//------------------------------// // Day 3 - Storm: 11/11 // Story: They're... ON HOLIDAY? // by Nameless Narrator //------------------------------// Smiley isn’t exactly sure where everything went wrong. One moment, it’s sniffing and eating weird pony things. Next, there’s a friendly zebra hugging it. Finally, everyone splits up because they’re all tuckered out from everything that’s been happening. Now there’s water everywhere, and it’s not the good water like back home which is scary only if there are rings on the surface or if it smells weird or… many other circumstances, but it’s still nice water if you’re careful. This is running water that made Smiley’s throat hurt when it tried to drink it. Hanging onto the chandelier in the long, now weirdly tilted corridor on the royal deck, Smiley watches the slowly rising water, unsure what to do without any coherent hive link in reach. What would the best number do? Walk on water, swim, or fly away. Experimentally, Smiley spreads its wings. They seem to be working just fine, so where should it fly? *Puzzled face.* *Puzzled face?* Without any hive mind response, Smiley settles down on the chandelier. Maybe this is all part of this strange trip? After all, from what it saw, ponies had water in big indoor holes too, and they were swimming in those. Maybe they just filled this long tunnel so that they didn’t have to keep swimming from one side to the other over and over so often. Groups of swimming ponies passed by Smiley on occasion, but they looked busy and none of them paid the Silent any mind, so whatever’s happening wasn’t changeling business. Smiley dips its foreleg in the water that has risen enough for it to reach. It’s nicely cold. If there’s one thing Smiley doesn’t like about this trip it’s how hot it is everywhere, unlike the tunnels back home. Granted, it feels great to curl up in the sun, but when it’s so hot everywhere that- Huh. Maybe that’s why ponies kept jumping into the big water holes so often! Perhaps it should try it too when things stop being weird and tilted. “Hey, there’s a changeling!” calls out a voice, “Why didn’t it follow the- oh, it’s Smiley.” Zebra friend! Smiley stops poking the water with its hooves and waves at Zemi wearing a weird, yellow, bubbly vest who immediately dives into the water from the stairwell and swims towards it. Stopping under Smiley, she stands up on her hind legs while grabbing the wall for balance, which gives her enough height to keep her head above water, takes her life jacket off, and presents it to Smiley. “Put it on like I did!” she shakes it in the air. Smiley watches, tilting its head. “Spirits damn it!” Zemi curses, taking the vest into her mouth. If there’s one thing she’d learned about ‘the weird drone’ today, it was that it’s more physical than verbal, so it pulls at Smiley’s hoof and beckons it to go to her. Smiley unsteadily creeps around the chandelier until it faces Zemi directly and flies towards her outstretched forelegs until she grabs it and pulls it into a hug. With her back pressed against the wall, she quickly manages to put the life jacket on Smiley properly.   “Thanks for making this easy by not resisting. Now come on, the ship won’t last much longer,” Zemi pats Smiley’s head, lets go, and starts swimming back towards the stairwell, ”I must apologize to 1313 later. I thought he was just paranoid when he said even the security ponies would ignore changelings in trouble and sent us to sweep for anypony still stuck here.” Confounded but amused by its newfound buoyancy, Smiley paddles its legs and follows her.  *** A fragment of 387’s mind is floating in darkness, deliberately severed from the rest of the world and anything that might interrupt its work. The warrior remembers clearly that he carried Chrysalis off into her suite, split up with 65536 in good spirits, checked up on 93, and then decided to go to sleep with the drones. Like a movie reel, the next piece of his perfect changeling memory has been cut out. Not blurred or having its details changed, simply gone until he woke up stuffed behind maintenance piping. There’s nothing there to examine nor recover, just his brain -no, his entire neural network spread all over his changeling body- scrubbed clean. The only places for a closer look are the clean cuts. Any clues he might have noticed when he woke up and didn’t take in at the moment due to confusion? Disturbed dust, scents, anything? No. He was out for hours, so that’s understandable. So what about before the cut? Something made him decide against going to sleep there and then. What? Did he hear or see something? The graphic reconstruction of his awareness state leaves 387 standing in a corridor with a hoof raised to open the drone cabin. 