ejection of the poisons in the system.

All Cala knew was horrible, terrible pain and it frightened her. She didn't know what was happening. She didn't know which way was up. She could only feel her body convulsing as it expelled the nastiness that had invaded her. She felt like someone had thrown her into a furnace, poured acid down her throat and left her to burn. Nothing could free her from this hell as she coughed and retched and squirmed, all without feeling it.

She tried to find some sense in the world. Her eyes only showed her brightness, an image too skewed and blurry to make any sense of. Her dizziness threatened to force her to clench them shut again as the tilted her head this way and that.

And then she blinked, and she saw a clear image. It was the image of the green unicorn, Harper, standing in front of her — sideways because the world had no right-side up. Its piercing yellow eyes bore into her own and she fought the urge to retch as it demanded every ounce of her attention.

It was quiet for a minute — just staring at Cala — and then it said, "you were always the stupider of the two of you. You and your sister, I mean." It looked thoughtful for a moment, finally tearing its sick eyes from the filly. "Brooke knew things you couldn't understand, even at your age. She was more cautious and observant."

"That's not to say you didn't have your own good traits though," it laughed, "you were definitely quite the doer. But you just didn't really understand the world like she did. Even though your mother allowed her to use the high-dive, she still found no interest in using the pool for anything. A shame, really. She probably could've been real fun to swim with," it said.

Cala closed her eyes and sighed. She did think of Brooke quite fondly, even if she could be a bit of a prude. The world resumed swimming around her and she curled up, losing track of the thoughts to fight the torrent of torment that the world sent her way.

⇝

Cala woke to find herself lying on her side on a concrete floor. Lights buzzed softly above her. Faintly she could hear the sound of rain pattering along outside. She opened her eyes and looked around herself. Her vision was blurry and it was hard to make out what was around her, but she could see that she was in the corner of a large gray room. Her skin burned terribly where it rubbed softly against the pavement under her, so she laid her head back down and tried to stop moving. It was hard to do because suddenly her chest caught aflame and she went up in a coughing fit, writhing and irritating the burns on her skin.

She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, finally settling down. It felt like she had gone through a meat grinder and she just wanted to rest it off.

Her eyes opened again and she slowly looked around the room, trying to make sense of anything she saw. Her sight failed her and she still couldn't make anything out. So she thought back. She recalled everything she had done yesterday. That morning she had found herself in a conundrum, and she remembered having to get used to the body while hating the itchiness of moving along the carpet. Hah... that was nothing compared to what she felt now. After sleeping in the bathtub, she had gone to get something to eat for breakfast, but something had distracted her and sent her into the ventilation ducts. What a strange way to spend the morning. She ate a bunch of cat food. Played some games. Then she went downstairs, and she jumped into the pool... and then...

She gasped as she made out a horizontal blue blur. The pool. It had gnawed on her body and spat her out, and now she lay in the corner of the room, injured and helpless.

That water. The water in the pool. It was evil, and she had fallen into its trap.

⇢

A little while later, she had finally been able to get some rest and she felt a bit better, though certainly nowhere near the ability to move again.

She heard a scraping noise and angled her head down to see an orange blur slowly getting bigger. It stopped in front of her and she thought she could make out what the cat brought. Red and brown. She took a breath, and instead smelled what it was: it was delicious! The cat brought her a meal in his own red dish!

She immediately dug in, not caring about the pain of moving her head up to the bowl. But she stopped after a moment because her mouth was dry, and she took longer than normal to chew it up. She finally swallowed, and it felt like a handful of thumbtacks was scraping their way down her throat. She started coughing again and felt lightheaded, dizziness kicking in and overwhelming her.

After a minute and some deep breaths, she continued eating in very small bites. The cat had wandered off while she continued. After a few minutes, she had eaten what she felt was enough for the moment and laid back to let her throat rest.

She heard the cat coming back, scraping something else across the floor. She peered down at him and saw he was bringing over another red thing. He put it next to the other dish; it was the same, but she couldn't see anything inside.

She leaned over and sniffed it.

Oh no! She recognized that smell! That was water. That was water and water was evil and she wasn't going to drink it because it had hurt her and she didn't want to be hurt again. She could vividly remember the feel of it all burning at her skin, invading her gills with an unspeakable terribleness.

No, she rejected the water and she laid back so she wouldn't have to think about it. She didn't know how long it would be before she could move again.

↪

[1-7] Stayed

Drip. Drip. Drip.

She stared lethargically up at the ceiling, trying to see where the dripping water fell from. There were cracks all over it. It was still too blurry to make out where there were water droplets forming.

She looked down at the pool, where it dripped into. There were tiny ripples running across it from the very slight disturbance to the surface of the water. At least she assumed so; it was like that the last time she looked closely at it.

She looked around where she laid. At some point she had gotten the courage to move a few feet over. It was still incredibly painful to move around, but it was worth it to get out of the reeking puddle of filth she had been squirming around in for hours.

She looked down at her scales. When she had first examined her new form, they looked shiny and smooth. Whatever that water had done, they were no longer; they were now matte and dry. It would be a long time before they gleamed with a healthy shine again. She had figured that whatever had happened to her, it had done damage to her lungs and — wait... 'Lungs'? 'Gills'? She wasn't even sure of what they were called, but that and her skin had been burned.

She looked at the cat. He was lying beside the dishes he had brought, grooming himself. She was thankful that he had done that for her, but couldn't bring herself to express it. She was in a really bad state. Crawling over and petting him? Out of the question. Cooing? Her throat still hurt.

A tear rolled down her cheek. There wasn't enough love in the world.

She shuffled a bit. Her skin got irritated, chafing against the concrete. She looked over at the pool room doorway and sighed. She needed to leave at some point. She just couldn't bring herself to face the pain of sliding across the hard floor underneath her to get there.

⇣

...Fins forward. Snout forward. Tail curled up.

Lift torso. Push forward and drop.

Lift tail, pull in. Lift fins and snout.

Fins forward. Snout forward. Tail curled up...

⇣

Cala dashed out of the bathroom. She was gasping for breath, rolling around and twitching spasmodically. Her head was wet, a sheen of moisture dripping off of her, while the rest of her body remained bone dry. She looked down at the plug she held in her muzzle.

Totally worth it.

She dropped that and shuffled across the damp — but no longer flooded — floor and went over to the refrigerator. Facing one's fear is tiring work and she was feeling decidedly... thirsty. She shuddered at the word. She reached in and pulled out a pitcher. She popped off the lid and looked in at the purple fluid. She gulped, took a breath, and plunged her muzzle in. It was elongated so it could submerge into the juice, and she sucked it up greedily; making sure that she was drinking it, not breathing it in! She pulled out and breathed heavily, looking down cross-eyed at her purple stained snout.

Yup, totally worth it.

A beat. She broke out into a terrible coughing fit, spilling the pitcher all over the ground and roiling under the terrible pain in her lungs. It kept happening. She always felt horrible when it did, and hoped that that agony would go away in time. After a minute she stopped, and looked back up at the fridge to consider if she wanted anything else.

The filly leaped up onto the counter to dig around in the cupboards for a can of tuna. She knew they had some, somewhere...

↷

A red bed was occupied by an exhausted Cala, facing the wall. The sheets were slimy, but she no longer found that to bother her. It soothed her sore skin. The orange tabby was curled up on the bed next to her. She smiled and curled her tail around it, pulling it up to her belly.

She closed her eyes and thought for a while. She thought about Brooke, she thought about school. Thinking of more recent things made her frown, and she thought a bit about what had happened throughout the day. She hadn't seen anybody else. Nobody was there. Maybe tomorrow she would go looking for... her mom, and sister. She had never gone out into the city on her own before.

She looked out the window. Lightning flashed. She could see the droplets of horrible water on her window from where they ran down in terrible rivulets.

No, she thought, I could probably stay inside for another day. And so, there in the apartment...

Thunder boomed.

That was where she stayed.

⇥

End of Part 1

[2-0] Interlude

The electric can opener refused to operate. The button was pressed many times, but it simply sat there and did not turn on.

The last can of tuna was left on the counter beside it.

↯

The elevator was still open. It was still open, even after days of being left vacant.

A red shape went inside. A prehensile, scaled limb slapped at the controls. They remained dark and unresponsive. They continued getting slapped at. After a while, a breath of air was released and the red shape left. The bucket inside got taken with it.

↯

An orange shape rolled in the middle of the hall.

↯

Drip. Drip. Drip.

On the floor below the domicile of the Little Red Monster, water kept on dripping in. A terrible reek of mold permeated the atmosphere.

A pop, and the red shape tumbled out of the ceiling. It laid still on the floor a moment before a rattling sound was heard; soon after, it took off on its way.

↯

In a mysterious place, static roiled in the sky. Everywhere above, little arcs of electric charges jumped between nodes. They gathered in packs and leaped together, traveling the sky and bringing forth life in the little world.

Below, a pit. It twisted as it sank deeper into the depths of the place. The lightning packs occasionally attempted a dive into that pit, maybe once every few hours. A terrible presence seated there guarded the entrance to the pit, seizing control of it as its own. It was as a hermit crab to its shell, so the dancing lights left well alone. It glowed with green and gold terribleness.

↯

The red shape emerged on the ground floor of the building. It crept into the lobby and slowly moved toward the entrance. A rattling sound was heard.

It sat like that for a long, long, long time. The sky outside remained dark.

Lightning flashed. Thunder boomed. Rain poured.

↳

[3-0] Intralude

The green aura lingered.

The sparks that danced in the sky ignored it.

It began to recede into the twisting pit below. None of the lights noticed. None of the lights cared.

I left that world completely. The damage had been done. My presence could safely go away.

Why not?

↭

[3-1] Care

Part 3

Three ponies sat in a room.

At one end, there was a zebra mare sitting in a recliner. She was tall, but looked quite unimposing the way she sat there. Her purple eyes were downcast and she hung her head. She had introduced herself — her name was Renée Holland — before sulking off and leaving Cala in the care of the other mare.

The other mare, who's name was Peyton, sat on a couch on the other side of the room with Cala. Cala was laid out on her left side, leaving the whole right side of her body exposed for Peyton to take care of her. She used wet-wipes to clean off as much of the grime on Cala's pelt as she could before applying rough bandages as best she could to the oily pelt.

Cala herself lied still, quite enjoying the care and attention afforded her. She cradled a small bottle of apple juice in her aching forelimbs and occasionally lifted it to take a sip.

The silence was broken by Renée speaking. "I just — I..." She sighed. "I wanted to take care of her. It was selfish, but I haven't gotten to... really care for someone for so long."

"I can see that. A mother losing her children might be the harshest victim of this world." Peyton looked up from her work, glancing at Renée meaningfully. "You knew them, though. You understood your own children's needs and wants, and this filly is a total stranger. You didn't ask her whether she wanted a bath or not. You just gave it to her."

"But she was unconscious, Peyton! You saw her as I came in; she looked terrible. She must have been lying out there in the sun for hours. Gosh, what a helpless little thing! How did she end up out there? Those legs look like they just sprouted out of her body this morning."

"For all we know, they did. It's amazing we didn't find her sooner."

