A pale, winged creature flew high over the sparkling ocean, searching.
She had searched every continent, only to find nothing but devastation, places where ponies used to live...but not anymore.
The ocean offered little hope. After all, seaponies ARE NOT REAL! But with nothing else to do, nowhere else to be, Princess Celestia quartered every square mile of salt water.
Far ahead, she spotted an irregularity in the waves and swells. As she flew onwards, her eyes confirmed the break was more than just a shallow or a reef.
Beyond a sandy beach, a jungle of trees and shrubs welcomed her.
She had found an island not listed on any maps or charts. An unexpected, last hope for ponykind.
Celestia descended gradually, as she circled the island. Finally, as she came level with some of the taller shrubs, she noticed a glint from beneath.
Celestia made a perfect four point landing, and trotted towards the shrubs, bending her neck low to fit beneath them.
The beacon was an enormous glass jar, practically large enough to let a pony crawl inside.
An empty glass jar!
Just a piece of garbage.
Celestia stomped her hoof in frustration. Just when she'd thought maybe she wasn't all alone! But it had been a mere trick of the light, an inconsiderate piece of littering.
But as Celestia looked even closer, what she saw gave her hope.
The jar had a lid next to it...but the lid?
Somecreature had pierced holes in the lid...FROM THE INSIDE. Sharp, jagged edges of metal poking up around each hole made that perfectly clear.
If somecreature had been inside that jar? Perhaps, just perhaps, that creature had found a way to shelter from the world-spanning catastrophe.
Celestia barely dared to hope...the survivor might be a pony. A stallion, even?
After Celestia's long flight over unbroken ocean, she felt weary. She found a shady spot beneath trees, curled up to rest, and gradually fell asleep.
***
A rhythmic sound, something between chopping and squishing, worked its way into Celestia's dreams, slowly coaxing her awake.
"Mmmph," she complained, as her dream masseuse faded into nothingness. But when she opened her eyes, she saw not only a pony, but a stallion!
Tall, powerfully built, gray coated and blonde maned, the stallion held a cooking knife in his mouth, with which he cut up something colorless and flattened, into small squares.
"Yes!" Celestia's heart rejoiced.
The stallion used a beach shovel to scoop up chopped pieces from the split log he used as a cutting board, and dump them into a hollowed out stump.
Into the stump, he sprinkled several dashes of white powder. Next he stirred the mixture with a stick, and finally dumped more white powder on top.
"Oh, jellyfish!" the stallion declaimed. "Why must your name be so ironic? You might be edible, but JELLY you are not. Cursed, cursed be the name of the so called jellyfish! More fitting to call you rubberyfish, at best. And even to eat you as a sort of edible rubber, takes SO much labor to chop you finely, and pickle your stings away with mounds of salt and lye."
Celestia stared wide eyed at this speech, and at the stallion's dramatic gestures.
When the stallion seemed to be finished, she said tentatively, "You're...alive?"
The stallion turned, seeking the voice's source. "Seaponies are real!" he rejoiced.
Celestia crawled out from beneath her bush. "No." She shook her head. "Seaponies are NOT real. I've looked. But alicorns are real, or at least ONE alicorn is real. Isn't that every bit as good?"
The stallion sighed. "You're an alicorn?"
Celestia nodded, waving her horn in the air as she flapped her wings. "Princess Celestia herself, princess of Equestria. And you might be?"
The stallion sighed again. "Hughbert Jellius, and no prince at all. A mere commoner. But I AM one of the world's foremost appreciators of jelly. AND of SOME jams."
"SOME jams?" Celestia echoed weakly.
"Yes. I don't like jams that have too many seeds in them. Too bothersome to chew."
"Well," Celestia said. She had centuries of training and practice in the arts of international diplomacy and courtly manners, but...this odd stallion somehow had her at a loss.
"So," Celestia said. "I'm glad to see you alive. I don't see a lot of ponies in this world, lately. How do you come to be here and...NOT dead?"
