Rarity frowned at the western horizon and the islands towering up in front of her. It’d been an hour since Rainbow had flown off to investigate the shipwreck, yet there still wasn’t hide nor hair of her to be seen. But, knowing Rainbow, she likely got distracted or overly zealous in her exploration of the wreck. The pegasus was certainly a thrill-seeking free spirit, and now that she had her flight back, Rarity knew it was only a matter of time before her sense of adventure got the better of her.
Still, the island was maybe fifteen minutes out now, so Rarity gently manipulated her field to slow the raft down. Gyro noticed the shift in momentum, and her ears perked up. “Why are we slowing down?”
“Rainbow told us she was going to find a place for us to safely make landfall,” Rarity said. “I don’t want to get too close to the island if it isn’t safe.”
Gyro sat up and curled her tail around her hooves like a cat. “Nothing about any of these islands is safe. I doubt there’s gonna be one section of beach that’s any better than the others.”
“Not true,” Rarity said. “The last island we stopped at where we found you had a very clear distinction between the east and west coasts. One side was sheltered from the minotaurs’ natural harbor and their civilization. The other wasn’t. If we’d landed there…”
“Yeah, yeah, I get it.” Sighing, Gyro frowned at the mountain rising in front of them. “So where is she, then?”
Rarity shook her head. “That’s what I was just wondering.” Her blue eyes scanned the islands, bouncing up and down over every spire of rock and knot of trees. A flock of birds rose from some of the trees, and she followed them for a moment before turning her attention a bit more to the north, where she could clearly see something wooden wedged between two rocky spires. “There’s the shipwreck, but I don’t see Rainbow.”
Gyro whistled as her pale blue eyes fell on the wreck. “That’s the Concordia alright,” she said, rolling her shoulders. “Rainbow was right about that.”
“Really?” Rarity squinted at the wreck and its colorful paints along the shattered hull. “How can you tell? It could be any ship. There aren’t any markings on it that I can see from here.”
The mechanic simply shot Rarity a look and raised an eyebrow. “Rarity, I was an engineer on that ship for a year. I know her. That piece of the hull’s part of the port side, close to the bow, from decks three, four, and five.”
“Oh.” Rarity pursed her lips and looked out to the side, watching the seafoam slide across the rolling waves like bubbles in a bathtub. “Then if Rainbow was right about that, maybe she was right about there being survivors.”
“Maybe,” Gyro said. “Or pirates. They were all over the Concordia when she went down, so they could’ve survived as well.”
That was a thought that hadn’t occurred to Rarity. “Oh dear, you’re right,” she said. “I hadn’t considered that. I just supposed that we’d find more passengers or crew like you, darling. But if there are pirates on this island…”
“Honestly, I’d be more worried about the pirates than the minotaurs,” Gyro said. She frowned to the north, where the minotaur island loomed in the distance. “The pirates can actually think, and if any of their gunpowder survived the storm, then they’ve got weapons much more dangerous than spears and nets.”
Rarity nodded in agreement. “Rainbow and I once talked about using the pirates as a way to get back home, but if they’re stranded here like we are, then there’s no chance of that. As it stands, they’d be much more dangerous without the promise of a payout for our safe return to Equestria.”
“And we’re three pretty mares stranded in the middle of nowhere, far away from law and order,” Gyro said. “I don’t think I need to elaborate on that one any further.”
Rarity felt her skin crawl and she shuddered in response. “Oh, heavens, did you have to bring that up? Now I’m terrified of running into them!”
“So we just gotta make sure we don’t. Besides,” Gyro assured her, patting the spears tied to the middle of the raft, “we’ve got weapons. We can defend ourselves if we have to.”
“I hope we won’t have to,” Rarity said. “Minotaurs, I could probably handle. But other ponies? Cunning and dangerous pirates with magic and firearms? I fear I’m horribly outmatched there.”
“Not if we get the drop on them,” Gyro said. Then she groaned and laid back down on her stomach. “Besides, we don’t even know if there are any pirates or not. And if there are, I figure Rainbow will be able to give us a heads up. She’d be able to spot their camp or something from the air.”
“Unless the foliage is particularly dense,” Rarity said. “Then she’d have to get low to look around.”
“And she can just fly straight up if she has to.” But, crossing her forelegs, Gyro frowned at the west. “But where is she, though? She shouldn’t have taken this long to check out the wreckage.”
“Knowing her, she likely saw something else that caught her interest and flew off to take a look at it.” Though Rarity sighed and shook her head, she couldn’t chase away the growing concern in her gut. “Unless something else happened…”
Gyro bit down on her lip. “We should take the raft in and beach it. If she was gonna report back to us, she would’ve done it by now. She’s Loyalty, right? She wouldn’t leave us hanging like this if she could.”
Rarity’s horn flared to life, and once more the raft began picking up speed. “Oh, dear, I hope she’s alright!” she worried aloud. “I really, sincerely hope she’s only fooling around on the island instead of something else!”
“Whatever it is, we’ll figure out what’s going on,” Gyro assured her. “But first, we need to make landfall.”
“Right,” Rarity said, eyes honing in on the white sands not too far away. “Hopefully it’s nothing, and we can all laugh about this later…”