"And look at how strange she looks. When the catastrophe happened to us, we were out of our minds with how otherworldly we became. But look at her! Her entire body looks absolutely absurd! Like a giant fish, like... cross-bred with what we are. It was at least reasonable to assume she'd be fine with water."

Peyton laughed. "You know what, Renée? Fuck, I probably would've done the same thing. How ironic is it for someone like this to have an irrational fear of water?"

Cala stirred. She mumbled, "Mmm... water hurts. Water hurt me really bad and I don't wanna touch it ever again."

Renée's ears perked up. "What's she saying?"

"Something caused this," Peyton said. "Maybe, as a kid, she was dumped in a bathtub full of acid! Caused her Post-Traumatic Stress disorder and rendered her completely mentally disabled!"

"Something that wouldn't happen in children..."

"And yet the most plausible idea we have on the table. You tell me what happened to her."

Renée sighed. "Look, I don't... she's right there, now. And she's awake. Let's ask her."

Cala turned her head to point upwards, revealing her left eye. She opened it and looked across the room at Renée. She squinted at her for a minute before saying, "I was going to go swimming. So I went to the pool under the building. There wasn't anyone around. I dived into the pool, then it chewed me up and spat me back out." She smiled. "I hate water now. And I hate you for putting me in a bathtub." She laid her head back down, closing her eye.

Renée went slack for a moment, before mumbling to herself, "I never did anything to deserve this." She went back to sulking.

Peyton got up and moved herself in front of Cala. "So you became hydrophobic after it happened, huh?" Cala turned her head again to look at her. She had a basalt-gray coat and dull green eyes, framed by an emerald-green mane. "Can't say I'm surprised. That would've been too cruel if fate had treated you to a fresh dose of aquatic lifestyle after it already took the luxury of water away from you." She looked closer at the right side of Cala's face. "Rest your head. I'm going to take a look at your eye."

She wiped away the grime on Cala's face, then carefully put two hooves above and below Cala's right eye.

She pulled.

Two girls screamed. Peyton because of what she saw, and Cala because of what she felt.

Peyton jumped back as Cala pressed a hoof to her eye. She looked behind her at the zebra mare who had gotten up and was rushing over, wary but worried.

"What's going on? What's wrong with her eye?"

"It's..." Peyton looked at the squirming form of Cala. "It's horrible. It's not an eye anymore."

Renée gulped, quivering as she watched Cala writhe on the couch, who turned her head and looked at the two mares before her.

"We're going to have to pull it out," Peyton said. She took the juice from the filly's hooves while Renée climbed onto the couch and held her down. The two mares glanced at each-other meaningfully, preparing for the task of amputating an eyeball.

"No! No!" Cala screamed. "Don't do that! It hurts!"

"Sorry, girl," Peyton said. "It has to be done."

↪

[3-2] Calm

Hooonk!

That was the sound of an airhorn. Again. Incredibly loud.

Everyone froze.

Cala was lying on the couch, screaming and crying. Tears ran down her left cheek and something worse ran down her right. Peyton was leaning over above her, something bloody held in her mouth and grimacing. Renée was lying atop Cala, no longer pinning her down, but now just quivering.

They were all staring at the figure that had just entered the room. A yellow stallion stood there with the horn in his mouth. He had wavy black hair and blue eyes. He was poring over the scene in front of him, a baffled expression on his face.

Renée was the first to speak out. "It was her idea!"

He dropped the horn and held a hoof up to his face. "Honestly, girls? I was away for twenty minutes and you've already started to torment her."

The mares got up and stood side-by-side in the middle of the room, facing towards him.

He first went up to Peyton. He gave her a scornful expression. "What've you got?" She opened her mouth wide, revealing a bloody ball of flesh in her mouth. He recoiled. He glanced over at where Cala still laid on the couch bawling, occasionally glancing over at him with one eye and an empty socket. He looked at Peyton once more, at the eye she had pulled out of the filly's skull. "Well, finish it," he said. She baulked at him. "I mean it. Eat it. Taste it go down your esophagus." Peyton began to chew, grimacing.

He then moved over to stand in front of Renée. He gazed at her in disappointment.

She took a quivering breath. "I didn't—"

"I know," he said. "It's not that. You know what it is." Renée finally let loose a tear, bowing her head and quivering with the pent-up helplessness she held inside. He took her in his arms and gave her a fierce hug, helping her calm down after that mess. He only held it for a few seconds, letting go to turn his attention to the most important development of the day. He walked over to Cala, with her following behind him.

Cala squinted as he came near. She shivered as he loomed over her.

"How are you holding up?" he said.

"No!

"No no no no! You won't touch me! You're all freaks!" She tried to get up but only managed to fall off the couch. She screamed again as her fresh bandages shifted. She sobbed and sobbed as she tried to crawl across the floor to get away from the latest cultist attempting to torment her.

"Would you calm down please? You're only hurting yourself," he said.

Then they heard gagging.

The room fell silent. Renée and the stallion turned around to see Peyton looking quite green, more so than usual. Suddenly she hurled, ejecting both the ground-up eyeball in her mouth and all of her lunch from earlier. She coughed and everyone stared at the look of horror and regret plastered on her face.

Then they heard giggling. Renée slowly started to laugh, quiet at first but growing as the room around her remained quiet.

"Fuck," Peyton said. Her eyes rolled into the back of her skull and she fell over.

That was when Renée broke out in a full, hearty guffaw. Even the yellow stallion smiled as he watched the scene. But nobody was looking at Cala, who crawled up behind them.

Cala launched herself between the two standing ponies, jumping at Peyton.

Chomp! Peyton screamed as she was brought back to the waking world by a sharp bite in the side.

Renée immediately reacted by jumping back and hiding in the corner of the room. The stallion ran out the door where he came in from. Peyton just screamed as a part of her pelt was torn off, and Cala walked around in front of the mare with a vicious, bloody smile.

"How do you like it, huh?!" she said. She chewed on the flesh in her mouth, and Peyton quickly passed out yet again.

Cala then turned her attention to the last waking pony in the room. She swallowed, then sauntered up to the zebra with a bloody smile. Her red-stained, serrated teeth showed in her maniacal grin.

"I'm sorry I ever did anything to you!" she said. "I was only trying to help! Don't hurt me!"

⤳

Thump. The sound of something meaty hitting the floor filled the room.

Cala finally turned her attention off of Renée. "Ooh, I smell fish! Hee!" She pounced on the giant, rotting fish that the stallion had brought in.

Renée let out a breath of relief. In the few minutes that the stallion was out, Cala hadn't made a move against her. Just stood there on wobbly legs. Staring at her crazily.

The stallion himself sighed, too. His nose scrunched up as he caught a whiff of the fish; unpleasant on its own, but being so old and without any preservative measures it absolutely reeked. But Cala didn't care about that, and he knew that she probably wouldn't.

Renée picked up the unconscious form of Peyton and turned to the door. "Come on, Willy. This room is too messy and stinky to stay in now. Let's just wait outside until she finishes that up."

The stallion nodded, and they left Cala to her meal.

By the time they had closed the doors behind them, Renée blanched. "Why did you bring back a monster? Do you see what she's begun to do to us?"

Willy closed his eyes and leaned his head against the door. "Yeah. That's absolutely... nasty. But you remember what we talked about concerning other survivors. Are we just supposed to leave them on the streets when we could be working together?"

"This thing isn't normal, Willy. It's afraid of water."

Willy just looked back at her for a moment. He laughed.

"I'm serious! She must have went through some kind of serious trauma before we found her. There's something seriously wrong." Renée proceeded to tell her side of the story from when she had first gotten the filly, and the two ponies moved to another room to get comfortable.

"You're absolutely right," he said. "Did she say anything more about the pool? What it sounds like she described doesn't seem normal."

"That's what I thought, too. It's like she doesn't remember what exactly happened."

"I guess it would make sense if the chlorine content of the water was above normal levels, it would cause her body serious damage. But then how did she manage to get out? We need to find out more."

Peyton came back to the world again with a groan. "Mmngh... where am I? Have you killed the monster?"

"No," Willy said, "I went out to get something for her to eat. I figure she was just grouchy, and after having a meal she'll be willing to cooperate with us. Renée was kind enough to distract her long enough for me to go and find something."

Peyton stared at him, then looked at the other mare. Both looked collected and no longer freaking out about any of it. "What the Hell?" she said. "Why aren't you flipping your shit over this! This is terrible! She's terrible!" She looked at the fresh injury on her side. "She bit me!"

"Well what did you expect?" Willy said. "You bit her, too. In the eye. And tore it out. That's kind of the reason this whole mess started in the first place! What were you trying to do? What could compel you into doing something so brash and stupid?!"

Peyton sighed and brought a hoof to her face. "Fuck. It... you didn't see it for yourself. It was horrible. It freaked the living fuck out of me, and from the screaming I could tell it must have been painful for the stupid fry. It was a mercy. If I had waited any longer, you would have came back and convinced me not to do it, only giving her more pain in the long run. Would you really want that for her?"

Willy stroked his chin. "Alright... fair enough. I can see how you might choose to do something brash, you know, in the heat of the moment. I'm not going to hold it against you because I've already made you pay for it. And it looks like you've paid for it two-fold since then, anyways."

"Hey," Renée interrupted, "did anyone happen to catch her name?"

The ponies at the table looked at each-other.

"I'm Cala!" Cala said.

"Ah, it's nice to meet you. My name is Willy," he said, shaking her hoof happily.

Peyton stared in horror at where the filly suddenly appeared next to her at the table. She let out a strangled half-scream.

"Ooh, and thank you for bandaging me, miss Peyton!" Cala gushed. She reached over and pulled the mare into a big hug.

"Wait, you were the one who bandaged her up?" Willy said.

Renée grinned sheepishly while Peyton remained too shocked to respond. "I guess, I may have been... felt too guilty at the time to do it myself," she said.

"But! But did she remember to use disinfectant?" Willy asked Renée. "Did she follow all the proper first-aid protocols when she was patching Cala up?"

"Who cares?" Cala said. "Now that you've all calmed down, who wants to hear a story?!"

They all baulked at her.

"Right, so there was once this girl named Cala. That's me, heehee! She was the coolest kid in school. Everyone loved Cala because she was awesome and was basically like a princess. Then, everyone else just died! They couldn't handle how radical Cala is, so they all just accepted their fates as 'worst people' and decided to leave. But then Cala stopped being cool. It happened at the same time, really. Those two things. Cala lost everything that made her a person, and — heck — she was practically useless. She turned into a silly fish. Can you believe that? So what happened, was she woke up in the middle of the night — because she was a fish — and it freaked her out and made her fall out of her bed...

⤷

[3-3] Holes

"...but guess what? I was able to get away from them. You know why? I grew legs. Right then and there, I just willed it, and pop! Suddenly I had legs! So I ran away from them. I ran really really fast and I managed to outrun them. I don't know what happened to them then... and I don't know what happened to me. I think I got really tired and fell asleep on the street." Cala paused for a moment, considering her story. "Yep, that's about it. Next thing I knew, a big, stoopid zebra was trying to wash me, but you guys already know about that."

