Author's Note
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cruoRt4vJfQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7Srbp8WPMY
Some optional music to go with this story that I listened to on repeat while typing it.
*ocean noises*
They were dancing in the mall.
Music video and all, enjoying the life they experienced… but low and behold one of their own was missing.
The Shadowbolt 5 were hardly complete without Indigo Zap, it would have been nice to have her get to know the Mane 6 along with them instead of spending so long on vacation.
But now they rarely think of it as they get lost in their fun, but they aren’t the only ones to do so.
…
Further South… Further West… Much Further…
Off the island coast is a cruise ship drifting forth through the evening breeze, painted slightly purple and orange by the distantly setting sun… lasting in the water for weeks on end like it was built to. Stacked high with creamy white balconies of the onboard hotel rooms. Jet black lines of tinted windows contrasting with the lines of the balconies like the stripes on a great geometric zebra.
An exquisite chorus of chill electric guitar music and wine glasses being lightly collided echo off of the white balcony walls. The gradually darkening sky bears down onto the partygoers with looming beauty.
Fading from its usual blue into a deep Indigo. And that girl of the same name stares back up at the vast, open roof of her spiritual home takes a deep breath of the ocean air. She picks up the scent of the brandy and foods from the deck below. The faint, quaint laughter of the other people, the music playing on the stereo rather quietly but loud enough to be slightly heard from the top of the ship; it never leaves her earshot. Neither does the gentle crashing of the waves at the bottom of the boat, or the wind passing by Indigo’s ears.
And on her back in her comfortable beach chair Indigo lies, watching the violet and orange edges of the sky dim on the horizon that separates one endless deep shade of blue from the other. The glass door to back inside her room stands behind her with the reflection of the back of her head in the center.
She arches her back and furrows her brow with a relaxed groan. Sighs and smiles like no one is around in the entire world. Can’t get enough of the way that breeze is tickling her hair. No need to check the time on her phone or a wall clock, nothing closes here. It doesn’t matter if it’s day or night, the earth can turn and turn and everything will still be in its right place, as far as Indigo is concerned.
Finally stands up when she feels like it, feeling the change in air pressure relax her as she steps into the hallway of the gently rocking cruise ship. Makes her way downstairs with the most glazed, happy expression. Time can go any speed it wants as she steps into the open air, everything in the world is perfect.
She gets a few sips of lemonade mixed with other beverages to drink at the bar. Then makes her way to the open part of the deck where her eyes can meet miles and miles of deep blue both above her and as far into the distance she can see. The increasingly deeper and darker shades of Indigo match her hair as the lamps and lanterns from the cruise ship gradually become the only source of light.
Indigo takes in the night breeze as though she were sunbathing. The ship party goes on and on through the night as Indigo relaxes by its side. More and more places on the ship come alive at night, the different parts from the parts during the day. Singers, dancers, performers bring life and joy to those who want to stay up through the soothing darkness of a tropical night to enjoy life.
The moon can dimly be seen through the shades of Indigo’s sunglasses. She pictures herself soaring through the sky like how she’s on the ship floating on the sea. Such an exquisite feeling that will not be interrupted by that text message coming in from her phone.
Goodness, who could that possibly be?
Indigo peers at her phone screen, the pixels of the screen engaging in a series of chromatic patterns from the way the sunglasses refract the light between Indigo’s eyes and the outside world she relaxes in.
It’s a text from Sunny Flare, asking where she is.
Oh… right. The other side of the world is just getting up at this time. It’s a good thing Indigo kept her sleeping pattern from there to be able to stay up all night over here without a hint of fatigue.
Sunny apparently wants to have a phone call. Indigo shrugs and obliges, knowing where this is going to go.
But to her surprise, it’s Sour Sweet’s voice she hears on the other line.
“Indy? Where have you been? I was getting worried.” Sour Sweet sends a concerned message from her own side of the world.
“Why you so worried, Sweet?” Indigo imagines how different her voice would sound on the other line. “You know I like havin’ me some alone time.”
“You haven’t been answering anyone’s texts! We all thought something happened to you!”
Oh, right. That’s why her phone was vibrating in her pocket for the past n number of days.
“Sorry, I guess my phone doesn’t pick things up very fast here. We are pretty far out into the ocean, you know.” Indigo casually cobbles together a lie.
“Wait, what? Indy, where are you?”
“…Earth.”
