"Up, you said?"
Twilight nodded, as she began to swim upwards through the water. Realising Starlight might not have seen her, she also said, "Yes."
Starlight followed close behind. The two were tied to each other with a magic thread for safety reasons, and both of them were similarly tied to the portal itself, but that was no reason not to try to stick close together. "How far away do you think the surface is?" she asked.
"Very," answered Twilight. "But it can't be too far. The water pressure isn't all that bad here."
"We have no guarantee it's working normally," Starlight noted. "We have no guarantee there even is a surface, for that matter."
"We'll try blind teleports if they turn out to be necessary," Twilight said. "For now, let's focus on trying to get there the regular way, and see what we find."
"A lot of nothing it seems." Starlight had a look around. "Visibility is surprisingly clear, and it looks like all there is to see is water, water, and more water."
"No currents." Twilight frowned. "Or at least I can't feel any. What's the water temperature?"
"Do you need the exact measurement, or is knowing it feels like a pleasant bath enough?"
"It is enough, actually." Twilight kept swimming upwards, moving her hooves slowly to avoid tiring her legs. "Is gravity acting normally?"
Starlight let out a small sphere of light from her horn, and watched it float in the water, going neither up nor down. "Either it isn't, or this isn't regular water."
"I'd guess the second." Twilight stretched her neck to look a little higher. "This'll be a boring one, won't it?"
"Maybe we should have gone down instead." Starlight looked downwards as she swam upwards behind Twilight. "Though it doesn't really look much better that way."
A pulse went off from Twilight's horn, and disappeared into the distance as it spread in the water around them. "No signs of any form of life," she commented.
"Expected, but disappointing nonetheless," Starlight said. "That thing could detect a Behemoth, couldn't it?"
"Of course it could," said Twilight. "So yeah, we're alone but at least we're safe. You don't have to call them Behemoths, you know?"
"I'm not calling them abominations. Whoever came up with that term probably knew less about them than we do."
"It's still a more neutral term," Twilight argued.
"It's hardly neutral," Starlight replied. "You just picked it because you feel you should honour the deceased."
Twilight was silent for a moment. "Maybe. There's nothing wrong with that."
"You can't blame yourself for the deaths of worlds that might have ended before you were even born. That's no less nonsensical than thinking you should shoulder the blame for all the crimes in history."
"But I can shoulder the blame for all the world's I may fail to save going forward. As I can take the blame for all the crimes committed in Equestria under my leadership, because they are the result of my failure to build a country where the circumstances for something like that to happen wouldn't present themselves."
Starlight looked at Twilight, sighing and shaking her head slightly. "No one expects you to build a perfect world, much less save a limitless number of them."
"I do," Twilight replied. "That's enough for me to try."