Everyone at the table stared at her with a range of emotions. Willy bore an amused smile. Renée looked baffled at the tale. Peyton had a distant look to her, with a sick frown on her face.

"Does anyone else here see the giant, gaping holes in her story?" Renée said.

"You've got quite the ego, Cala," Willy said.

"You think she made all of that up?" Renée asked him.

"I didn't!" Cala said. "Everything I've told you was real things that happened to me. I didn't make it up."

Peyton got up and left the room, saying, "I think I'm gonna go clean up that mess."

"You did! I think you did!" Renée said. "Explain to me, then... how was it that you saw rain outside that whole time when it wasn't really raining?"

"Oh it was raining outside, Miss Holland. I saw it with my very eyes; it rained constantly until I left. Then it was dry."

"Well, I haven't been to your apartment, but we haven't seen any rain around here since... at least since the disaster."

"I can back that claim," Willy said. "It's your word against ours."

"I don't believe you."

"Alright, how about a point that interests me, personally," Renée said. "How were you able to get out of the pool after you dove in and it began to kill you? How did you survive that?"

Cala sighed in exasperation. "I went over this. It chewed me up and spat me out. Why? Because that's what water does! Water is evil! It doesn't want to kill me; it just likes to see me suffer."

"That doesn't make any sense. Water hasn't done that to any of us."

Cala squinted at her for a moment, before saying, "None of you are seaponies."

Willy laughed. "The curse of those who made it. Our greatest strengths are also our worst weaknesses, sometimes in the most literal way possible."

"Let's try a different angle," Renée said. "What do you think happened to everyone?"

"Well... I dunno. I guess I've been thinking that they all went on, like, a vacation or something. They left because the apartment got flooded, and left me behind because I'm a seapony and I can deal with water. Well... that's not as true anymore as I thought at first."

"Think back to the start, though. Even before you flooded the apartment, you said you were calling for your mother but she never came. Why's that?"

"Um... ugh, I don't know! She was asleep or something. I just had to make do on my own."

"Go over what happened after you woke up in the bathtub that morning in explicit detail."

Cala groaned. "Fine. First, I looked at my reflection in the water, and I got happy seeing what I was. I noticed the floor was flooded, so I decided I would leave the bathtub. I first went out to the kitchen to find my mom making breakfast, but she wasn't there. I heard a door close behind me, and I turned around and went to my mom's bedroom, looking for her. But she wasn't there. I got really sad after that, and then... I don't know. I think that's when I had that idea about where she went, and I just went off to get myself something to eat. When I started eating, though, I heard—"

"Okay, stop," Renée said. "You said you heard a door close behind you."

"Yeah...?"

"And you're absolutely sure you were the only one there?"

Cala paused, shocked at that. "Woah, yeah. That is really strange, isn't it?"

"And you said you don't remember what happened in the bedroom?"

"... ... ...No. I, actually. I don't remember what happened. At all." She stared wide-eyed at Renée. "That's kind of spooky!"

Willy chuckled. "Wow, you're pretty good at that, Renée."

"So there must be only one explanation for this," Renée concluded. She rubbed her hooves together and giggled: "Ghosts!"

Cala screamed.

"Woah, wait a minute!" Willy shouted, silencing the room. "We still don't have the full story here."

"You're right!" Renée said. "Cala, do you remember in the bathroom, when you were trying to get the drain plug... and it just fell into your lap?"

"Ghosts, ghosts!" Cala shrieked.

"No!" Willy said. "There's something else. I should have mentioned this earlier, but... Cala was mumbling things when I found her on the street today. Really strange, almost cryptic things."

"I was?" she said.

"You were. There was one thing in particular that you were saying, though... it was... gosh what was it? Oh, right.

"'This is retribution for having rent the aegis null'."

Cala paused at that. She gulped, her body beginning to quiver.

"Those aren't words that a girl her age should know," Renée said.

"That's not all," Willy said. "There were other things, too. She was mumbling about... a unicorn. A toy. Green. The name 'Harper' popped up a few times as well.

Cala started to giggle. She looked manic. "This... this is... ... ...heeheeheehahahaha! Retribution of the aegis! Aaaaiiieeee! Retribution for rending the aegis null!"

Peyton walked into the room. "What's going on?!"

"This is retribution for having rent the aegis null! Hahahahaaaah! Ghosts! Ghosts! Harper!" Cala chanted.

"She's losing her mind!" Renée said.

"Ghosts! Harper! Ghosts! Ghosts! Ghosts!"

"What have I done?!" Willy said.

"Ghosts! Ghosts! Ghosts! Ghosts! Ghosts! Ghosts! Mmfoas gphostes ghoph..."

Everyone looked at Peyton. She stood behind Cala, her forelimbs wrapped around the filly's muzzle. Cala stopped chanting, now just trying to breathe. She let go and Cala gasped for air.

Cala started coughing. At first it was just a dry cough, but then it built up and started to sound grating. Everyone winced as she started to practically hack her lungs out.

"Well, that's officially the strangest thing I've ever seen," Willy said.

"Are you alright?" Renée asked.

Cala finally stopped and moaned out, "mmmfgrh... bring me some pain pills."

Peyton laughed. "Are you addicted to those things, or something? Sounds to me like you've already had enough to last a lifetime pain-free."

Cala chuckled, though it sounded more like a rasp. "Addicted? It's only been, like... a week. That's not enough time to become addicted, right?"

Renée gasped. "No! Oh, sweetie, you didn't know? It's been over a month since the catastrophe happened!"

Cala looked at her.

Renée looked back.

"Well, it's official," Willy said. "On top of being a hydrophobic seahorse, scarred to Hell and back, and bat-shit insane, our newest member is also a drug addict. Does anyone have anything else to add before we call it a day?"

"Yes," Peyton said. "I vote we keep her in a kennel as a pet. She can be the group mascot." Renée laughed at that.

↪

[3-4] Water

Peyton laid back in her bath. Bubbles foamed up around the side of the tub and she tried to relax.

She couldn't, though, because Cala was also in the bathroom with her. Cala was standing up on her legs, taking deep breaths. They still wobbled. She was standing tall enough that she could look over the side of the tub at Peyton soaking in the water.

She fell over. She gasped as her body hit the floor and her legs crumpled beneath her again.

“That was pretty good,” Peyton said. “I think you lasted a full minute that time.”

“No!” Cala said. “I did better than that. It had to have been a whole five minutes at least.” She sat up onto her haunches, tensed a moment, then lifted herself back up to her feet, standing again.

“You're actually pretty tall, Cala,” Peyton said, leaning over the side. “Not very big... your legs are like sticks — but you're much taller than I am.”

Cala blew a raspberry. “You're tiny. In fact, you... you're all small. You all got to turn into adorable ponies and I—”

“You're incredibly cute yourself,” Peyton said. A moment later she blushed, realizing what she said. “Look, you don't have to feel bad, it happened to everyone.”

“It did? But you guys are the only other ones I've come across.”

“Well, of the people who are still here. We thought we had found everyone in Seattle before we came across you. But... you do know that literally almost everyone just, up and disappeared, right?”

“Hey—woah!” Cala said, falling over again. She took a few breaths then sat back up, but didn't stand up fully yet. “Of course I knew that! Do I look stoopid to you?”

“No, actually, you're more like...” Peyton blanched. “Well, you act like a child. Like, a really bratty, know-it-all fucking kid.” A beat. “How old are you, anyways?”

“Older than you,” Cala said. “Who even cares?”

“Hm. Well, Renée and Willy both treat you like a child; they're in their early thirties or something, I think, and they kinda may have treated me like that, too, a while ago. I guess that's why they put me in charge of you while they went off and continued working on, eh... whatever it is they're doing today.

“And speaking of which, you still haven't changed your mind on the bath, right?”

Cala's visage immediately soured. “No! I'm not taking a bath with you!”

Peyton looked down at the dirty, soapy water she was in. “Well, okay, I'd guess this soap wouldn't be good for your scales anyway. How about this,” she said, and pulled the plug. The dirty water all drained out. “I'll fill it with fresh water, then we'll get you to at least try it, alright? It couldn't possibly hurt.”

Cala grunted.

Peyton filled the bath with fresh warm water, then turned the faucet off and gestured to Cala. “Okay, come on over here. You don't have to even touch the water yet, just come sit beside me.”

Cala sighed, looked around the room, then slowly made her way over to Peyton's side, next to the bathtub.

Peyton sighed, and looked at Cala with sad eyes. “Look, I... I've been kind of terrible to you since we met, haven't I?” Cala slowly nodded. “I'm going to come out and apologize for it. You know, just... I really wasn't in the best way this afternoon when we met. Ever since I met the others, well, it has been nice to get a roof over my head and have other, smarter people caring for me. But then they expected me to pull my own weight around here. It's not something I've ever really done, you know — I'm only seventeen, for fuck's sake! I've never had a job before! And now they're expecting me to do... gardening work, eugh.

“Well, we were running kinda low on food today,” Peyton continued, “and I skipped lunch even though I'd been working all morning. Then you showed up. I've just kind of been doing what makes sense. But that doesn't make any sense. I didn't realize you had already been through so much, and I figured a little pain wouldn't phase you.”

“That was horrible,” Cala said. “You... freaking tore out my eye with your own teeth. How could you do that?”

“I was panicked.” Peyton chuckled mirthlessly. “If you'd seen what I did, you would have done the same. Hell, you would've done a lot worse, considering you're like some kind of predator now.”

Cala laughed.

Peyton smiled... then said quietly: “Do you trust me?”

Cala looked at her with a tear in her eye, half-smiling.

Peyton reached out with her wet forelimb and touched Cala's shoulder.

Cala flinched, gasping, as she felt the wet forelimb touch her. But she found she didn't back away from it. It was warm, and it wasn't water; it was just Peyton's arm, and she found that she didn't mind that so much.

“You trust me right? Yeah... so I made some jabs at you. But I really do want what's best for you. Did I do a good job bandaging you up?”

Cala smiled. “You did. And I do.”

Peyton took Cala's arm in her own. “Let me help you then. I promise, nothing bad will happen to you; I'll make sure of it.” And then she pulled Cala's forelimb over the tub. Gently, but not too slow, she lowered it into the water.

Cala gasped. She quivered and her pupils shrunk as she watched her arm submerge in the water.

But nothing happened.

She didn't pull away, because Peyton's hoof was holding on to her own, and she found that she liked the way the water felt on her hoof. It had been a while already since she had last felt that; too long. Why had such a silly fear taken over her mind to begin with? It hadn't been worth it, Cala concluded.

A small whimper escaped Cala. Just barely audible. It grew, and started to break apart, like little whining sobs. But from the grin on her face and the tears running down her cheek, it was clearly not a sadness that powered them. Cala's broken laugh grew in intensity as relief washed over her. Nothing had ever felt so good.

A fear of water! How silly! What a silly thing for her to have. That fear of water! Oh, how silly that had been! Cala laughed and laughed, pouring her soul into her expression of immense relief. She reached up her other arm and dipped it into the water, too. Oh the silliness of it all! She had feared water, of all things! Fearing water! How could such a silly thing have happened?