“Indy, please.” Sour Sweet just assumes she’s just joking with her. “What part of ‘Earth’?”
“The cool part.”
“Yeah yeah, very funny. Well can we at least talk for a little bit? I miss you, girl!”
“What do you mean? You know I’m alive now.”
“But Indyyyyyyy!” Sour Sweet starts up what Indigo knew was coming. “So much has happened since you left toooown!”
“Well I guess I wouldn’t mind hearing about whatever new drama started up.” Indigo groans and stretches again, noticing stars filling up the night sky. “Oh yeah, this is great.” She unintentionally blurts.
“…What?” Sour Sweet says, still in the same universe as indigo despite what things feel like.
Indigo lightly chuckles.
“Just uh, just tell me what’s been goin’ on while I was away. I’m listening.”
“Kay then, well… you know how Sunny got her new car, right?” Sour Sweet begins the long-bottled-up gossip.
“Uh huh.”
“She crashed it. Like on the first day.”
“Hey! It wasn’t the first day!” Sunny Flare’s voice says in the background. “I had already had it for a month! You’re such a liar!”
“It was your first day driving it outside of your neighborhood, so it still counts.”
“Nuh-uh!”
“Yeah-huh!”
More playful back-and-forth bickering can be heard, with an annoyed groan from Sugarcoat arising from elsewhere in the background.
“Wait, hol’ up.” Indigo says. “What are you all doing hanging out this early in the morning over there?”
“It’s noon here, Indy.” Responds Sour Sweet in a nasal tone. “Gosh, how far away are you?”
“From the sound of it, far enough.” Indigo says under her breath before holding the phone closer. “Well, it’s nighttime here. That’s all I know.”
“Is it like, tomorrow over there?” Sunny Flare jumps in, now closer to the phone. “Like, are you past the Primary Median?”
“It’s Prime Meridian.” Sugarcoat corrects her from the background.
“Wait your turn!” Sour Sweet gripes before some fumbling can be heard. “I was holding the phone first!”
“It’s MY phone!” Sunny Flare refutes. “Now gimme!”
“Nuh uh!”
Indigo sighs, mostly in relief that she’s far enough away from all of that to relax.
“You should have used YOUR phone to contact Indigo, Sour.” Sugarcoat says in the background.
“I was desperate, okay?”
“Your phone’s right there on the table!” Sugarcoat can almost be envisioned sternly pointing towards the phone with the tone of her voice. “There is no excuse for this, give Sunny her phone back.”
“But I wanna talk to Indyyyyyyy!”
More shuffling around can be heard until Indigo receives a call from Sour Sweet’s phone. At this point she expects Sour Sweet to be on the line, and she’s right at first before more arguing can be heard.
“Oh, come on! What’s wrong now?” Sunny complains after the line is switched to Sour Sweet’s number.
“Don’t look at my pictures!” Orders Sour Sweet.
“What? I wasn’t looking at your freaking pictures! Oh my gosh!” Sunny says almost with a laugh.
Indigo hears some more altercations before Sour Sweet’s voice becomes the only one talking loudly.
“Indyyyyyyyyyy!” Sour Sweet blares right into the mouthpiece like she’s falling off a cliff or something. “I miss yoooouuuuuu!”
“Do you have to be so loud?” Sugarcoat says to her. “You’re not ten feet away from the mouthpiece!”
“Oh… oh no… the connection’s breaking up.” Indigo fakes a surprised voice. “I gotta go. Got bad mobile coverage in the middle of the ocean, ya know?”
“But Indyyy-” Sour Sweet’s voice is cut off by the hang-up before Indigo turns her phone onto airplane mode and slips it into her pocket before the tidal waves of new texts from her friends come in.
She laughs to herself as she pictures the other girls all coming together to try and convince Sunny’s parents to buy another new car with their money. That’s probably what happened, knowing the other girls, and Indigo didn’t have to be part of that episode.
Indigo goes back to relaxing as the sky is pretty much pitch black now. She soon gets herself up as she hears dance music start to play. It’s probably like 10 PM or something now.
She joins the rest of the boat party and dances with a whole bunch of strangers as the night hours go on. A lot of her favorite songs are played on the stereo system, and no one is in the mood to go to sleep any time soon.