Hughbert stomped his hoof. "I was minding my own business, soaking my entire body in jelly within one of my giant jars, as a proper jelly appreciator does..."
Tentatively, Celestia nodded.
"I use a long straw to breathe through, so I can get a full soak even all over my head."
Celestia nodded again. "I've known at least one prince who many times has been told to go soak his head." Tears welled in Celestia's eyes. "But...those times are gone."
The stallion huffed angrily. "For whatever reason, somepony thought it would be funny to slap a lid on my jar, screw it on tight, and knock the jar over to let it roll away. Isn't that terrible?"
Celestia ventured a cautious "...yes?"
The stallion continued, "Of course, a jar that's mostly full of jam and pony has a rather limited supply of air inside. If I hadn't thought of poking holes in the lid with my pocketknife, I could have suffocated. How unkind!"
Celestia nodded. "How dreadful."
"Even with the holes, I might not have been able to stay alive if I hadn't had my trusty straw with me, to suck air from outside. How lucky that my years of jelly connoisseurship have taught me advanced in-jar survival skills!"
Celestia's amusement only barely showed on her face. "I doubt even a colt scout could have done better."
The stallion nodded with satisfaction. "Yes. And then...the disaster happened."
"Do you mean, when the catastrophe swept across all of Equestria and beyond?"
"I wouldn't know about that. But my jar rolled into the ocean, and floated away. I was forced to live for months on only my dwindling in-jar supply of jelly, and any other nutriment I could catch through my straw. Do you have any IDEA how long it takes to suck a full meal's worth of newly hatched baby fish through a straw?"
Celestia shook her head. "My formal education...somehow failed to cover that. I could tell you which forks to use in what order at a formal dinner, though. Knowledge which, like so much else, is useless now."
The stallion smiled. "But I see map corners sticking out of your saddlebags. Those seem like useful knowledge. Surely you can navigate the way back to civilization. Are you here to rescue me?"
Celestia stared at the stallion. "You don't know, do you?"
"I don't know what?" He blinked. "Are you bad at directions? Are you lost out here too?"
Celestia shook her head. "Civilization is gone. There IS no more civilization. You and I are it. Ponykind perished, destroyed by a calamity too horrifying to describe."
The stallion's jaw dropped. After a moment, he spoke. "What? No more civilization? No more ponykind?"
Celestia nodded.
"No more jam farms and jelly factories? No more cherry plantations? No more freshly planted strawberry fields?"
"No," Celestia sighed. "No more strawberry fields, forever." She shrugged. "Unless strawberries are self sowing. Do strawberry plants reseed themselves? Or do they require pony assistance from one season to the next? You see, I never used to have cause to worry about such things. Farmers always handled these matters for me."
Hughbert collapsed onto the sand. "It hardly seems worth living. Not with the world's jelly production knocked back to the Stone Fruit Age."
Celestia tried to look cheerful, to inspire some hope. "But...maybe we can rebuild! We can recreate the arts of civilization! We can build a new society! With me as princess, and you as..." Celestia eyed his sturdy figure. After months without seeing even one stallion, she felt unusually thirsty, possibly impairing her judgement. "just perhaps, if you pass the full interview process, my prince?"
Celestia stepped closer. "You, my handsome stallion, survived all alone as a castaway upon this desolate island. You must be a very resourceful pony. I know we can do it, together."
The stallion gazed up into her eyes. "You...make me feel something. Something I haven't felt in the longest time."
Celestia smiled. "Hope?"
"Yes, hope."
"Excellent. Please show me around, and help me learn desert island survival, sand based arts and crafts and that sort of thing. "
Celestia used her wings to gather coconuts from treetops, and fished with a collapsable pole from her saddlebags. Hughbert turned up his nose at eating "even MORE fish, not even JELLYfish!" but didn't complain about her eating the entire catch of mackerel herself.
Dinner was quite adequate.
Afterwards, both ponies used end-chewed sticks to clean their teeth, and cuddled by a campfire.
