//------------------------------// // 05. Call Upon The Sea Ponies // Story: Synchronicity // by Sev //------------------------------// ((Author's note: This Chapter introduces the Kelpies, my take on modern versions of the Seaponies featured in earlier generations of MLP. While the Kelpies are described in this chapter, a little visual assistance never hurt anybody, so I'm sticking a few links to their design here. Enjoy! http://s1091.photobucket.com/albums/i395/sevjano/?action=view¤t=seapony2.jpg http://s1091.photobucket.com/albums/i395/sevjano/?action=view¤t=windsweptweb.png )) “Gone?” Applejack demanded. “What do you mean she's gone!?” If all the color could drain from a white pony's face, it had done so from Rarity's. Her legs were trembling and for the life of her she couldn't seem to get her body to behave correctly. It was as though someone had pulled the plug on half her switches. She felt unhinged, and she had a reasonable guess as to why. “Twi..Twilight!” She stammered. “S-s-s-s-something got her, from the water… just appeared in front of her face! I can't hear her anymore, its like there's a hole in my head where her mind was. I can f-f-f-feel where she's supposed to be but when I try to talk to her its like… like an empty room.” Rarity stumbled sideways into Pinkie, who supported her. “Can't... seem to get my balance...” she muttered. “We gotta get down there!” Applejack exclaimed, turning from her examination of the debris in the hall to run back for the stairway. “Never should've left her by her lonesome, what was I thinkin’!” “Wait!” Pinkie Pie yelled after her, which brought the workhorse to a skidding stop. The pink mare was supporting Rarity, whose legs were twitching like they were only receiving half the signals they should be. “I think she's hurt!” “I'm… fine. Twilight needs help!” Rarity replied, trying to shove off of Pinkie, but stumbling as soon as she put weight on her legs. Pinkie caught her a second time and looked at Applejack worriedly. “Its probably her connection with Twilight,” Pinkie said, bracing Rarity against a wall. “It’s like half the air in her balloon went out. Shes sinking...” Fear washed over both Pinkie and Applejack's faces. “Does that mean… Twilight is...” Rarity shook her head. “She's alive,” she assured them. “I can f-f-f-feel her. It’s like… like knowing somepony is in the room with you, even when you can't see them. But shes not th-th-” Rarity had to force the words out, like her mind was hitting speed bumps, “thiiiinking at me like she was. It’s all dark fog. I-I-I think she's unconscious,” the unicorn breathed hard, “and it's weighing me down.” Rarity had closed her eyes to try and focus her thoughts amidst the haze of Twilight's floating fog, and as such was caught by surprise when she felt herself lifted off the floor. When she opened her eyes, she was sprawled over Applejack's back, being held steady by Pinkie Pie to her right. Applejack took off toward the aqueduct with Rarity expertly balanced astride her, as only a rodeo pony could. “Th..Thank you,” Rarity whispered, a hint of shame in her voice. She prided herself on cleanliness and civility, but 'feeble' was never something she wanted associated with her name. Applejack's sidelong nuzzle came as a welcome surprise. “Think nothing of it, Rarity,” she assured the unicorn. “You just see what you can do about rousin’ Twi through that link thingy of yours. I've got enough legs for both of us.” The fact that Rarity could still summon up a less than publicly appropriate comment about Applejack's legs in her mind gave her hope for collecting what cognizance she had left. She made repeated calls to Twilight, but every attempt seemed like tossing pennies down a well. Nothing but darkness and stagnant, dead silence. Cold, too. She was cold. Or maybe she had been cold? Rarity backtracked, and reexamined the last set of imagery she'd received in a terrified, reflexive jumble. It was like staring at a memory through a distorted lens. She'd seen something… attacked it... “Guys, wait up!” Rainbow's voice echoed down the hallway, and the three landlocked ponies turned to face her. She and Fluttershy were charging down the hall toward them, and Fluttershy was shaking her head violently. “No, don't wait up!” she yipped, “keep running!” Applejack cocked her head to the side, but when Fluttershy shot past her toward the hallway, she took it as a signal to take her word for it and followed suit. “Why are you running?” Pinkie asked as she galloped alongside Rainbow. They took a turn hard and Pinkie advanced a few paces to help hold Rarity on Applejack's back. The weight didn't seem to bother the