The party goes on like how you’d probably imagine any all-night activity for young adults to go down. Indigo just straight up has as much fun as she can after sleeping and relaxing all day in preparation for using up all her energy at night. Might as well stay up all night anyway since she’d need to be up during the day on the other side of the world anyway. And might as well make some good used of this.
The pools on this cruise ship always have lukewarm water, and they’re the funnest to jump into from over a whole story high up. Good thing the balconies loom right above.
Sometimes, Indigo likes to chill with some other people on the deck in the reclining chairs. Sometimes, she likes to see how many more rounds of jumping off of the balconies of the cruise ships she can do before she gets exhausted from it again. Sometimes, she likes to hang around the bar, sometimes, she likes to explore parts of the cruise ship she hasn’t seen yet by roaming the hallways and talking to people walking with her about life and stuff.
She sometimes checks to see if the sun’s going to rise soon.
That part of the sky over there is getting lighter. Looks like that’s where East is, as it turns out. Not like it matters, there could be no directions on the compass, the arrow could point anywhere and it would just point to more paradise.
And so, Indigo braved the whole night once again, getting a bit rosy in her glistening cheeks that are pushed aside by her smile as she watches the sun rising behind a few horizon clouds.
She and a few fellow party-goers lock arms and lean on one another’s shoulders as they wander around some more, some of them singling songs and laughing giddily. Indigo hardly even knows any of their names, only knows what they like to do and what they have shared together as a group of fun people on a boat in the night.
“Alright! Al… alright.” Indigo says to a couple of guys and girls as she dizzily stumbles back to her room. “When we get back to land, we’ll surf, okay?”
“Right on!” One guy says before falling over and having the other laugh at and with him.
“One of you gotta remember for me, but we’ll surf, okay?” Indigo repeats. “I’ll rent a surfboard or something.”
“Okay!” Another girl gives Indigo a thumbs up before the door closes.
Before she knows it, Indigo is back on her balcony watching the sky turn colors again. She crosses her arms back behind her head on the chair and doesn’t let a single thought about her phone cross her mind. The distant clouds glow with the emerging sunlight reflecting off of them, looking like Heaven on Earth.
It’s like the word stopped turning for the night, but when it started again right now, it might as well have stayed still. Such relaxing warm air that brushes against Indigo’s skin. Time and space doesn’t matter.
Indigo drifts asleep in the warm ocean climate as some of the older passengers get up for breakfast. She sighs countless times.
A kino vacation indeed.
…
What time is it now? Noon? Three in the afternoon? Indigo’s phone says 4:07 as she switches it off of airplane mode.
And so begins the incessant buzzing, like an alarm clock that won’t turn off. So many text messages from four different numbers. And that’s just from last night, not counting all the other times one of Indigo’s friends texted her asking if she was alive.
Indigo prepares to read all of what’s going on, decides to go wandering about the cruise ship once more just because she’s curious to see with whom she can talk while all of the other people she partied with are presumably asleep.
The sounds of the ocean waves fit the fluffy white clouds on the horizon nicely as it all meets Indigo’s eyes and ears. The whiteness of the clouds a bit shrouded in a light blue haze as that same soft electric guitar music accompanies the waves. Indigo takes in this scenery with deep breaths as she finds somewhere to rest herself since she’s still a little tired for the moment. But the warm day could never escape her if it tried, even if she fell asleep once again. It envelops her soul as she lied back in the chair between two middle aged women.
One woman is watching a soap opera on her iPad, and the other is reading a book — a novel. Indigo is reading a soap opera on her phone from the text messages that were sent. She smirks at the things that were said.
Sunny Flare did get the other girls to convince her parents to buy a new car, and Lemon Zest even got them to include a top notch stereo system into the car they bought so she could listen to rock music at full volume with the windows rolled down whenever she hangs out with Sunny.
That’s really all Lemon Zest is talking about, while Sour Sweet is lampooning Sunny for crashing this car on the “first day”, while Sunny goes on about Sour always stretching the truth and that she’s just jealous that she’s not like the most recent pop singer to top the Billboard 100 in the music industry.
Sugarcoat gives her own more sober side of the story, providing an unbiased point of view from the middle about how both girls are in the wrong in their own ways and that they’re annoying her so much that she feels like she’s gonna explode.
Then the girls are talking about some… dance contest? Indigo is sure this must have been something interesting, even if it wasn’t something she herself would be too interested in partaking in. But the other girls met up with the girls from that other high school during it, so that was a thing, apparently.