Peyton saw how ecstatic Cala was and laughed herself. She grabbed Cala's fetlocks with her own. She leaned over the edge of the tub, wrapping her arms around the other mare, hugging her and feeling Cala hug her back. They both sat there, hugging each-other over the edge of the bathtub and sobbing sweet cries of joy.

After a minute had gone by, Peyton pulled back, and balanced leaning on Cala — who herself did the same by leaning on Peyton, their forelimbs propping themselves up. “Fuck! That worked, it worked! You put your hooves in the water!”

“It worked! It worked!” Cala chanted, giggling, her cheeks sore from smiling so hard.

“You're damn right it worked! You're awesome! No fear of water is going to hold you back!”

Cala just kept laughing.

“So what? Are you just going to sit there laughing? Or are we gonna go the rest of the way?” Peyton smirked and scooted over in the bath, making room for the other mare. “We could stop now, or... we could go the full distance. Come on. Let's kick this stupid damn fear and make you right again.”

Cala hesitated, though. She contemplated just jumping in next to her new friend, but she found her mind resisting that course of action, despite her knowing damn well that it was completely painless.

“Damn it — let's just get on, already!” Peyton said. She wrapped her limbs around Cala and heaved.

Cala shrieked as she was hauled into the tub with Peyton. She gasped, her eye opening wide as she saw the water coming closer by the millisecond.

Splash!

Peyton wrapped her arms and legs around the mare in her grasp, holding her and keeping her from thrashing in the water. She turned onto her back, holding Cala on top of her.

Cala gasped and gasped, shivering. She felt the liquid seep back into her scales for the first time in weeks. She could feel the strong limbs enveloping her, keeping her safe from the wrath of the water. And that was really all that mattered. She slowly settled herself, her mind finally accepting that maybe the water wasn't the worst thing in the world.

Peyton, below her, gasped as she felt Cala's fins rub at her belly. She blushed; she couldn't think of this mare that way... not after they had just got to know each other. She focused instead on comforting Cala, trying to get her to calm down. But then she felt something off.

She looked at the door to the bathroom, which was again in Cala's blind-side, and saw Willy standing in the doorway. He just smiled and shook his head, closing the door and leaving them.

Cala giggled again and turned over, face-to-face and lying on top of Peyton. “Yes! Yes! It worked! Thank you Peyton! Thank you, thank you, thank you!” she grinned at her new best friend, lying on top of her in the water. ”I love you so much!”

Peyton blushed, but laughed it off. She was just glad that she could help one of her few remaining peers to overcome a crippling fear.

↪

[3-5] Home

Peyton held a radio in her hooves. It was a large, clunky thing, hardly new technology. It spat a stream of static at her as she turned a dial on it back and forth.

Cala got tired of trying to figure it out. “What are you doing?”

Peyton sighed. “Trying to find a broadcast. The airwaves have been completely silent recently. Even those radio stations that were programmed to keep broadcasting pre-chosen songs and ads have stopped.” She turned it off and looked at Cala. “If I ever manage to hear anything on the radio, it'll mean that there's somebody out there that has figured out how to send a signal.”

“But I thought we'd already found everyone,” Cala said.

Peyton laughed. She put the radio on the nightstand and crawled into the bed with the other mare.

The bed was strange. It had a water-filled mattress, per Peyton's request, and had slick sheets that weren't made of cotton or any other material that you normally found in bedsheets. Instead, they were made of a non-absorbent material so that Cala could sleep well without her skin drying out. Peyton was surprised Willy could procure a thing like this on such short notice. It wasn't the first time, either; he knew the city like he used to know the back of his hand.

“Goodnight.”

Cala settled in to sleep. This was the best she had felt since the disaster happened. Her right side was still covered in scrapes, but they were no longer bandaged. They had fallen off in the bath, revealing fresh water-resisting scabs underneath. They still stung to the touch, but felt much better than they had at first. Even her empty eye socket, while still aching, felt better than the ravenous itch that first took over after the dog attack. It hadn't seemed noteworthy at the time as it had blended in with the pain of the rest of her body.

Cala felt something, again, that she had nearly forgotten about through her trek that day. It was a stirring in her belly. She knew that something had been dwelling in there for the past month. It wasn't anything bad. It just put strange thoughts in her head that were alien to her.

She fell asleep to thoughts of... pouches.

⤍

Willy awoke to the sound of something crashing downstairs.

He groaned. He felt something stirring next to him, and opened his eyes to see the beautiful striped body of Renée next to him. He turned over and looked around the room. Nothing out of the ordinary.

Honk!

Uh oh. That was the sound of one of his airhorns... not good.

He jumped out of bed, leaving behind the mare and leaped to the door. He nabbed a vest off a hook and stumbled to fit each foreleg into it while stumbling across the hall.

Now wearing his vest, he ran down the stairs into the living room to find two fillies rolling around on the floor laughing. But there was something wrong with the floor. The whole room, what had just the day before stank of old fish, was now flooded. He saw that all of the carpet was completely damp.

“Hey!” he shouted. The girls both froze, wide-eyed, slowly turning their heads to look at him.

He stomped across the carpet. He could feel the water on his hooves; it was strange, something he hadn't ever felt with his new body. He went right up to them and scooped Cala up onto his back. He nabbed the airhorn from Peyton's hooves, stuffing it in a pocket.

“Peyton, this is not right. I'm disappointed. I want you to find a steam cleaner and get all this sorted out by the time I'm back.” He marched toward the door, taking the fishy filly with him.

“But we don't have a steam cleaner! Where am I supposed to get one? Where are you taking her?!” Peyton said.

“Bye Peyton!” Cala called before the door was slammed shut behind them.

⤿

Willy stopped walking.

Confused, Cala sat up and put her forehooves on Willy's head, peering over at what he was looking at.

“Well, Cala,” he said, “this is where I found you. Do you know which way you came from when you got here?”

Cala looked around. It was all familiar in a vague sense, but more because she had been around the whole city as a child, and not because she remembered collapsing here. But she did remember a few things about her run.

“I don't remember, Mister Willy. But, um... I figured out my legs are really, really weak, and I don't know how I was able to run so far.” She looked at the street they were on, and noticed how the pockmarked pavement was sloped. “I guess I was running downhill.”

“That works for me,” he said. He started walking up the street away from the city.

Cala sat back as they started moving again. “There's a thing on your butt,” she said.

“Yeah, I noticed that pretty quick after I got turned into this. A traffic cone... heh. I was a construction worker before all this. I got to do work all around Seattle, and sometimes places abroad. I know Seattle very well. I was the one who found both Peyton and Renée; you know how?”

“Hmm...” Cala thought for a moment. “Did you search through every building in the city?”

Willy laughed. “No, no. I wouldn't even be done with a fraction of this place if I did that. What I did, was I went through all the residential areas. We're heading toward one of them now.” He pulled the airhorn out of his pocket with his mouth. “Themn eh yoozt diz—” Honk! He laughed as he put it away. “Then I used that to try and grab the attention of whoever I could, just walking through the streets and blasting it off now and then.”

“Who did you find first?” Cala asked.

“Peyton, of course,” he said. “That little rascal. She lived in the downtown area, probably affluent before money became worthless.” Cala looked at him funny. “That means she had a rich family. Not many people get to own apartments down there, it's expensive.”

“Okay. How'd you find Miss Holland?”

“Uh, please just call her Renée. Well, she actually came to Seattle from Tacoma. Took an entire day and walked all the way up here. That's pretty dedicated, but she knew that if she had any chance to find others she'd have to come up here. Turns out she was right. Still, she was complaining about sore hooves for a bit after I found her... but beggars can't be choosers.” He paused and thought for a moment. “There was also someone else that we met... but, hm. Well, we didn't really get to know much about him. He didn't stay long before he flew off.”

“He flew off?” Cala asked.

“You're asking me, miss Seahorse. I still can't believe how such tiny wings could give him any lift... but that's all in the past. Right now, we need to focus on finding out where you lived. We're entering the residential district now.”

They went silent for a few minutes as they walked along the road.

...

“There!”

Willy looked at the decrepit old apartment as they came in front of it. It had begun to rot, and he saw water damage taking over the foundation. Besides that, there was a crack in the window pane of one of the entrance doors. These were signs that the building had been lived in without any maintenance; it was the place Cala must have called home.

Cala jumped off his back and walked through the doors. She looked around her and found some things were on the floor, as well as the bucket of things that she wanted to bring with her. “Yep, this is it! It's all here.”

Willy knocked the bucket over and watched everything spill out. “This is all a bunch of junk! Why would you want to bring any of this with you?”

“It's not! It all has its—”

“Meaw!”

“Jasper!” Cala gasped as the little cat ran out to greet her.

Willy sighed. “Alright, why don't we, uh... you can pack the things that have... sentimental value, then I'll carry the bucket back.”

“Jas is coming, too! He looks so hungry, though. Can I feed him before we leave?”

“Uh, alright. Don't take longer than five minutes, though. I have things I wanted to get done today.” He turned to leave the building as the filly went to feed her cat. He's just wait outside, keeping watch. Something caught his eye, though. Something... pink, and rubbery. He looked at it a moment before shaking his head and smiling. No, it wasn't dangerous.

He scooped the non-perishables back into the bucket and picked it up. He left behind the items that weren't in the bucket to start with, the crowbar and a pill bottle.

He did a double-take.

He looked closer at the pills. This was the kind of medication that people got addicted to after being in the hospital. A fire began to build in him. This wasn't right!

He ran out the building and chucked the bottle down the road. “Sayonara, painkiller fiend! Ha!” He grinned as it bounced out of sight. One more problem taken care of.

⤳

Renée laughed as she stood at the top of the stairs, seeing Peyton's situation.

Peyton grumbled. Hadn't asked for this. She pushed the big, clunky contraption with her mouth, trying but mostly failing to maneuver it around the room. It was torture. She didn't know what cruel fate enjoyed having her performing housewife duties with no hands, but she knew that they would pay. Good-for-nothing...

She heard the door open behind her and collapsed. She didn't know what she would face for being incompetent and cleaning up her and Cala's mess. Willy was still so strict with her whenever she screwed something up.

Instead, when she opened her eyes she saw Cala's face up to her own. They smiled at each other, and then she looked down at Cala's mouth to see...

Cala dropped what she was holding. “Hi Peyton! I brought you back a gift!”

Peyton's eyes went wide as she tried to comprehend what she was seeing. She blushed fiercely.

“I, um... th–thanks! This is w–wonderful, I love it!”

“Yay! I'm glad you like it,” Cala said. “And look! I brought my friend back from my house.”

Peyton recovered in time to see the orange cat come up to her and nuzzle her. She smiled; cats were such sweet company, she was glad Cala went back to get him. She looked at the mare. Not as great of company as such a great... friend, though.

“Go take a break,” Cala said. “I'll finish cleaning this up, you can play with Jasper.”

Peyton gratefully took the opportunity and left the scene, wary of Willy. Oh, she had an idea of what she'd do... and it likely wouldn't involve Jasper.

[3-6] …

Author's Note

Warn: this chapter contains non-explicit description of sexual behavior. Your risk.

[3-6] …

Cala's legs wobbled as she slowly climbed up the flight of stairs.

