//------------------------------//
// Chapter 2:  The Hidden World 
// Story: The Element of the Island 
// by computerneek 
//------------------------------//

I return to the ship early for my evening meal.  She is not here, but I expected that.  Only the mission commander stays aboard ship.
The transit duty officer returns for me after my meal, taking me back to the island shortly before everypony else heads in for dinner.
I scan the crowd.  Just like all the other times, she is nowhere to be seen.  I take a minute to look for her, but find nothing.
So I pick a spot on the mountainside to lie down and watch.  To wait.
Nothing happens.
I let out a sigh.  This mission is exactly what I thought it would be:  Exile.  Command may not see it as that, but that’s what it is.  I’ve been here for four entire days now, but the only things anypony has found were clearly planted.
Time passes.  The sun goes down, relegating everything to the dimness of the moon, just barely peeking in between the clouds.
She’s almost certainly not an Agent; she avoided the headcount, reappearing after they finished.  After they found that nopony was missing.
So I wonder to myself.  Who is she?  Is she a hitchhiker on that ship?  A private detective teleporting from another ship?
Another Agent teleporting from another ship?
I don’t know.
A youth settles down next to me, around my age.  I glance briefly; it’s her.
She smiles at me.  “Fancy seeing somepony still around this late.”
“What about yourself?”
She looks away.  “I never leave.”
This draws my attention; I turn to face her.  “Why?”
“I never need to.”
Silence holds for several seconds.
“You’re not an Agent, then.”
She turns back towards me.  “Is that what everypony is looking for?”
I shake my head.  It is confirmed, she’s not an Agent.  I look back down at the village.  “No.  That’s what everypony is.”
“Including yourself.”
“Yes.”
“So…  What is everypony looking for?”
I trace the paint trail with my eyes, all the way to the gallows.  “Clues.”
She remains silent for almost a full minute.  “What for?”
“What happened.”
She looks away.  I look towards her, follow her gaze.
“There’s…” she pauses.  “That beach might have what you’re looking for.”
That beach is empty.  I’ve scanned it before; there’s nothing to find, only the uniform sand.  “It’s empty.”
“The water is not.”
“Sounds like I have work to do.”
Neither of us move.
Silence holds for several minutes.
“Why have you been looking with us?” I ask.
“I get bored.”
“How have you not gotten caught?”
“I…  I watched for weeks before I started.  More and more ponies, of various ages, came to…  look.  Something about the charred remains of Ponyville seemed to fascinate them.  Yet while each one, on arrival, would look at the volcanic sand weird, not one would look into it any further.”
“Volcanic sand?”
She nods, prodding the black sand with a hoof.  “That’s what this is.  Rock, boiled into sponge, then crushed into sand.”
“Ahh.  Carry on.”
“The part that most amused me was that they would never refer to each other by name.  It was always ‘hey you’ or the like.
“Eventually, they had enough ponies looking that they almost never seemed to recognize each other when they asked.  So I tried going out myself.  I joined them as carefully as I could, and started looking.  It’s interesting what I’ve been able to learn from the blast marks, but nopony else seemed to care.
“Three days in, one of them asked me a question.  He wanted to know if I’d seen anything, so I told him the blast marks were interesting.  I think he spent the rest of the day staring at the wall.
“The next question was a couple weeks ago, where I sit during dinner.  I told him I sit wherever.
“The third question was just under a week ago.  He wanted to know if I wanted to ‘show the new kid around’.  That’s something they’ve been doing for each other, whenever a new one would show up- and I chose not to presume to know what it’s all about.  I said no.
“The ‘new kid’ they were referring to turned out to be you.  You were the first to notice the cuckoo clock I’ve been moving around town for weeks- so I thought maybe, just maybe, somepony smart enough to actually find something had arrived.”
Silence holds for another couple minutes.
“Ponyville?” I ask.
“That’s what the village was called, before…  Before it happened.”
I look at her.  It almost sounds to me like she knows what happened- possibly even saw it.
I chose not to ask about it.  That could scare her away.