workhorse, but Rarity was gripping her flanks with a look of abject terror on her face. “Some crazy old law written before Nightmare Moon was defeated gave control of Equestria to the military should its usual rulers go missing,” Rainbow answered, growling. “They tried to hold us in 'protective custody' and called Princess Luna a 'civilian'. Can you believe that?” “I can believe all sorts of things,” Pinkie replied proudly. Rainbow rolled her eyes, then frowned. “Wait,” she said, “why were you running?” “Rarity said Twilight saw some kinda crazy water thing in the crazy river place through their crazy brain telephone!” Pinkie said happily, then frowned. “Oh,” she added, “And then she got knocked out by something and it gave Rarity a bad case of the derps. We're kinda scared for her life.” “WHAT?!” Fluttershy asked in shock, but Applejack cut her off, moving into single file so they could descend the stairwell leading to the aqueduct. “Where's Luna?” she demanded. “S-s-s-she split off from us,” Fluttershy stammered, “something about finding the members of Equestria's Parliament to re-establish the working government.” “She told US to track down the princess,” Rainbow added, as the team arrived with a skittering halt at the bottom of the stairs. Fresh water was on the pathway, but there was no Twilight to be found. “Looks like we may be missin’ more than just the princess...” Applejack muttered, a hint of worry in her eyes. She knelt down to let Rarity off her back, where the white unicorn struggled to maintain her footing. “Fan out, everypony,” she said, “Pinkie, stick near Rarity and make sure she doesn't fall in the river.” “Oh come now,” Rarity protested, her knees still trembling, but Applejack shot her a glare. “Come nothin’,” Applejack said firmly, “I am NOT losing any more ponies today.” “Nothing over here!” Rainbow reported, having flown down the length of the pathway. Applejack pawed at the ground nervously. “Ya know, this coooould be a good thing,” Pinkie commented. The looks she received would've made any other pony swallow their own tail rather than continue, but Pinkie paid it no mind. “Think about it guys. Before, we didn't have anything at all to tell us where Princess Celestia might be. But if Twilight was taken by the same thing, they're probably heading to the same place!” “Then we've lost a princess AND a friend!” Applejack shot back, seething. Pinkie tilted her head and pointed her hoof at Rarity. Slowly, Applejack turned, and realization dawned on her. “You can talk to Twilight. You said you were doin’ it when we were upstairs. We can use your link to find her! “Only if she wakes up!” Rarity countered worriedly, “I k-k-k-keep trying but my words just aren't getting to her! I don't know what else to do, I'm rather new at all this!” “You're probably just not being loud enough, silly!” Pinkie offered, beaming a smile. “Ponies can't hear words when they're sleeping.” She flipped up the flap on Applejack's saddlebag, which still contained the book that held the Elements of Harmony within it. “You gotta be a bit more direct!” She took hold of the book with her mouth, and with one powerful whip of her neck, slapped the flat side of it against Rarity's rear with a loud enough THWACK to make every pony in the room wince sympathetically. Twilight Sparkle jolted bolt upright with a start. Her head was still lingering in a haze, but memories and images slowly coalesced in her mind. Cold. Wet. Fear. Some creature she'd never seen before. It had crept up on her… but it hadn't looked aggressive. It was just there, from nowhere. She'd struck it, and then… here she was. Alone, in the dark, in a strange place, with no idea what had brought her there. And to top it off, she was soaking wet, her ass stung like all giddy up, and she was filled with a completely unexplainable urge to murder Pinkie Pie. By and large, it was a situation all pony parents warned their fillies would happen if they went around flaunting their cutie marks too much. *Twilight?* came a familiar voice in her head, if such things could be called familiar. A welcome one, anyway. *RARITY! I'm alright, are you OK?* *A right sight better than Pinkie Pie shall be when I'm through with her. Twilight, we need to be careful. You were unconscious, and I could barely stand while you were. This link seems to affect us physically. I dread to think what would happen should one of us get injured. Where are you?* Twilight turned to look at her flank, and the sympathetic sting she felt there from what she'd absorbed from Rarity's mental imagery had to be Pinkie Pie's definition of direct communication. It was a fair example of what Rarity was afraid of. *I'm not… sure...