She had just ate lunch with Willy and Renée, and Peyton had been in their room for the later part of the morning. She was starting to wonder what her friend was doing, and now with nothing else to do, she slowly made her way upstairs to check on her.

She collapsed at the top, breathing heavily. These new legs were terrible. She tried to imitate the way the others moved around now, but she found it was much harder for her to get around like that. Instead of walking, she ended up crawling across the floor to get down the hallway. It almost felt just like ‘old times’.

She opened the door and looked into her room.

...

Oh that's. Uh.

...

What?

Cala saw Peyton looking down over her own belly at her sitting in the doorway. Green eyes sparkled with mischief.

“I've been waiting for you,” Peyton whispered.

Cala started shaking. What.

What was she doing with the pink toy?

“Come over here.”

Cala crawled across the floor toward the bed. The whole time her own eye was locked with Peyton's green ones, and she couldn't look away. She was next to the bed. Peyton had turned over, reaching over the edge and pulling Cala up on top.

Cala found herself lying on her back, looking up at her friend.

Peyton was rubbing Cala's belly. “I've noticed you're a bit bloated down here. It's almost as if...”

Cala could no longer hear her friends words as she felt something in her body.

It was what she felt last night.

It was what she had felt every night, lying in bed. That strangely alien feeling. It was amplified now, pushing way past what she had felt before. It felt good to her, but... It's the wrong time. It's the wrong place. It's the wrong other.

She mentally screamed. What what what!

She only refocused long enough to catch the last comprehensible phrase that Peyton would utter.

“I've never seen something like this before!”

She was staring at Cala's crotch.

❗

?‽?‽?

Peyton ate roe.

⤹

⤸

⤹

⤸

Cala sobbed.

“Cala?”

She cried.

“Cala, you... you didn't enjoy that?”

Cry cry sob, she.

...

“No...”

She cried and cried.

“Fuck! What have I done?!”

Cala kept crying and crying, despite Peyton's best efforts to comfort her.

⤞

Cala lay on her back, staring up at the ceiling. Her eye was glazed over. She had run out of tears to shed.

Beside her, Peyton had snuggled up to her side. Her dark face was stuck in an eternal grimace, and she desperately clung to her lost lover as if it was a corpse that she hadn't wanted to let leave the land of the living.

Cala wasn't dead. At least, in her own mind, she was aware of the fact that her body still functioned. But that was all. She couldn't bring herself to move a single muscle. She couldn't find the will to turn to her friend and tell her that she wasn't sad. She wasn't. Just lost. She felt lost and confused as she stared up at the ceiling, trying to comprehend the loss of her own virginity and why the whole thing felt so wrong.

Suddenly, the ceiling was no longer there.

Cala didn't see it anymore because what instead filled her vision was green. It was the bad green.

She loved the pure green that she saw in her friend's beautiful mane. A bright green. An emerald green.

This green was raw. It was pale. She had referred to it as ‘aquamarine’, but now she found that word didn't hold enough of a negative feel to it. This green was rabid, gross. This green was feral.

She stared into the feral gold eyes of the unicorn in front of her eye.

As Harper glared at her, she almost felt guilty for what just happened to her. Harper's glare was vindictive, and it turned Cala's mind around. Suddenly, Cala found that she couldn't stop thinking the old thought that haunted her. This is retribution for having rent the aegis null. This is retribution for having rent the aegis null. This is...

—Peyton cracked open her eyes and leaned up to look into her friend's again. It looked so hollow. So ghostly. So dead. Despite Cala having gone completely still a while ago, Peyton knew that there was still a spark of life in there, no matter how small.

She put her hoof on Cala's chest and felt the last bits of movement in her friend. It moved up and down slowly as it pulled in the barest of breaths. It thumped slowly as the cold heart beat a slow rhythm.

Peyton felt a tear form in her eye. “Cala...”

Cala's eye suddenly moved. It blinked, then focused on Peyton. Her face tensed, eyebrows furrowing.

Her horn glowed.

Peyton gasped. She looked up at the horn she had on her own forehead. It had never glowed like that! In fact, it was so invisible that it was hardly even noteworthy to her.

She stared at the gold glow on Cala's horn. It almost matched Cala's eye, but it was a darker shade of orange. It... didn't fit there. It wasn't supposed to be.

She reached over and whacked it.

Cala's horn rattled. She looked away from Peyton and focused her dull eye on her own forehead. That glow fizzled out, and suddenly her horn emitted a green mist.

Cala took a slow, rasping breath, then started coughing.

Her eye clenched shut in her coughing fit, and when it was over she opened it up again. In it, Peyton saw that its usual lively glossiness had returned. But Cala stared up at the mist flowing out of her horn. It was deathly familiar. It floated up above her head, looming like an evil presence.

The mist congealed and I formed a mote of golden light.

Cala looked mortified. Peyton shrieked as I turned and focused on her. That one would be mine.

I dove at her, but she was quick. She reached behind her, grabbing the nearest thing and holding it up in front of her to block me.

It worked. The mote of light hit the radio. With a flash of light, it was all over.

I became one with the new object that would house Lyra's soul.

⥲

[3-7] Lyre

“I remember now.”

Cala sat holding the radio in front of her face. Peyton sat across the way on the other side of the bed, holding herself and looking nervous.

“You made me forget it all. You made me not know that you were there, but I know now what you did. It sucks,” Cala said.

The radio laid still in her hooves, keeping quiet in shame.

“Liar! What do you have to say for yourself?”

Peyton raised a tentative hoof. “Um, you... you might have to turn it on, Cala.”

“How do I do that?”

She reached over and flipped a switch on the radio. It began to hiss a stream of static, just as it had the night before. It began to change, though. The constant noise sputtered, went quieter, then spat out two bursts that could be heard as the syllables of a word.

”Lyre,” it said.

“Yeah, you're a big, fat liar!” Cala said. “Don't think I don't know!”

“Lyre...”

“Shut up!” Cala rapped her hoof on its casing.

“I need... my lyre,” the thing sputtered, then the static came back in full force, drowning out any further words.

“What the fuck is that thing?!” Peyton yelled. “Why did it... come out of your horn? Were you possessed?”

“Augh, I was, I was...” Cala grimaced. “That, whatever that thing is, that is what I used to call ‘Harper’.”

“You what?”

“It was slowly taking over my mind, Peyton. Suddenly I remember so much. That thing is evil!”

“What the fuck?”

“What's going on in here?” Renée asked from the doorway.

Cala gasped. “Oh no...” She began to shake. “No. Mom, Brooke... my family... my friends...” She clenched her eye shut. “Gone. Gone. Gone. They're gone and they're gone and they're gone. They didn't leave me, oh, oh no! They were taken! Everyone I ever knew is dead!”

Peyton and Renée looked on silently as Cala broke down in front of them.

“Nothing I ever knew is real anymore! My friends and my peers at school, oh God but that school is probably just full of rotting textbooks by now. My aunts and uncles and grandparents, who I would always see every year during Christmas, oh let their memory carry on in peace. The countless, nameless people I saw pass by on the streets every day, and none of them will be remembered. Oh God oh God oh God. They've all just disappeared. None of us know where they went, do we? We don't!

“But that isn't even the worst part. No no no no no it's so much worse than that. I'm still here. We're all still here. We didn't get taken away like the rest of them! We all got left behind for the spirits of the dead to haunt and taunt endlessly! Oh God!”

“Why is she just suddenly realizing all of this?” Renée asked.

Peyton moved to hold Cala, who collapsed onto her shoulders. She bore a sad, faraway look as she patted Cala's back.

“We have such a responsibility now. We're responsible for the world. We're responsible for each-others' lives. We're responsible to live in this crap world now that they're all gone. Responsible responsible responsible. We won't be able to save anything,” Cala said, going on and on.

Renée left the room, leaving Cala in the care of Peyton for the moment.

↷

“...And the. The um. The stuff that people took care of. We didn't make it so... so things would take care of itself. It's so ridiculous. It's almost like we weren't even expecting people to disappear. Naw. Who would think that...” Cala rambled.

Renée walked back into the room, carrying a large water bottle. Willy came in behind her. “Here, I brought you something,” she said.

“Oh, that. Water. That's perfect.” She took it in her hooves. “Water for the hydrophobic seapony. Well not anymore. Harper could only wish that she could make me fear it forever.” She took Peyton's hoof in her own, clenching it, then took a huge swig from the bottle.

“Who's Harper?” Willy asked.

“Apparently, a malignant spirit that possessed Cala and appeared to her in visions, messing with her life,” Peyton said. “Cala might have saw it like an imaginary friend — or an imaginary enemy, in this case.”

Cala finished taking her drink, taking a breath. “It erased all my memories so that I wouldn't question the stuff it was doing, I think. It was horrible. I look back on it all, now knowing everything that really happened, and it scares me how absolutely stoopid a lot of it was. Like, I can't believe I did that!” She took another pull from the bottle.

“Does that have anything to do with the way you were acting?” Renée said. “Because... at times I felt like you had just completely turned your brain off, like you never thought about the things you were doing.”

“Huh...” Cala said. “How old did it seem like I was acting?”

“Age?” Renée paused. “You were... well, I thought you must have been six or seven. Nine at the absolute most.”

“I would disagree,” Peyton said. “She might seem extremely boneheaded, but I mean — look at her! She's got to be at least my age. Look at how tall she is!”

“Well, both of those guesses are way off,” Cala said. “I see why you both thought that, though. I'm actually eleven. At least, I was before everyone disappeared.”

Peyton baulked at her. “No...”

“So if there was something that was inhibiting your thought, well, what happened to it?” Renée asked.

“No! Fuck no!” Peyton said. “You've got to be fucking joking!”

“What makes you think that?” Cala asked.

Peyton looked sick. In fact, she looked absolutely mortified. “What the fuck have I done?!” She suddenly looked at everyone in the room — all of them staring at her in confusion — and then she ran off, wailing.

A moment passed. ”So... what did she do?” Willy said.

“I'm not sure,” Cala said. “It was definitely bad enough that it scared Harper out of my head, though. It ended up possessing the radio.”

“You're not sure?” Renée asked. “But I thought you suddenly remembered everything. Why can't you remember this?”

“Well, I—” Cala sighed. “...I don't know how to describe it, is the thing. Nothing like it has ever happened to me before.”

An uncomfortable silence filled the room.

The sound of retching and sobbing could be heard from the bathroom nearby.

“Anyways,” Cala said, “after that happened, Harper showed up for the first time since I left my apartment. She looked... angry. I think it was the first time she looked like that. Peyton must have noticed something was wrong, so she did... something. The next thing I knew, there was mist coming off of my horn. And I somehow I knew that that was Harper's soul.” She told them the rest of the story up until Renée showed up in the room.

“‘I need my lyre’?” Renée said. “What would make it ask that? Did you take its lyre from it?”

“Well, maybe. I think it meant the mark it had. There was a little yellow harp painted on the toy's butt... but I guess it could be a lyre, too.”