It’s been a few hours.  We spent a little more time chatting, but now she’s gone off somewhere.  I stopped by the supply container on the way to that beach, pulling out a diving set.  Now, I’m just about ready to enter the water when she shows up.  She smiles at me.
“This might help with the search,” she states, offering me something.  I can’t see what it is, but I take it anyways, and thank her for it.
Then I head underwater.
Blackness.  I can’t see anything down here at night.
Then her thing does something.  Light blasts out of it, and suddenly, I can see for miles.
She’s right.  There is something here.
It looks like a few dozen shipwrecks.  Badly burned, fragmented in some cases.  All sunken.
I swim around it, drawing air from the magic snorkel I got from the kit.  I swim down, searching for clues.  Her light thing seems to move itself, shining wherever I look; it’s rather convenient.
I explore.
“Find anything?”
I whirl around in the water.  There she is, a hundred feet underwater, with no gear at all, save that strange metal thing on her back.
I raise an eyebrow.  I can’t speak with this snorkel in my mouth- not that I can speak underwater anyways.
Somehow, she doesn’t have that same restriction.  She giggles, no snorkel in sight.  “Well, you’ve been down here for a few hours, so I figured you might have.”
My eyes go wide, and I briefly remove the snorkel from my mouth, checking the indicator on the side.  Or, more accurately, the crystal storing the magic to power it.
It’s empty.
I’m probably living on the last scraps of magic it has right now.
I stick it back in my mouth, and swim for the surface.
It runs out, and stops working, before I make the surface.  I’m close enough, though, that I’m able to break the surface before I run out of my final breath.
Her head pops out of the water while I’m gasping for air.  “Run out or something?”
“Blasted thing always runs out.  And it’s the only one.  Unless you know how to recharge it?”
“Nope.  I don’t know how the things they put in that chest work- only that they’re all useless to me.”
“Ahh.  Whelp, I guess that’s me done here, unless you’ve got more of…  whatever you’re using.”
Her grin does not belong anywhere near an Agent, let alone directed towards one.  “I’ve got plenty.  And, so long as we stay near the island, they’ll never run out!”  She snatches the light thing out of the water between us.  “Not unlike this thing I normally don’t use.”
“Yep!  The Depth Striders have lights on them too, so I never really need a Sea Lantern.”
“Ahh.”
“So, you go get rid of…  whatever that is, and I’ll go fetch another Depth Strider for you?”
“Works for me.”



She meets me without it, at the beach, once I dispose of the scuba gear.  “Ready?”
“Yes…  where are they?”
“In the water.  They’re a bit heavy on land.”
She leads the way into the water.
We simply…  walk in.  All the way up to our heads.  She doesn’t stop, so I follow.
Something touches my back, right about at the point when I start floating off the bottom.  I let out a little yelp and twist to try and see it; she’s still in front of me.
Then, the water is suddenly comfortable.  It’s still cold, and I can feel that, but it’s also comfortable at the same time.
She looks back at me.  “Oh.  Sorry, I forgot to warn you- that’s the Depth Strider.”
I duck my head underwater, twisting to look…  Yep, it’s one of her things, attached to my back.  I lift my head back above the water’s surface, looking for her.  “So…  how do I use it?”
“Just…  move.”  She demonstrates, slicing through the water so quickly she throws two waves off to her sides.
I try.  It’s…  unnerving, I think.  All it takes is a thought, and I’m sliding through the water as if it wasn’t there.
I stop, and turn to her again.  “Oh...kay.  Um, how about that talking underwater thing you did earlier?”
“That?  Oh, that’s automatic.  While you’re wearing it, water and air are one and the same.”
I raise an eyebrow, take a deep breath, and stick my head under again.  I try saying something.
My vision is clouded by the large bubbles coming out of my mouth, but the oration is clearly audible anyways.  I take a breath-
And freeze.  I just took a breath of ocean water, and it felt like a normal breath of air.
She zips up in front of me, underwater, and blows a stream of bubbles into my face.  Then she starts laughing.
I eventually start laughing as well.  She did demonstrate it for me earlier, after all.  Why am I doubting it?
Once we finish giggling, we both speed down into the ships.  Which are visible even without the…  she called it a Sea Lantern, right?
Her Depth Striders look like metal saddles with short, leg-length fins sticking out the sides.  She has assured me that these fins can fold down against our sides at will, but we lose much of our mobility when we do that.  Turns out there’s also several lights on those same fins.  They’re not as bright as the Sea Lantern, but they spread more- and shine further.
So we explore the ships.



