//------------------------------//
// [3-2] Calm 
// Story: Seattle Seapony 
// by dNihil 
//------------------------------//

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...


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