* Her eyes had drifted upward, and were now focused on a form that floated some seven feet away, suspended in the black, and looking back at her. *Rarity… I'll uh… get back to you on that.* “It” was a she. Twilight could see it in the face, which was clearly pony, as much as hers or any others were. She was adorned in cheerful blue-green, and had hair of light pink with white streaks down the middle, cropped short and angled into a cute pixie-like cut. The eyes were a deep golden yellow that caught the light of Twilight's apparently self-illuminated chamber. The body, however, was distinctly less equine. Twilight could see similarities between it and her own: both were sleek and lithe, both seemed to possess the same build. But where Twilight's front legs were, this other girl had long, wing-like fins with three long, flat digits that formed a swimming surface not unlike the front fins of a seal, though apparently with greater dexterity. Where Twilight's rear hip carriage and legs would begin, this girl's body continued into a gradually tapering tube that resembled the rear half of a dolphin, but rather than terminating in a tail fin, her fin took up the majority of the tapering shape, and was significantly larger than a dolphin's would be, proportionately. From the way it bent and flexed as the girl hovered there, Twilight imagined it could be contorted into contact points for mobility on land, though she doubted it was anywhere near as efficient as her own legs. But in water... That's where they were, she realized. Underwater. Twilight knew a few spells to keep water out of a room, but this… it was like being inside a bubble. She could hear drops of water echo as they dripped off her body. The curved, clear surface causing any noises to reverberate in distorted ways around her. It was small, some twelve feet in diameter, but the utter clarity of it made it seem to extend far beyond its physical borders. Not that there was anything to look at beyond her bizarre new companion. It was very, very dark out there. Oppressively so. Dark, and enormous. Twilight took a defensive stance, though without being startled into aggression, she was far more cautious than last time. The girl outside lifted one of her flippers and curled its two outside digits in, forming what appeared to be a hand shaking a finger warily. She opened her mouth and a bubble slipped out of it, traveling upward. And upward. And upward, until it disappeared from sight entirely, having never reached the surface. Twilight got the idea, even as the grim memory of the cold water returned to her thoughts. “You've got me,” she said aloud, as a means of testing if she could be heard. “I get it. I attack, and the bubble breaks, right?” The girl outside nodded. At least Twilight could speak to her, though it was yet to be seen if she could speak back. She cursed her current situation. This deep, with no idea where she was or how far off the surface was, she really was trapped. She could teleport, but to where? Without some direction, some point of reference, she'd end up… anywhere. In the ocean, in a rock, there was nothing to see, nothing to fix on to. The girl gave a little flip of her massive tail fin and swooped elegantly over the bubble, turning a slow, drifting roll as she did so and coming to a halt at the bottom, near Twilight. She was settled on the ground now, just outside the edge of the sphere, and stood near as tall as Twilight did, and with much the same posture. The similarities between the two creatures were too specific to ignore. Twilight struggled back through years of study to try and assign a name to what she was seeing, but the only one to come to mind was outright impossible. She had a gradient of white on her fins that looked a bit like surf on the waves. It appeared again on her back, Twilight noticed, surrounding a small, unobtrusive dorsal fin. Twilight had seen it during the roll. She'd also seen something else, but refused to believe it, until the girl turned sideways in the water and forced it into view. A cutie mark. “How...” It looked like a full moon, but with the outlines of clouds removed from its depiction, forming what appeared to be a nighttime scene on what amounted to the other girl's flank. The image itself was less important than its existence. Nothing had cutie marks, save for ponies. Nothing at all. And yet... The other girl had put her flipper against the side of the bubble and was pressing gently against it. Her look wasn't threatening, but she did seem to be indicating that Twilight should step back. Keeping a little distance between herself and the… sea… pony… struck