As the music of our friendship survives...survives...surviiiiiiiiiiiiiiives~!”
The enormous magical unicorn apparition shot its equally enormous rainbow laser at the sirens. They faded in the blinding light while holding up their arms to try and shield against the purifying fire. Everything they had become was being stripped away.
It hurt.
It burned.
And yet…
...weight was being lifted from their hearts. As the red jewel necklaces cracked, they each began to feel something deep inside they had long since forgotten. A version of themselves that they were each born with and lost over the years of hatred and abuse of power. Their true siren form: innocent and with an abundant love of both life and their fellow creatures.
Their bodies had been pushed back down onto the stage when the laser hit so when it was over that was where they were. On the stage for all of CHS to see. Broken and returned to their old original siren selves. Now harmless and incapable of singing a seduced crowd into a raging army.
They were bare.
Naked.
But that wasn’t so much an issue since they were no longer human. Sirens were creatures part pony and part fish complete with scales down their lower half and fins for tails. Apparently, the Equestrian magic had reverted them to their Equestrian bodies. But something was very off besides the bemused looks of the otherwise aloof crowd.
Of course, the lack of water was a more serious concern to the three female half-equine fish rather than the bizarrely large world around them. The trio of sirens flailed and flopped around in panic. It felt like they were beginning to dry out under the sweltering hot lights of the stage and complete lack of moisture.
“Water! Water!” Aria screamed, eyes wide in horror.
Sonata coughed painfully and tried tumbling back from the intense lights.
Adagio used her equine hooves to pull herself along the rough boards of the stage. She had no clue where to go, though. She couldn’t remember any major sources of water around.
Thankfully, even as the large audience began to laugh at them in ignorance of their peril, a savior swept through the crowd like a hurricane and practically jumped onto the stage so she wouldn’t waste time going around to the stairs. Her voice was nothing like the gentle shy tone it normally was. No, only the rare animal ever heard this urgency from her and only when the animal was in severe danger.
“Applejack, get the hose from the storeroom quick! There’s a spigot around the corner! Rainbow! Rarity! Help me get them down to AJ! Pinkie, find a basin! Twilight we need the truck at the animal nursery. Everyone hurry! They can’t survive long like this!”
Adagio felt her mind slipping. Her gills were collapsing and she was choking. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see her sisters were barely moving. If only she hadn’t pushed them so far none of this would have happened. They could have gone on surviving without ever going to CHS. It would have been hard but they would have at least lived. That was her last thought as a pair of warm blue arms wrapped around her and picked her up.
“Gah!” Adagio shouted upon reviving. Her eyes shot open and her tail slapped around wildly.
Water.
Water!
She was in water!
Only her outer eyelids had opened. The inner clear set were still closed. She was underwater and her scales didn’t feel like they were suffocating her. This was a miracle! She took note of her surroundings-
-only to be tackled by a familiar blue siren.
“Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh!” Sonata squealed in total joy, her voice only slightly warped by talking underwater. As sirens, they had no issue speaking beneath the surface and their words were far clearer than if a human attempted it. It was hard to even tell that Sonata had collapsed earlier just like her sisters. But then this was Sonata, after all. “You’re awake! Oh my gosh, Dagi! Aria won’t talk to me!”
“Is she dead?” Adagio began to worry and swam around her blue sister.
“No,” grumbled the purple one. She was floating on the other side of the whatever-they-were-in. Her hooves were crossed against her chest and she had her back to them. “Just leave me alone.”
Adagio knew this mood. Aria got this way every time she felt her dignity had been slighted. And Great Siren Goddesses had they all been slighted. However, as the eldest of them, Adagio knew better than to let her emotions affect their ability to survive. Their situation had changed enormously and they would all have to tread – or swim – carefully in order to live another day.
First things first: where were they?
The place they were in was not very deep. Barely twice as deep as they were long. It was circular too, judging by the way the rubber walls curved about. The surface was smooth though and there were no sharp rivets or joining spots. In a way it was like a large bathtub and an odd sprinkling of light made the water’s surface look almost like marble. Before she could reach the surface to look around, a pair of blue arms crashed into the water and grabbed her out of it.
A very familiar face greeted her as she was held in the open air, dripping above the pool below her. This was one of those blasted ringleaders. Rainbow Dash.
“You sure they are okay like this?” Rainbow stared hard at the small siren in her hands. She held the creature at a distance and seemed to be wearing some kind of thick off-white apron.
Fluttershy was right next to her and was smiling sweetly at Adagio while she opened some sort of can. “Yes. Be gentle and let her lower half into the water if she starts looking uncomfortable. The danger was the heat and lack of moisture closing their gills on the stage. Not simply being out of the water.”