“That's such a strange thing. We all have images on our haunches that... somehow represent us. I spent a whole night once thinking about it. Willy's is a traffic cone — that's a pretty self-explanatory one, he worked in construction before the disaster. Peyton's was a bit more confusing, but I figured out that her Monster Energy Drink logo makes her social, or something. She doesn't talk much about her life before this. Mine is a bit more abstract, but it represents the talent I have with paper-craft. I took up origami as a hobby. Unfortunately, I can't do that anymore... but there are plenty of other things taking up my time.”

“Okay, I think I get it,” Cala said. “Soul jars are probably stronger when they look like the person the soul came from. Since the butt mark says a lot about the person, just having a lyre on it should make it strong enough to answer my questions!”

“‘Soul jar’? Is that what you're calling it?” Renée asked.

“Yeah. A soul trapped in an object. Didn't you ever watch T.V.?”

She laughed. “Certainly not children's cartoons, no.”

Willy cleared his throat. “Do you need me to get anything?”

“Yeah,” Cala said. “Some yellow paint and a small paintbrush.”

“Ooh, we're finally going to get some answers,” Renée said. She clapped her hooves together and laughed. “I love solving mysteries!”

↪

[3-8] Liar

Cala flipped on the power switch. Static poured out. She flipped it off. Silence. She flicked it on again.

Renée was sitting on one side of the bed, watching her. She was looking at one thing in particular, actually. “She's become a lot thinner, too.”

Peyton, sitting next to Cala, blushed. “Yeah, it does seem that way...”

“And you... you look like you just ate a six-course meal, for Pete's sake. Hmmm, maybe there's some sort of connection?” Renée said sarcastically.

Peyton covered her face in shame, rolling over so Renée couldn't see her protruding belly.

“Were you in the bathroom trying to regurgitate it?”

“Shut up,” she grumbled.

“Look,” Renée laughed, “I'm just trying to piece together what happened. Surely you can't blame me for being curious about it. I just want the best for you both, after all.”

Cala flicked the radio in her hooves. Static. Off. Silence.

“Would you care to tell me, though... have you developed a taste for caviar?”

With an angry snarl, Peyton grabbed the radio from the hooves of the mare beside her and threw it at Renée. The zebra shrieked and ducked, causing it to bounce off the wall behind her and emit a sharp hiss of static.

“Hey!” Cala said. “I was messing with that!”

“Look, okay?!” Peyton shouted. “I gave her a blowjob! That's it!”

“You gave her a what?!” Willy shouted, having just walked in the door.

“Uh oh,” she said, then dove behind Cala.

Cala narrowed her eyes at the mare. A moment passed. “Ugh, you people. Always getting so worked up over silly things.”

“What do you know about sex?” Renée asked.

“None of the details,” Cala said. “But my sister, Brooke, was always talking about that stuff. At least, in the last year or so. I know enough to know that all it does is cause drama.”

“Did you give your consent when she did it?” Willy asked.

“My what?”

“Did you agree to let her do that to you?”

“I was too confused at the time, I think. I don't know.”

“That's technically rape,” Willy said.

“Did she hurt you?” Renée asked.

“Well... no. It was uncomfortable. I didn't like it.” Cala considered a moment. “But you know what? Peyton seemed to enjoy it quite a bit, and in the end it got me to open up my eyes. I think that's definitely worth it. Have you ever seen someone vanquish a demon that's possessed someone just by giving them a blowjob?” They both looked at her oddly. “That's what I thought. I don't even know what a ‘blowjob’ is.”

Willy laughed and rubbed his temple with the tip of his hoof. “That is really confusing. I'm just trying to imagine how someone could give a blowjob to a female pony.” He walked over towards where the radio landed.

Peyton sat back up and smiled sweetly and Cala. “Hey... I don't even care that you aren't returning my feelings anymore. That was really kind of you to defend me like that.” She laughed. “Fuck, now I'm getting all sappy, too.”

“It doesn't matter,” Renée said. “Let's stop delaying and get this over with already.”

Willy tossed the radio and paint on the bed in front of Cala.

Cala set the radio in front of her. She found an empty spot on the case and brushed the dust off with a hoof. She took the paintbrush in her mouth and steeled herself up to—

“Wait,” Willy said. “We should probably do this somewhere where Cala isn't going to get paint all over.”

Everyone groaned.

↴

Now re-situated, Cala used the brush to create a simple image on the radio case. It was a curvy U-shape with a thin stroke crossing over and connecting near the two ends.

“That's it?” Renée asked.

“Mmm-hmm,” Cala said. Willy took the brush from her mouth. “It's close enough. There's three strings as well, but that'd be hard for me to do.”

She turned it on. Silence. Then a staticky voice came from the speakers.

“Oh. Hi. You did get me my lyre,” it said. A beat. “I'm surprised. You probably hate my guts right about now, don't you?”

“You don't have the guts to fess up and face my wrath,” Cala said.

“That's funny. I also don't have the heart to keep you from knowing the truth any longer. So what do you want to know?”

“What I want to know,” Renée said, “is how you could torment such an innocent girl so much! What were you trying to do? Were you turning her into a monster? Because you succeeded pretty damn well at that!”

It chuckled, or at least made some noises that sounded amused. “What, you haven't figured it out yet?”

“No?”

“Of course... you're intuitive, but you can't read minds. Otherwise you'd have seen me sooner.” It did something like clearing its throat. “In a word: ‘protection’. My name is Lyra Heartstrings, and I sent my soul to the human universe to protect my ancient ancestor.”

“Ah-HA!” Cala said. “Your first lie revealed! You aren't Harper at all!”

“I am, though,” it said. “That's just the name you decided to give to me.”

“But, wait,” Renée said, “how do you mean, ‘protection’? Were you trying to protect poor Cala by making her afraid of water?”

“Hey, hold up! Are you responsible for making our affair suck ass?” Peyton interjected.

“I'm so confused,” Willy said. “Is this the ‘ghost’ that was apparently haunting Cala in the apartment?”

“Stop! Are you going to let me tell my story from the beginning?” Harper said. Everyone begrudgingly quieted down. “Good. Let's start... ah, okay, I know.

“I don't remember my own life from before I came here, but I do know some important details that were sent with me. The most important thing in my mind at that moment was that I was supposed to find a pony by the name Calamity, and protect her. I didn't find that pony, but what I did find was a human girl who went by the name Cala. So I stuck by her side for as long as I possibly could until she could help me find the pony I was looking for.

“I'll have you know... it was an incredibly long time before I did! It took years, and despite what you might think, waiting is a lot harder than it seems. There was one particular adversary I faced that was as detrimental to my success as any one person can be. Every night, the sister of the girl I followed would vanquish me. At first, it was getting tossed out the window. You may have figured out that a soul will power an object and drive it to succeed in its purpose. The purpose of a toy is to entertain, and one of the best ways to stop that from happening is to lose it. So the power I got was to return to my former place without anyone noticing I had left. But Brooke was terrible. Even after forgetting that she had thrown me out the window, she knew that that wouldn't work, so the next time she did something more drastic. Threw me into a fire. Every time it was harder and harder for me to force myself back into position. After a month of that, Brooke finally had enough and gave up. What a relief! I had used so much energy and will to do that that my soul would surely perish if I attempted it much more.

“Feeble as I was, though, young Cala had lost interest. It was such an unfortunate turn of events, and it irritated me to no end that fate would treat me so cruel. One night, though, I finally took fate into my own hands. The Event took place. Everyone disappeared from around me except for that one little girl, who began strangling in her bed. I saw my chance and took it. If there was any way that I could protect Cala now, I would have to directly interfere.

“So, using the last of my energy, I broke free from the figurine that had housed me for so long. I went to Cala, who was struggling and confused, and took her power as my own to be able to set things right. I went into her horn, and — devoid of my own energy, as I was — I had to take what magical energy was given to Cala to perform a spell. I knew this spell, and others, naturally because it was a bit of the precious knowledge I had been granted. It's a spell that all oricorns must learn if they wish to survive on land: the air breathing spell. So basic to cast, so energy efficient, so it didn't use hardly any magic. She had calmed down, but hadn't woken up. I also needed to cast something else, because if she stayed there in her bed she would have likely died from dehydration. She hadn't gotten much... bodily reserves, you could say, from the transformation, and she desperately needed water.

“What I did was I used the rest of her magic to cast a storm spell. What it does is causes a storm in the nearby area. I still have no idea how I knew this spell. What it would do was draw in nearby clouds and make it rain, hard. It conjures the most amount of water for the least magical cost, which would be perfect to help Cala survive for a while. I didn't realize, though, that the water wouldn't go inside of the building she was in. That was a mistake. All that ended up doing was waking Cala up, due to the thunder, and making her start trying to crawl to the bathroom. I didn't see the point at first, but then I realized... of course, there's water in the bathroom, and that's the perfect place to go in a situation like that.

“I couldn't do anything as she went over there. I had spent all the magic on a worthless spell, and I could only watch as Cala helplessly stumbled her way into the bathtub. She turned the water on, and finally I relaxed. She had a strange whim, then, and got a spike of irritation that sparked her magic again. I used the opportunity to use a small dose of basic telekinesis to satisfy it, and she got what she wanted. Unfortunately, she did notice me casting it. I made a note to be more subtle after that so I wouldn't be found out.

“She ended up sleeping in there the whole night, and in the meanwhile I built up my magic reserves. The storm spell went away after about an hour; there weren't that many clouds fueling it. I casted an illusion of the spell on the window. An illusion is incredibly cheap on magic, and what I wanted was for her to leave the building in the morning to get to somewhere more hospitable. If I was lucky, she'd find an ocean. It would help to lure her out of there so she got on that as soon as possible.

“Well, that didn't end up going to plan. Right after waking up, she found she missed her mother incredibly much. I knew the truth, that everyone had disappeared. She didn't, though. She almost got caught up thinking about it, so I used some quick telekinesis to distract her; slamming a door closed. Didn't work. She went into her mother's bedroom and the thought caught her yet again.

“I assure you, I hadn't wanted to do it. But I didn't want Cala to waste time thinking about her dead relatives. She would have time for that after she found a good place to be. So I tapped into her mind. I attempted to subdue her thoughts of her family and friends, and make sure that she would stay focused on her goal.

“Well, it half-worked. I got her convinced that her family was just away for a while, and that they might come back later. I calmed her down and convinced her to eat something. She then went on her merry way, got distracted by the cat, and ended up eating... what, debatedly, may or may not have been that good for her. After a while she ended up getting the brilliant idea to try out the pool. I had completely forgotten that there was a pool, but regardless it was a pretty nifty idea. She went and did a couple things that I'm not sure were necessary, then finally dove in.