“I like what you’re doing.” One of the ladies turns her head and says to Indigo.
“Wha- huh?”
“Enjoying life while you’re young.” The lady clarifies. “You just got up after a long night, I can tell.”
“Mhm.” The other lady joins in. “You’re lucky to have found your way onto such a long cruise on your own at your age. I wish I could have back in my day, but I was too busy workin’. Had to earn up all my money for years till I got here.”
“Thanks.” Indigo nonchalantly responds. “Yeah, I am thankful for this. Cause I know it ain’t gonna last forever.”
“I hear that.” The first lady says. “I’ve always told my students, and my kids all the time what most parents are afraid of saying: live while you’re young. Don’t waste your years slaving away at some job you hate so you can only relax like this when you’re old and weak like me. Of course, don’t overdo it or throw your life out of order over it, but don’t underdo it either. That’s what I always say.”
“Heh, that’s a good way of putting it.” Indigo stretches and takes another long hard look at the beautiful horizon. “My friends were doing some stuff at the mall last I heard.” She recalls what she just read in the text messages.
“Yeah… I was about to say.” The second lady holding the iPad says. “You’re lucky to have gotten here at such a young age. How old are ya? Mid 20’s? Early 20’s?
“Nineteen.” Indigo answers.
“Whoooooweee!” Says the first lady. “When I was your age, I was working a cashier job all summer long while taking summer classes!”
“Your folks rich?” The second lady asks. “If you don’t mind me asking, of course.”
“Well, I have a rich friend. But I kinda got here because I found out I had enough extra money to travel here, and I had a huge free time gap in my summer, so… yeah.” Indigo leaves out over half the story of how she made the best time of her life possible without anyone else’s permission or knowledge.
“I hear ya, I hear ya. Takin’ the opportunity, I getcha. Lord knows I would have done the same thing if I could, whether my folks liked it or not.”
“I hear that.” Indigo leans back further and crosses her feet. “I hear ya loud and clear.”
She continues to have a prolonged, casual conversation with the two ladies. They’re really nice and actually share a ton of common interests with Indigo despite the generation gap.
They talk about the 80’s and stuff, and things they did when they were Indigo’s age. Glad they can finally chill out here with her now that they can afford to. They’re just overall pretty darn pleasant to talk to for Indigo, with that vast, open plane of blue before the three of them.
Indigo likes to silently giggles at the new stories from her friends coming in, sometimes asking her if her phone is “working again”. Oh, that part gets her grinning like a fool. Eventually putting her own headphones on to listen to vaporwave while looking into the distance. Where that endless blue sky meets that endless plane of the sea… hidden in that haze of the ocean’s horizon.
…
The ship finally reaches land once more by the end of the day. And keeping up with her promise, Indigo goes ahead and rents a surfboard from a local beachside surf shop.
They luckily all stayed nearby eachother in nearby hotels and motels. This helps them surf together more easily, still not really thinking much about asking for eachother’s names until it’s all over and done with for the day. Having surfed in the evening lighting until they couldn’t see well anymore and had to stop because it got too dark.
“Tomorrow, alright?” Indigo says to them. “We’ll do a rematch then and see who gets the biggest waves.”
“So be it! See ya tomorrow.”
Indigo goes inside and plops down onto the motel bed and instantly falls asleep without the energy to check her phone.
All night long, Indigo dreams about flying rectangles of text messages zooming straight at her.
“Indyyyyyy! Where are u? :(“
“Are you getting these? Did your phone get stolen? I’m worried”
“yooooooo Indy did you hear about the new Iron Maiden album that might be happening? Oh also are you alive?”
Indigo dodges them like bullets in the Matrix movie, slow motion included and all. There goes one of them… there go a couple others. There goes a wall of text from Sugarcoat, and a wall of emojis by Sour Sweet. And a food selfie by Sunny Flare with a caption “do you think this’ll get a lot of upvotes?” There goes Lemon Zest sending YouTube links to lyric videos metal songs in the text messages like she actually does in real life.
Every single one is dodged until Indigo wakes back up and then pretty much does the exact same thing in real life anyway.
The dream still stays in Indigo’s mind as she surfs throughout the day. And then the next day, and then the next day when she goes on another multi-night ship cruise. It stays in her mind because it’s not really a dream, and she’s dodging these things left and right around the clock now.
All the way until she returns home over three weeks later.