“How do you know anything about us?” Adagio wanted to sneer at first but she was piecing together in her mind what had happened and couldn’t bring herself to pour venom on her saviors.
“I guessed at first, but Sonata has told us all about your original forms,” Fluttershy replied sweetly and tossed some sort of chip like thing into the water. Sonata rose to the surface, grabbed it in her mouth, and dived again with a happy face.
“Okay. Why are we so small? I should be bigger than you,” Adagio frowned and was not surprised in the least that Sonata had sung like a bird.
Indeed, her torso fit nicely in Rainbow’s hands. If Fluttershy would compare them to a regular animal then she might put them at just barely larger than a chihuahua. The siren’s voice didn’t seem too badly changed for the size but any intimidating presence she might have had before was completely gone. Even the sharp teeth of her larger apparition were far less menacing in this form.
“That’s easy,” another voice said from the opposite side of the pool. It was that purple girl who was one of the other ringleaders. “The magical counterspell used magic from the portal’s dimensional flux to create a virtual leyline converted at a rate of three over two point five based on the power source I constructed to reopen the portal, which caused an inverted-”
“The spell made ya tiny,” Applejack cut in to get to the point. Twilight frowned and flattened her brows in frustration at that. “Good thing too. Take my granny’s ol’ semi to haul ya if y’all were right-sized. Never would have gotten to the farm and back before y’all keeled over.”
A small blue siren head popped up above the water below Adagio. Sonata was looking one way and another like a miniature dog so energetic and happy she might pass out from the excitement. “Oh oh oh!” Sonata practically yipped at Fluttershy. “Can you hold me again? And toss me back into the middle of the pool?! That was so much fun!”
“How long has she been awake?” Adagio deadpanned.
“About an hour,” Rainbow replied with a smirk but carefully lowered the siren back into the water and let her go. “Aria was up about half an hour ago. You were the last one to come around.”
Adagio said nothing immediately, but she remained half above the water and looking at the group of human friends that had defeated them. Her mind tried figuring out what to do next. What could they do?
A loud splash made Adagio look back to the pool’s center. Sonata had just been tossed there by a giggling Fluttershy. Those two were sure hitting it off. The pink one – Pinkie Pie – was also at an edge splashing some water on Sonata after the girl came back to the surface.
Now that Adagio got a better look, though, it appeared they were in some sort of back yard. It was green almost everywhere and the grass looked plush enough not to hurt if she fell out of the pool. A mossy stone wall encircled the yard and a house made up the fourth side that wasn’t made of the same wall. A large willow tree shaded them overhead and the above-ground pool they were in looked even larger from the surface. It was about twelve feet across and barely came up higher than the waists of the human girls.
She processed all of this and quickly realized they would not be going anywhere unless these girls helped them to do it.
“You!” Adagio squinted at the one called Rainbow Dash.
“Got a problem, squirt?” Rainbow smirked again.
“Dashie!” Fluttershy scolded her friend’s uncalled-for remark.
“You were the one that carried me, right?” Adagio asked unfazed.
Rainbow seemed taken back by the question. She answered slow and unsure. “Yeeeaaah,” she crossed her arms, “Fluttershy got Sonata, and Rarity carried Aria. I’d carry all three of you in a flash, but it’s hard just to carry one of you because those scales are so slippery. Even dry-”
“Thanks,” Adagio fought to keep her eyes on Rainbow’s. It wasn’t easy and her heart burned with saying it to someone who she wanted to merely use and discard previously – at best. But she wasn’t stupid. This girl had saved her life. These girls had saved all of them without a need to and Adagio had a feeling the debt would never be repaid.
Rainbow’s arms fell out of the cross and she looked genuinely surprised. Perhaps even uncomfortable. “I...it was...”
“The right thing to do,” Rarity finished for her struggling friend. The white teenager was looking down into the water a quarter of the pool’s distance away. “Even if it was a tad...icky. This form is simply the way you are and that is hardly your fault.”
Adagio could make out the vague form of Aria underwater even from the bright lighting above the surface. The purple siren was a grump but she knew she owed her life as well. She was at least looking back at Rarity.
“So what now?” the lead siren finally asked.
“Now,” yet another voice said from a lawn chair behind Rainbow Dash. The blue girl moved aside and revealed none other than the trump card the girls had pulled out against the sirens. Sunset Shimmer. She pulled off a pair of sunglasses that reflected the bright glare of the sun where it peaked through the willow’s branches. “We adopt some fishies.”