Twilight as a good idea either way, and she relented a few feet of space. The bubble bowed, and the other girl squeezed through it without compromising its integrity, like a soapy horn would do to a soap-bubble. When she'd entered the entire way, she took a deep breath, and smiled warily at the rather unnerved pony. “Kelpie,” she said simply, in a light voice that surprised Twilight with its frank openness. She'd rather expected some sort of weird… bubble language or something. This girl spoke like she'd just come up from down the streets of Ponyville. “..Wuh?” “It’s the word you're looking for.” She'd tilted her head and was eying Twilight from the side. “It’s what I am. A kelpie. A water pony.” Twilight made a face. “Kelpie's don't exist,” she insisted. “I've seen that word in all of two encyclopedias, both of which began with 'Descriptions of Fantasy Mythology' on their covers.” “Oh!” the other girl replied, looking surprised. “I didn't know! I wish somepony told me this stuff earlier, I've gone my whole life thinking I was real. I'd better get going.” Both ponies stared at each other for a moment, Twilight with her mouth slightly open, the other girl with a brow lifted, as though waiting for reality to swallow her up for the crime of being make-believe. “Hmm,” she commented flatly after a few seconds had passed. “Seems I'm still around. Crazy.” She smirked at Twilight's face and repeated her earlier proclamation. “Kelpie.” Twilight composed herself after a moment's deliberation. “Alright,” she ventured, “let’s say you are.” “Yay!” the light blue kelpie replied sardonically. “Thank the waves for small victories.” Twilight had to crack a smile, if only internally. The kelpie girl was slightly smaller than Twilight herself, who had never been known for her size, and had a chunk, like a bite mark, missing from her right ear. It lent a degree of scrappiness that matched her apparent sarcastic streak, and Twilight, being one herself, had a thing for siding with the underdogs. “Are you responsible for the princess's kidnapping?” Twilight asked firmly, refocusing on the task at hand. The kelpie shook her head firmly, then chewed her lip, as though rethinking her assertion. “I wasn't, no,” she replied, “but uh… kelpies… kinda were.” Twilight grit her teeth and snorted, but the kelpie girl raised her flippers defensively and urged the aggravated unicorn to hear her out. “My name is Windswept, Twilight Sparkle,” she explained, once Twilight had eased on her hooves enough to make explanation possible. Twilight raised a brow at the kelpie's knowledge of her name, but didn't interrupt. Windswept continued, “I'm a representative of Princess Aurora.” “I've never heard of a Princess Aurora,” Twilight responded suspiciously, and Windswept gave her a smirk. “You've never seen a kelpie, either. Tell you what, Twilly, how about you save all your disbelief ‘til the end of the lesson, because there's going to be an awwwwful lot of stuff you haven't heard of over the next few minutes.” “...Twilly?” Windswept erped, having not noticed her own use of a familiar nickname. “It’s uh… just… never mind,” Twilight could swear she spotted a blush on the kelpie's face, but it vanished quickly as she proceeded. “Princess Aurora is our princess. Has been almost as long as your Celestia has been for you. Before her, we had electoral leaders like you did, back in the days before the storm.” “The storm...” Twilight's eyes widened. “Wait, THE storm? The Windigo blizzard? You weren't even involved!” Twilight leaned in, lifting a brow. “There was a whole tribe of ponies that were outright erased from that legend? You expect me to believe you were there, and we just left you out of the story?” “Who said we were there? It doesn't snow underwater, Twilight.” Windswept countered. “When the other ponies took to fighting over resources, we went a different direction. We went deep, and we stayed there. The ocean had enough resources for all of us. It was rough, but so were we. We endured, and when your tribe and the pegasus ponies and the Earth ponies left on their pilgrimage to Equestria, we stayed out in the ocean. We weren't involved at all,” she took a seat on the ocean floor, covered by the comparatively soft cushion of the bubble, “but that doesn't mean we didn't exist. When you had all left, you'd taken the storms with you. According to our legends, for centuries following we thought you'd all died in the blizzards.” Twilight considered. The legend was oooold. Very old. It predated Celestia considerably, and while it was widely considered to be fact, nearly nothing still remained from that era of pony history. If there