“I was happy for her. It might not have been the end goal I expected, but she ended up finding something that could satisfy her until she was ready to leave. Of course, it was too much to wish for. I still have no idea what actually went down back there, but the water in pools aren't normal. There's something in them that seapony physiology just didn't cotton well to. She had a layer of slime coating her whole body, but that water just... dissolved it! All of it! And then she had the bright idea to breathe it in. Not only did the chemicals in the water start gnawing at her lungs, but — have I mentioned? The spell I used to turn her gills into lungs? It only works one way. Cala lacked the focus to be able to do anything but thrash at that point, as in pain as she was. I had to use up her magical reserves, yet again, to teleport her out. I didn't do it as fast as I would have liked. She still ended up with dry scales all over her body, and her lungs had been... irreparably damaged. I did what I could to keep her lungs intact, waking her from unconsciousness to eject the poisonous water, but then I discovered that teleporting her had made her too nauseous to think. I tried to hold her attention. I did much better that time than previously at getting into her mind, and I reprimanded her for not knowing how bad the pool water was. It was no use. I had inadvertently gotten her to think about her sister. I don't know how or why; maybe I was trying to rub off some of my own pain on her to make her feel bad. She ended up passing out again, and I was out of magic so I was unable to do anything after that.

“After the first day, things had changed. Cala had developed a crippling sense of hydrophobia and I didn't really know how to take it. The storm illusion was still on all the windows. I had put it on every window she went near, just to be sure. Now they were having the opposite effect. They scared her. They made it so she was trapped inside, rather than what I wanted, which was for her to leave. I think over the month that she was in there, I changed my mind about how I wanted to protect her. She became addicted to pain medication, taking much higher doses than the highest recommendation for a human. They took away the massive amounts of pain that she inflicted upon her body by sliding and bouncing around. They also made her sleep much, much more. She was sleeping as much as she could, staying awake only a quarter of the day to wait for the storm to disappear. It never did, because I left it there, making her stay inside.

“The day came that she finally couldn't take it any longer. It was hot inside and she needed to leave that place. At that point, I was actually encouraging her fear of water. I had gotten much better at illusion, so I put terrifying images in her mind. She couldn't leave, because the rain would tear through her body. It would rip her up and eat her. But it wasn't enough, and Cala broke through it. Every last illusion I had set up fell away and she left that place. She discovered the truth. She figured out that she had been lied to. So she broke down out there, letting out all of her pain and misery.

“She drew the attention of ravenous dogs. They charged toward her, merciless, stopping at nothing for a chance to taste sweet meat again. I did the kind thing and I held them back. I told Cala that I was being generous helping her like that, even though she didn't deserve it for voiding my protection. I cast another casual seapony land-dwelling spell, one that required a bit more energy to use. It created a pair of legs for Cala. It was the first time she had seapony legs, so they were at their weakest, but with a little adrenaline rush even those skimpy things can gallop.

“So, with my magic spent, the dogs were unleashed on her and she darted away like a bullet. There would be no stopping her, and even those dogs were unable to keep up and got lost looking for her. It was at that point that I decided my job was done. I let myself leave Cala's mind, and I remained dwelling in her horn. I was still there, so the changes to Cala's mind didn't go away, but I stopped messing with her mind and allowed her to take her own path from then on.

“I simply observed as another pony found her, and a new group of people took over the responsibility of protecting her. It wasn't until Peyton decided to tamper with Cala's biology that I came back. I felt I needed to teach Cala that it's not okay to have sex with other ponies, but I didn't get the chance since I was forcefully ejected from Cala's skull.

“Are there any questions before I move on to the next part of my story?”

The four ponies gathered around the radio were stupefied, staring in silence at the object in question.

Cala was the exception. Rather than staring stupidly, she just glared at it.

Willy was the first one to speak up. “This is officially the craziest thing I have ever seen.”

...I said, do you have any questions?

[3-9] Chance

Author's Note

Warn: This chapter also may depict sexual behavior and stuff in fuzzy detail. Your risk.

[3-9] Chance

“No? Nobody has any questions?”

The room was silent.

“...It almost feels like I'm speaking to a void. I know you're all listening to me, but you're not really saying anything, and it's kind of worrying. Almost like you don't even comprehend anything I have to say.

“Anyways. Peyton, I know you feel sore after what you did. But hopefully you won't feel so bad after this part.

“Cala, you're not eleven years old anymore. At least, that's what I gathered from your physiology. Seaponies take a long time to mature. It's not until their very late teens that females begin to develop eggs. The age of consent in Aquastria, from what I recall, is twenty-one years of age. They also live much longer than normal ponies; I've known a few seniors who had achieved over two hundred years of age. Yet, right off the bat, after your transformation you began to develop those reproductive cells. Another thing I noticed is that your brain is now fully developed. Part of my soul took root in the space your brain hadn't developed, and I hadn't even realized that until I was plucked from it. So you might notice an intelligence boost, along with remembering everything I had repressed from your consciousness. You're now much older. I'll bet even older than Peyton is, meaning you were actually correct when you said that... uh... yesterday, I think.

“I also wanted to tell you about how seaponies lived. Information that could be particularly useful to the state you're in now. You remember me talking about two spells that oricorns use to be able to live on land. Those were the two main ones. There's actually one—” Click.

Everyone looked at Cala, who had flipped the power switch on the radio. She sighed, looking back at them. “That's all I want to know for now, in case you're wondering. Renée, you're satisfied with the knowledge that a crazy spirit has been controlling my life?” The zebra in question laughed and nodded. “Willy... you, uh... you get the situation I'm in right now?”

He shook his head. “I'm still confused on the details. I think, at this point, I'd rather respect your privacy on the issue than badger you about it, though.”

Cala smiled. “Peyton. Do you feel better about all this, now that you understand all that?”

“I understand that whole situation even less now,” Peyton said, blushing.

Cala jerked her head toward the door, signalling the unicorn to follow her, then stood on wobbly legs to leave. Peyton helped her and they left the room together.

“Do you think they'll be fine on their own now?” Renée asked.

“I don't know,” Willy said. “It's not our problem. They need to work it out between themselves. We've been acting like their parents.”

“We have, haven't we?”

↠

They'd returned, once again, to their bed. Cala and Peyton laid next to one-another.

Cala was lying on her right side, digging her snout into the pillow, her left eye gazing at Peyton. She had her tail and her legs curled up tight to her body, her fins splaying out behind her on her back.

Peyton, lying on her left side next to her, laughed. “You look... absolutely silly, and adorable. Why did you bring me back into bed?”

Cala giggled. “Don't you get it, Peyton? This is okay now. I get what happened earlier, and I appreciate what you were trying to do.”

“You do?” She blinked. “You hated every second of it and I was too blind to see that.”

“No... you were just going about it wrong. Now I know how to do it right.” Cala leaned up and pulled Peyton's head toward hers.

Peyton felt Cala's tiny muzzle pressing into hers. She squealed as something pressed into her mouth. It was a new, totally alien experience. She had no idea what she was sucking on, but she shuddered while enjoying that feeling. She moaned in the kiss.

When Cala pulled their lips apart, she reached her tail up and wrapped it around Peyton's midsection. She pulled Peyton towards her, and their limbs rubbed against one anothex.

“Tell me, Pey,” Cala cooed, “how can I make you feel good?”

Peyton felt the entirety Cala's tail pulling on her. She glanced down at where the nubby tip rubbed against her chest. “I have a few ideas...”

...

And then they fucked. If we went into any more detail, this story wouldn't be appropriate for anyone to hear.

↘

Now, I should probably elaborate on something. I never got the chance to talk about this during my first monologue, but it's pretty important. Cala would eventually figure this all out on her own.

Seapony reproductive systems are much different than normal ponies. They're an entirely different species, actually. They're split into their own two races like normal ponies are their three ones. Oricorns and water ponies, as opposed to unicorns and earth ponies. No equivalent to pegasi, since they all have fins.

Anyway, what all this means is that their sex is really strange to others at first. I'll just run through an abridged version of it. First, the stallion and mare engage in a mating dance to build their arousal. The mare then deposits her eggs via an ovipositor into a large pouch on the stallion's belly. The stallion fertilizes and holds them until the fry are old enough to swim on their own, then releases them. The sexual roles are completely reversed.

It takes about a month for a mare to develop a batch of eggs. (Sound familiar?) If they don't find a mate to carry them, she has to eject them, because they're only viable for a day or two. That's basically what happened during Cala's first sexual encounter. It was all a big coincidence, and Cala crying had nothing to do with Peyton trying to do that. Peyton completely failed to do anything but witness this happening.

...What? No, it wasn't me who made her sad!

Okay, I may have helped cause it to happen at that time in particular. It'd have been a shame to just waste sweet roe like that!

The point is, it's not normal for this kind of pairing to happen. But it still does. It's a little less common than a gay couple of the same species. They share an intimate relationship because Cala wants to see Peyton happy. She found her chance and she took it.

↪

[3-X] Fire

“Jump! Jump! Jump!” Peyton chanted. She laughed and clapped her hooves together.

Cala jumped. Well, not quite. She fell off the dock, more like. A big splash of water hit Peyton as Cala entered the sea for the first time.

“Woo! Go Cala!” She leaned over the edge and splashed at the water with her fore-hooves.

Cala's head popped above the surface of the water. She gargled a bit of water in her mouth and spit. “Bleck, how this stuff is salty. Am I supposed to learn how to breathe this?”

“Drink some of it, oricorn! Oricorn!”

“You don't even know what that means!” Cala said. But Peyton kept laughing. Cala's head submerged, and after a second her tail flipped out of the water, sending a stream of water at Peyton.

The cold water hit her and she shrieked, but then still laughed at Cala's antics.

“Speak for yourself! You haven't even felt the water,” Cala said.

When her friend didn't respond, Cala noticed how she was floating. She had her skinny legs tucked up very tight to her body. Only her pectoral fins were treading the water, and she had to work her right one harder since it was torn from the dog chase. The water got colder under her toward her tail, which was wrapped up and helping her balance. She had felt that cold when she had dived under; too far down it became unbearable to feel it. She was not made to swim in frigid waters.

Cala focused again on her friend. “Come in with me! Jump! Jump!”

“I don't know how to swim, though,” Peyton said.

“Jump in! I'll carry you!”

Peyton smiled at her, then got up and walked away.

“No! No! Peyton, don't leave!” Cala began to breathe more rapidly. She looked down into the water. It was dark. The further into it she looked, the deeper and darker and colder it seemed. She almost felt like it was going to pull her down.

“Peyton! Peyton! Peyton! Come back! Come back!” Cala screamed. She beat her fins harder and tried to stay afloat. Her head and neck stuck up out of the water. Her tail was pulled up as far as she could bring it. She did everything she could to keep from sinking. “Don't leave me!”

“Woah, woah!” Peyton said, running back to the edge of the dock. “I was just getting myself a life jacket, see?” She held up the dinky vest. “Now... how am I supposed to wear it. It probably won't fit right, and the clasps—”

“Come into the water with me!” Cala said. “Who cares about that? I'll carry you!”

Peyton gulped and looked into the water. “Is... is it cold?”

Cala laughed. “That wouldn't be a problem for you. You're a lot stronger than I am. You're twice as heavy as me! Your body fat will insulate you!”

She blushed. “Still, I'm not sure if—”

“Just jump, already! I wanna hold you!”

She looked into the water with trepidation in her eyes. She took a deep breath, let it out, and reached out a hoof to feel the water again. It was cold!

But then she couldn't ponder that. A scaly prehensile rope had wrapped itself around her limb and yanked her into the water.

As soon as her shrieking and thrashing had subsided, Peyton found herself wrapped up in Cala's legs, kept afloat with no effort. She looked at Cala's face and saw that she had visibly calmed down, too. They both relaxed as they floated together in the ocean.