387 smirks. He clearly can’t find what is amiss, so how about what isn’t? There isn’t anyone in the corridor, his warrior peripheral vision is granting him a good enough field of view. The ventilation shafts above him aren’t big enough for any creature to crawl through, and there are no holes in the floor under the carpet lining the entire hallway.  That means I either heard or smelled something. Smell could have been coming from anywhere due to the vents, so that line of thought won’t narrow this down. Alright, if I heard something that got erased, where could it come from?  Someone tampered with his mind to a great degree, that’s clear. He’s fairly certain that even Chrysalis still couldn’t do something like this and she had some experience with his unique primal changeling mind by now. And yet, the creature he must have followed did it on the first try, successfully, and including wiping his backups. Whoever it was, they were an absolute master of mental manipulation. I wish I knew more about magic. What happened to me seems impossible to do through sheer mental skills, and I would laugh at anyone who would claim they could do it… before now. No, I can’t treat magic as an all-powerful answer. If it was, changelings all over Equestria would be having different problems, and if ponies can’t even do detection perfectly, mental manipulation is nowhere near the point of what happened to me. So, that means…what? Stairs! Several potential puzzle pieces move the warrior’s theory ahead. The only places where he could have heard something unusual for that time of night were cabins or the stairs. Considering that he ended up down on the normally permanently locked maintenance deck, stairs are much more likely. The staircase is made of metal and not carpeted. He must have heard someone and followed them down. Along with a stab of pain, a tiny bit of 387’s memory returns, revealing a flash of him descending the staircase. Heh. I was wrong. They didn’t only cut out a chunk of my memories, they were much more delicate and tried to cut themselves out at the frayed edges of the missing timeline. Why, though? The result would have been the same. 387 concentrates on the final memory. A tiny piece is missing from the visual. He saw something from the corner of his eye just as he rounded a floor, something which is now the missing piece. The shape is round and slightly frayed. What could it be? The metaphorical floating of 387’s separated mental fragment gets interrupted by… …actual floating? He should be completely insulated from the outside world right now, so why…? Oh no… 387’s eyes shoot open and, as a warrior, he’s immediately fully aware of his surroundings, namely the fact that he’s floating in water with the outer layer of his carapace soft and porous like pumice and gills on his neck.  The ship is sinking. Drones? Natural causes? Immediately, he checks his hive links and finds them crippled, exhausted, and unable to contact anyone. Thankfully, he can at least sense the others, all but one… The vital one, unfortunately, as little as he would want to admit it. Chrysalis? The absence of Chrysalis’ link in his mind doesn’t bode well. 387 swaps his reflexive pumice transformation for flippers on all four legs and swims out of the suite, going as fast as he can towards the stairs to the royal deck. All doors on this floor are open and brief glances into the cabins reveal no drowning or drowned creatures, which hints at the possibility that 387 has woken up during the late stages of passenger evacuation. Stairs up cleared, 387 enters the royal deck where the water is reaching only to his neck, and notices the only closed door on this floor which, to his mounting horror, is Chrysalis’ suite.  Hive damn it! If she drowned because of Luna’s spell I’ll be so pissed. Laughing at the sheer stupidity of it all, but pissed. Unlike with Gem, this magically reinforced door doesn’t survive the furious onslaught of a love-empowered warrior who punches a hole in the section that’s still above water and breaks the rest off. Chrysalis is sitting on top of a wardrobe with a scowl on her face showing her fangs. “Took you long enough!” she snarls at 387. “I got my brain blended by someone better than you and I only just woke up. What’s YOUR excuse?!” he shoots back. “I can’t transform or contact anyone, probably thanks to Luna and that traitorous little drone spawn, and the door was locked!” “Did you lose your key or something?” sneers 387. “I woke up only when I swallowed water, you moron, and I could barely control my legs. It’s a miracle I even managed to crawl up here!” growls Chrysalis. “Hop on my back,” 387 rolls his eyes, swimming over to the wardrobe “And promise you won’t call 65536 a traitor again. I checked its head to see what happened between you two and that one’s on you.” Carefully, Chrysalis pushes herself onto 387’s back and locks her forelegs around his neck. “I am its Queen no matter what it- blbulublublublu!” she swallows water when 387 dives down into the filling