had been a nation of sea ponies who had up and left before the storms had ended and had no part in the union of the races, how long would it have taken to completely forget them? Two centuries? Three? The legend was more than a thousand years beyond that. “We… forgot you.” Twilight said quietly. “Time does that to a pony,” Windswept replied, “and its been a very long time. While Equestria slowly grew its borders, we expanded across the oceans around where ponies first began. What you call the Everfree lands, the places that sit just beyond the magic of Equestria. It wasn't until Discord that our tribes met each other again.” Twilight shuddered a little at the name, and tried to play it off as a chill from the water. She and her friends made an effort to not speak of him often. “Kelpies were there for that?” “Everyone was,” Windswept replied, “Not just everypony. Everyone. The dragons in the Dragon Lands to the east of Equestria, the sphinxes to the south, the griffins; everyone. Discord's most recent invasion was nothing, miniscule, compared to his first, Twilight.” She beamed a proud smile, and Twilight found herself surprised to realize it was aimed at her. “You and your friends stopped him before he could gain momentum. You were amazing.” Twilight pawed at the ground a bit, disarmed by the praise. She coughed lightly to prompt Windswept to continue. “Celestia and Luna emerged from that war. Products of Discord's tampering, as we understand it.” Windswept said, and Twilight's eyes narrowed. “Princess Celestia is NOT-” Windswept held up a flipper to silence her. “I'm not saying she is or isn't, Twilight, honest. I'm telling you what OUR legends say. Because our Princess IS a product of Discord's tampering, and is every bit as ageless as yours is.” Twilight was less than comfortable with that idea, but found herself depressingly ill-equipped to counter it. She really didn't know anything about Celestia's origins, or why she possessed aspects of all three pony tribes. An amalgamation of different ponies… the possibility, however remote, brought a chill to her spine she couldn't pass off as cold water. “Aurora has ruled over Kelopolis ever since Discord's original defeat, and ever since then, we've had very minimal, very… tense… relations with Equestria.” “But,” Twilight interrupted, “I've never… I mean, none of us have ever...” “Asked.” Windswept concluded for her. “None of you have ever asked. You follow Celestia unequivocally, Twilight, all of Equestria does. You never consider the lands beyond your borders because that's… just… not where ponies belong! Am I right? Have you BEEN to the borders?” Twilight was forced to shake her head. “I never thought about it. It’s just… beyond. It’s not where ponies go. I know about the Dragon Lands, we have shared schools of magic with them, some of us even keep their young to be raised with pony sensibility. It’s a really long standing relationship, but...” “But you've never questioned it,” Windswept finished. She gave a little sigh, and looked at Twilight with eyes that betrayed a strange affection. As though she'd known the unicorn longer than just the few minutes they'd spent together. “We have a saying, down here,” she said. “'Shoo be doo'. Its short for ‘Shouponi Benthis Dumoi’. Ollllld kelpie tongue. It means 'trust the sea'. The thing about it is, 'shouponi' is the same word we use for 'be wary of'. Do you see what I mean?” Twilight nodded slowly. “Your word for trust is the same word for suspicion. You don't trust anything fully.” She nodded. “It’s not the greatest motto to have, but in the ocean, it’s a way of life. Water keeps us safe, it keeps us fed, it cradles us, and it loves us. And then, one day, it might pick you up and smash you against the rocks until you die. And it will never tell anypony why it did it. My point is, we don't live in a paradise. You ponies, you… figured it out. You achieved a sort of brilliant balance with a benevolent ruler, and a system for everything, and land that provides, and a princess that contains elements of every single one of her subjects. Ours doesn't. She was a captive of Discord's, enchanted with agelessness so that she might entertain him for eternity. She rules over a civilization that takes everything she says with a grain of salt by their very nature. She has loyal, loving subjects. Lots. Me, for instance, but she also has enemies. Bitter kelpies who think we'd all be better off if they were running the show, and they're the ones who took Princess Celestia.” There it was. Twilight frowned and leaned back. “Why?” she asked. “What would that get them? Is she a hostage? If you've all done so well by