As it turns out, she’s never explored these ships before.  She’s always left them be, never needed to look.  As a direct result, we discover many treasure chests filled with gold.  We find barrels and barrels of alcohol, we find…
“Pirates,” I finally state.  “These are pirate ships.”
“Two hundred pirate ships?”
“Two hundred?  There can’t be more than sixty or so here.”
“Fifty-five.  But that’s because a hundred and forty four never made it to the shore, and one was blown to bits after it landed.”
“Do we know where the remains of the other ships are?”
“Most of them.  Six- including that one- were blown to bits, all the rest sank.  This way.”
She leads me out to sea.  Way out to sea, where we find piles and piles of sunken ships and treasure.



We’re in the middle of exploring these when she suddenly looks up, towards the surface.  Towards the island.
“Oh?” I ask.  “What is it?”
“It’s them.  I can feel them, returning to the island.  Teleporting, I think they call it.”
“Dayshift, then.  I don’t have to go back until tonight, though I probably should beforehoof.”
“Oh?  Why?”
“For one, I’m going to need breakfast.  For two, if I do, I can get permission to stay out all the time.”
“Sounds like a pain.”
“It is a pain.  Anyways, I’ve been wondering…  how far can these Depth Striders go?”
“For as long as they have power.  They’ve got onboard capacity for about ten minutes.  So long as we’re within about three miles of the transmitter, back at the island, they won’t be using that onboard capacity, resulting in an effectively indefinite endurance.”
“Uh…  I’m going to pretend that made sense.  So, ten minutes, but that doesn’t start counting until we get too far from the island?”
“Yep.  Said ‘too far’ is marked, on the seafloor- wanna come see?”
“Sure!”
She then leads me out to sea.  Some three or four times as far as the furthest wreck.
There, on the bottom of the ocean, is a picket fence.  She stops at it.
I stop next to her.  “I wonder how much it’d cost to build a fence like this that broke surface.”
She looks up.  “Considering we’re about half a mile underwater right now, probably a lot.  Especially if it’s going to be stopping ships.  Wait…”  She zips along the fence.
I follow.
To where a ship’s anchor is lodged firmly in the metal fence, the chain hanging upwards, to…
Yes, that does look like a ship up there.
“Well hello,” she states, and starts racing up the chain.  “Who’s this?”
As we rise, we turn off our lights.
She…  lands, for the lack of a better term, on the bottom of the ship.  “Huh.  Decent-sized ship, don’t you think?”
I look across it, moving to the side.  “Yep.  I’m thinking it looks familiar, too.”
“Oh?” she asks.  “Maybe-  Oh.”  She looks suddenly up into the ship.  “Yep, it’s your ship.  I didn’t think it was this close.  Meh- the automatics won’t start shooting at it unless it gets a mile closer to the island.”
“Wow.”
We return to the shipwrecks, and continue exploring them.
She seems to be enjoying the search just as much as I am.
We agree to avoid bringing anything to the surface until after all the other Agents go back to the ship for the night.



So, before too long, I find myself back on the ship.  I eat my breakfast, tell the mission commander what I found under the water.  He immediately approves me to work on my own schedule, hooves me a field promotion, and sends both the promotion paperwork and an order for more snorkels back to base.



Overall, hardly an hour passes before I’m back on the island.  She’s waiting for me at the jump site.  I wait until we’re underwater again before I give her the news- and we share a hoofclap before returning to our exploration.
“I think…” she begins, eventually.  “Maybe tonight, if you don’t mind, I can show you what happened.  How Ponyville fell.”
“That include whatever disaster covered the place in volcanic sand?”
“No.  That’s how Ponyville’s attackers fell- and I really hope nopony sees that ever again.”
“Why?”
She only shakes her head.