“So, why'd you do that?” Peyton asked, finally letting out what was on her mind.

“Hmm...” Cala smiled. “Payback for the bathtub.”

“The bathtub?”

“You did the same thing, remember?” Cala giggled. “Scared me near to death.”

They continued to enjoy the water in their own company for a while longer.

↫

“Are they just... hugging? Is that all they're floating out there doing?” Renée asked.

Willy smiled. He was lying on his back, petting Jasper, who slept on his belly. “Who cares?”

Renée grunted. She kicked at the sand underneath her. She was looking across the beach and the waters to where the two fillies swam off the end of the dock. “I don't like it. I don't like what Cala has been doing. She's just too smart for a girl her age and—”

“Well, she has grown a few years in the past few days, don't you think?” Willy laughed.

“But it's not natural!” she said. “I don't care what they've been doing together, where they're headed is going to break us all apart. Already we have no idea what they've been doing when we're not around, we're just going to keep drifting apart. We're the only group of survivors and they're just destroying that. We won't be able to work together, and we'll have less of a chance to survive without their help.”

“Or do you mean that they'll have less of a chance to survive without us watching over them? Because what you're saying doesn't make any sense. Do you or do you not care about what they're doing together?”

“I just... I don't know. I'm just so worried. I want what's best for them... and for all of us.”

“Let them carve their own path,” Willy said. “I don't know why you like to involve yourself in peoples' lives so much. I just try to help people out when I can. If something goes wrong, then I'll try to correct it in a quick and efficient matter. But meddling doesn't get you anywhere. It usually just makes people hate you.” He thought for a moment. “In fact, Peyton never really fit into our group all that... seamlessly, you could say. She was almost like a third wheel. It might be better if it were just us living together now that she has something else important to fill her life.”

Renée sighed. “Yeah... alright. That might be for the best.” She leaned over and gave Willy a peck on the cheek. “You're so level-headed. I don't know what I might do without you...”

Willy just chuckled.

A few moments later, Renée gasped. She was staring at the dock, and... it was not supposed to look like that! She got up and ran toward the shore.

“Fire!” she yelled. “FIRE! FIRE!”

⤻

They floated together silenty, holding each other, enjoying the warmth of the sun and the chill of the water. Then, suddenly, Peyton's ears perked.

“Do you hear that? I think Renée's yelling something at us...” she said.

“Mmmh,” Cala replied, hugging her harder.

“I think...” Peyton looked around them. Something didn't look right about the dock. “It's on fire... Cala, the dock is on fire!”

“...What?” Cala broke out of her reverie to look at Peyton.

“We have to untie the boat! Hoist me up onto the dock!”

“Um... okay,” Cala said. She swam closer, then lifted Peyton up a bit. Once the unicorn got a grip, Cala shoved upwards, sending Peyton rolling over the wooden boards.

Peyton got up and ran towards a nearby sailboat that was tethered up to the dock.

“Wait!” Cala yelled. “Wait! Help me out of the water first!”

Peyton groaned, but ran back quickly and helped Cala get back up. Then she ran back towards the boat, grabbing a rope in her hooves and unwinding it from a metal anchor that was bolted to the dock.

“Pey, are you—” Then Cala finally caught sight of the blaze, only a couple dozen feet away. “Shit!” she swore, then went to the other anchor to unravel the other rope. She didn't bother with her hooves, instead getting her mouth dirty and wasting no time catching up to Peyton's progress.

They both threw the ropes on board the boat at once, then leaped aboard as the fire drew near. The boat drifted away from the dock as Cala sat there watching, catching her breath and feeling the heat of the blaze on her skin. Peyton, wary of the leaping flames, took a paddle and used it to push their boat further away from the dock and danger. The boat moved away from the dock as the two mares watched, constantly looking for imminent danger.

“Whew. That was close,” Cala said. “We almost lost all the supplies we collected to a fire. Can you believe it, Pey?”

The mare just stared at the dock. “Wow. That's a big fire...”

“Y'arr! Quite fitting, lad! The most recent plunder of Calamity the Conqueror deserves only the most glorious blaze to lay wreck to it!” Cala had donned a pirate hat and an eye-patch over her right eye, Peyton saw, and was grinning stupidly.

Peyton laughed. “That actually looks really good on you. Is this going to become a regular thing?” Cala shrugged. “Well, regardless, I guess it was about time we set sail.” She leaned over the back of the boat, shouting toward the beach. “You hear that, ya pansies! We're leaving! Good riddance, and I hope you never catch sight of our hides ever again!”

“That's... kinda mean,” Cala said.

Peyton huffed. “You don't know what it's been like to have to labor under them for the past month... you start to learn how not to care.” She smiled. “I'm just so glad we're finally all alone. Do you have any idea what I've wanted to try with you without those nags being around to catch us in the act?”

Cala cackled. “Oh-hoh, I do know. But first we've gotta get out of here. Do you have any idea how to work a sailboat?”

“Not the slightest clue.”

↹

End of Part 3

[3-E] Sail

“Cans. Cans. Cans. Cans. Cans...” Sigh.

Cala sat in the underbelly of the boat, examining the supplies. There was quite a bit of food, for the most part. All of it... canned up. Not much other than that.

Sigh. “Cans. I don't even know how to open cans.”

“Do either of you know how to use the hand-crank can-opener Peyton brought?” Harper said over the soft music it was playing.

“Without hands?”

“You have magic. Both of you.”

“You still haven't taught us anything,” Cala said with a harrumph.

“You're not willing to learn. Maybe going hungry for a day or so will make you finally listen to what I have to say.”

“But the magic lessons you try to give are so... boring! It's no fun listening to you go on about... arcane science, willpower, blah blah blah. Who cares about any of that? I just want to be able to shoot laser beams and wreck stuff!”

“You have... uh... sharp teeth, for that.”

Cala narrowed her eye at the radio for a moment. She reached over and grabbed a tuna can from the top of the stack... then began to gnaw on it!

“Hey!” Peyton said, ducking her head in the hatch in the ceiling. “I think I figured out how—”

Cala stared back at her with a chewed-up can in her mouth.

She groaned. “Ugh, what are you two... doing, down here?”

“I don't have anything to do with that,” Harper said.

“I'm hungry!”

“This is why we brought a can-opener,” Peyton said.

“But how are we supposed to use it? Neither of us have figured out how magic works...”

With a fine show of dexterity, Peyton opened a fresh can of tuna with only her hooves, teeth and said tool.

“...How...”

Peyton sighed. “I had to figure it out on my first day. My family had been due for a grocery run. Opening up the can of baked beans was a bad idea...” She shuddered. “Almost as bad of an idea as eating the whole thing. My body had been turned inside-out by the time Willy found me. Anyways, when you're done with that, just chuck that mangled thing overboard along with the empty can. They're both useless to us now.”

∘

“...Run that by me, again?” Cala said.

Peyton sighed for the umpteenth time. “Fine. The big problem is, we need to go north, but the wind is going south. We can do one of three things. The easiest option would be to wait it out until it goes in any other direction. The hardest would be to try and paddle our way north against the wind, but it might take longer than a month to get to the pacific ocean and it's too exhausting. We also have the risky option of trying to zig-zag our way up the Puget Sound, using what little leverage we can from the wind, but it probably won't work since neither of us have any sailing experience.”

Cala was silent for a moment. “So why didn't we just get a motorboat?”

...Peyton smacked her own forehead. “Duh. Renée suggested this instead so that I wouldn't have to worry about maintenance and fuel and all that... but nobody really thought about the implications of a sailboat...”

“Hey, it's not so bad.” Cala smiled and rested a hoof on her friend's shoulder. “I'd rather be stranded on the ocean with you than anyone else. I know that you'll look after us and get us somewhere safe eventually.”

Peyton giggled. “Thanks. It's nice to get to be here with you, too. I know I'd probably really hate this otherwise, but if I get to spend this time with you, I know that at least I'll enjoy it, and we'll probably get to have lots of fun, too. Could you imagine if I had to get trapped alone with just Harper? This would be torture!”

And then they kissed. Or something. I don't know; look, I'm just here to tell a story, and they were reluctant to give me all the details, alright?

...Maybe some. Peyton is a bit of a pervert.

Let's just wrap this up, shall we? Even put in one of those fancy arrows again so you can tell I'm moving on to something big:

↯

[4-0] Postlude

So, I understand that the story kind of broke down near the end, and I started referencing myself more and more.

Well, the cat's out of the bag.

Yes indeed, I am Harper! Formerly Lyra Heartstrings. But my corporeal life doesn't matter as much now as it did when I lived it. Over time, I got back more and more of my memories. I can vaguely remember what Ponyville was like, and how I lived there and blended in to landpony society as an oricorn muse. Nobody ever found me out. I don't think I even told Sweetie Drops after she related her secret identity... God, that made me such a horrible friend, I know. Could never forgive myself for that lost opportunity at bonding with a true friend before I left.

I haven't had any friends since I came here. It really sucks being a poltergeist, you know? You possess people to save their lives, but they're never grateful for it. Not one damn bit.

But I suppose you're just wondering why and how I left my former home. Well, I didn't really know back then, but now I've gotten a bit of an idea. It's not a solid theory; it still needs some holes to be patched up before I can truly accept it to be the truth.

I was given an opportunity. I was to help foster the oricorn race by protecting one of the last of them in some universe at some time. To be honest, I have no idea where the connection is. Maybe this place will eventually become Equestria, and I am one of Calamity's descendants, sent back in time to protect her. Maybe this is an alternate universe, and I have no connection to her. I knew it was important, though. There were only a dozen of us, each asked to be sent away to protect the dozen or so oricorns. But there was a twist. However we were sent back, we couldn't bring our bodies with us. Only our souls could go.

Well, I'm just a muse... a musician. But some oricorns possess a talent that's unique to our race. I don't remember the name for it... Necromancy? Dark magic? Oricorns' horns are particularly susceptible to housing an external soul, and that somehow makes us the best at performing magic concerning the manipulation of spirits.

One of the oricorns that was requested to leave with us was a very talented... necromancer. So he was the one who tore each of our souls from our bodies. He then used some of the energy in each of our souls to conjure artifacts designed to house souls for extended periods of time: soul jars. They were individually altered to take a shape that suited its destination, and mine was probably the best, as it represented every facet of my corporeal figure, shrunk down into a toy.

I knew my mission, even as I was sent to where I needed to go. I had to protect the pony who would go by the title Calamity the Conqueror.

I should also probably clarify here how it is that Cala became older when she got transformed into an oricorn. It's been hundreds of years since this all happened. Large communities of ponies have formed, and I've personally gotten a chance to visit them and meet some interesting ponies. Apparently, such a large transformative Event is bound to have errors. A lot of people received forms that were inappropriate to their character. Gender swaps. Age disparity. The rare fusion; you name it, it could probably have happened. The Event was the phenomenon of the millennium, and almost nobody knows anything about it. It's such a shame, really.

How did Calamity end up finding all the surviving oricorns to form a society? That's a story for another day. Hopefully I won't botch it up quite as much as this one...