corridor. When he surfaces, Chrysalis spits out a wad of goop and water and rasps, “WHAT THE FUCK?!” “I told you not to speak badly of 65536,” 387 snickers, “If there’s a drone who doesn’t deserve it it’s that guy. It speaks to its loyalty that it even bothered to warn you before you shoved your brain into a mental equivalent of a cement mixer filled with broken glass and angry cats.” “FINE!” Chrysalis growls, “I won’t do anything to it and I’ll let it visit the hive this winter again, stupid red costume and everything. Screw it if it asks me to wear that glowing red nose again, though, no amount of wibbling is going to make me do it!” “But you were such a cute reindeer!” says 387 innocently, finally getting to the stairs and running upwards to the main deck. “I will bite your head off and use your overblown ego as a floating device!” “You’re the one to talk about ego. How could you even think that stealing a ticket to this cruise would be something we wouldn’t figure out?” “What?” “Don’t try to pull this shit on me! 10013 talked to 1313 who confirmed he didn’t invite us here and that his invitation got stolen.”  “So? How does that involve me? Our ticket was addressed to us, not that living Build-your-own-changeling project.” “For the love of the hive, Chrysalis, I’m going to need you to be honest for once in your life! Did you have someone steal 1313’s invitation and use it to get on this cruise?”  “Warriors…” Chrysalis rolls her eyes, “Yes, sure, I definitely did all that, then I made sure everyone on the guest list would be okay with us AND that we’d have our own cabins. No, you idiot. I saw a chance and I took it.”  “Holes damn it! Then who would want us here and why? And why did you take the drones instead of warriors and infiltrators for safety?”  “You wanna know why? Because they deserved it more than anyone else. Did you know that 36658 beat a timberwolf pup to death when it attacked 57999 at my poppy patch? It had to eat half of its own stash not to feel the pain of having two of its legs ripped off and crushed organs and it still lived when 57999 dragged it halfway across the Badlands before a ranked changeling caught its call for help. 10013 has been ignoring my break time rule to teach the newly hatched how to deal with tunnel horrors. 20100 invented the basic pictograms that cover the walls of their little ‘shrine’. Those are not just random pictures, in case you didn’t notice. This is their reward, some time to rest, relax, and see something new which they, as experienced veterans whom the other drones listen to, can communicate to others. I admit I picked the new guys at random, but they’re here so that the newborn back home can believe someone with the same circumstances as them.”  “And… Smiley?” the admission hits 387 like a hammer. “Good luck charm,“ Chrysalis grins, ”Oh don’t look at me like that! I was wondering if some fresh interactions could serve as a mental recovery tool.”  Security ponies are spread out over the top deck and one begins waving a glowing flashlight in the air shortly after a small ball of chitin rushes towards the duo. “OVER HERE!” 10013 calls out, “LIFEY BOATS THIS WAY! STICK TO THE NETS!” With a breath of relief, 387 carries Chrysalis towards the raised front of the ship where ladders have been set up leading down to a floating yellow raft full of ponies. Many more are dotting the sea ahead, connected by ropes, while a lightweight web of thinner ropes spreads to the side to which ponies who didn’t fit on the lifeboats are clinging while wearing life jackets. The warrior obviously doesn’t believe that Chrysalis would just blurt out everything even when she’s not feeling exactly well, but it is something.  “10013, does your hive linking work?” “Yup!” “Is everyone accounted for?” 10013 points towards the webbing with only dozens of life jackets being visible against the black, late evening sea. With enough concentration, 387 spots a group of strangely puffy drones wearing even puffier yellow vests while bobbing on the surface of the water with their legs hooked on the webbing. “Yes, they are! There wasn’t enough space in the lifey boats for anyone but 93 and 65536 because the SECURITY ponies couldn’t get to those on the underwater side of the ship, so they gave all the guys big, yellow floaties that keep us from sinking! 36658 is holding an extra one for me. Oh, and Smiley got two because we couldn’t teach it the floaty form in time.” “Good job!” 387 nods approvingly, squinting at Smiley who has one lifejacket hooked around its forelegs and one more around its hind legs, “Really good job.” After dropping Chrysalis off on the nearest lifeboat, the warrior joins in scouring the boat for anyone stuck. Eventually, Glorious Quest accompanied by Sun Hammer announce that everyone is safe, and the procession of boats starts drifting away from the cruise ship with the floaters in tow.