yourselves for so long, why take her now?” “Because we need her, Twilight. And you. And Equestria!” Windswept was standing now, and hoped her posture might add gravity to her words. “Something is coming. Something that threatens not just Kelopolis but the rest of the world with it and we can't fight it alone. It took Discord to bring us all together before. A global catastrophe that took a global effort to thwart.” Twilight stepped back with a gasp. “He's not...” “No,” Windswept replied, “he's not. But he's also not the only thing in the universe that can threaten us all, Twilight! Two years ago, you saw a catastrophe coming by looking in a book of old mare's tails and believing in yourself.” She swallowed a little, her breathing having quickened as she tried to convey her earnest. “Not long ago, I looked up in the sky and saw something move that shouldn't have. I dug through every book, every piece of crumbling old waterlogged lore I could find, and found a similar story to yours. Only when your legend of Nightmare Moon ends, ours keeps going. She was never the real threat, Twilight! Her allies were!” The words of the Legend of Nightmare Moon scrolled through Twilight's mind as though she was reading them in front from a page in front of her. “‘On the longest day of the thousandth year, the stars will aid in her escape, and she'll bring about...’” Twilight swallowed, “The stars… you're talking about the stars. How can the stars-” “Kelpies don't exist, Twilight,” Windswept reminded her, “and Nightmare Moon is just an old mare's tale.” The smaller Kelpie moved forward. “They're coming. Aurora sent me to find you so that I could try and secure you as an advocate. I've watched you for months! I saw your birthday in Canterlot, I… I saw you save the dam in that rather marvelous looking costume of yours, I've BEEN here, trying to… get to know you. So that when I finally did make an appearance, I could convince you of how important this was! So you'd hear me out and let me try and convince Celestia that we need her again, like we needed her with Discord. But on the night I was planning on meeting you, out by the bridge you always walk on...” “They took her,” Twilight breathed. Windswept nodded. “Months of planning, destroyed in seven minutes of violence. After they did that, I was sure I couldn't just show up and try to talk to you. Pegasus guards everywhere, whole city on alert. I'd have been hauled off on first glance. I waited until you were alone, but you looked… hurt. Your head was down and you kept yelling to yourself, I was worried.” She made an odd face, “I'm not a spy, Twilight, I'm not really… trained… to not get feelings for someone I watch for a long time. I considered you my friend, even though we'd never met. It was just… a thing. I knew where you were, how you acted, how you behaved. I like you.” She chewed her lip a bit, looking like she was braced for some sort of backlash. Twilight was silent for a moment while she considered what she'd heard. She certainly wasn't at ease with the idea of having been observed in secret for so long, but putting things in perspective was something Twilight prided herself on, so long as they didn't consist of missing homework deadlines. A sea-blue waterborne stalker was rather insignificant next the possibility of a global threat. “You realize I have no reason to believe any of this,” Twilight said flatly. “Oh, better than that,” the kelpie replied. “You've got a ton of reasons not to believe any of this.” Nonetheless, she looked up at Twilight's face, awaiting her decision. The unicorn lifted an eyebrow. “Can you get me to Princess Celestia?” “Oh yes.” Twilight's mouth split into a determined grin. “Well then. That's progress.” Windswept's smile beamed like a bonfire in the darkness of the water, and all at once, the bubble containing both of them lifted off the floor and shot upward toward the surface. *RARITY!* Twilight thought dramatically to her friend. The distance had damped their empathic link, and with neither of them broadcasting direct thoughts, it had been the first Rarity had heard from her in a while. *TWILIGHT! What's going-* *Get everypony together and head for the bottom of the Canterlot Falls. We've got a princess to find, and I've got us a way to do it!* As the bubble raced upward toward the air, Twilight turned an idle glance to her new companion. “You've… really been watching me for that long?” Twilight asked, her brow raised dubiously. “I was your backup singer during Winter Wrap Up this year,” Windswept replied. “You're really pretty when you sing, Twilight.” “... Oh. Wow. Um, thanks!” “Juuuuust don't dance anymore. Like, ever.”