Sleep was more pleasant for each of them than it had been for what felt like nearly forever. Celestia had been alone since the catastrophe, and Hughbert...had been alone for even longer than that.
When morning came, the two ponies nuzzled, and went out for another day of 'showing Celestia around.'
As the days passed, Celestia became increasingly convinced that Hughbert Jellius was, indeed, THE ONE. THE right stallion for her. The best and most eligible bachelor in the entire world.
(Also the ONLY stallion in the world, but who's counting?)
(That is, assuming that seaponies really AREN'T real.)
***
One day, Celestia was flying around checking palm trees for ripe coconuts, when she looked out at the ocean and thought the ocean wasn't QUITE the right shade of green.
Or maybe she was just imagining things?
Yes, she decided. Just imagining things. No way could the catastrophe reach this far, to the center of the ocean, to an island so far from any other land, to a place that no map or chart listed at all.
But, the next time she looked out in the same direction, she couldn't lie to herself.
The ocean really, truly was the WRONG shade of green.
She whizzed through the air, landing upon the sandy beach where, as usual, Hughbert laboriously turned jellyfish into a sort of finely chopped jellyfish jerky.
"Hughbert!" she cried out. "We need to escape! We need to leave the island!"
Hughbert blinked at her. "And go where?"
"I don't know! But we have to leave. We have to look for another place. I didn't know THIS island was here, until I found it. There might be some other undiscovered island too, even more remote than this one!"
Hughbert blinked again. "WHY do we have to leave?"
Celestia took a deep breath. "Hughey," she wheedled, "I told you about civilization being destroyed, right?"
Hughbert nodded. "But you never really told me what happened to it."
For a fraction of a second, Celestia's gaze darted towards the ocean. Hughbert, noticing, stared out at the deep water.
"Celly. What aren't you telling me? What's the secret? What's going on?"
Celestia took another deep breath. "A...'friend' of mine thought it would be funny to spike the food of a dragon friend of mine with gem concentrate, to make him suddenly grow really big." Celestia sighed. "Discord has really bad taste in jokes, sometimes. So, having poor judgement, my 'friend' Discord decided to play the prank not just anytime, but at a huge diplomatic event, the Inter-Species Conference. A conference where, by mistake, Spike's meal was served to the wrong creature."
Celestia sobbed. "To the WRONG CREATURE!"
Hughbert gently patted Celestia's withers, trying to comfort her.
"Every type of creature in Equestria and beyond was there!" Celestia wailed. "Dragons. Abyssinians. Yaks. Oryxes..."
Hughbert asked hopefully, "Seaponies?"
"No! SEAPONIES ARE NOT REAL!"
"Sorry." Hughbert slumped.
"And you know who else was there? THE SMOOZE."
"What's a smooze?"
"It's a creature that, it turns out, if you feed it EXACTLY the wrong kind of gem concentrate, starts growing at nearly the speed of sonic rainboom, swallowing up everything in its path."
Hughbert patted Celestia. "You poor dear."
Celestia sighed. "I wouldn't even know THAT much about why the world was destroyed, if Discord hadn't apologized to me while we were running away. Before he fell behind and the Smooze ate him too." Celestia's shoulders heaved. "I am SO, SO sorry. So sorry that we have to leave this island, so sorry that I ever let Discord sneak into the kitchen for a moment when I wasn't looking..."
A wave broke upon the shore, slithering partway up the beach...and didn't retreat back into the water. It just kept crawling higher on the sand, narrowing the gap between ocean and jungle.
Hughbert stared. "Is that...is that the Smooze?"
"Yes. That's the Smooze." The wave of green slime picked up a piece of driftwood, caressed it with one newly formed, temporary tentacle, slowly swallowed the wood into the Smooze's depths.
"That..." Hughbert said, staring as if mesmerized.
"Run! Come away with me! Don't let it get you!"
Hughbert took one step forward, towards the Smooze. "It's exactly like jelly. With ZERO seeds. Jelly that can grab a pony, caress him...it's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen."
"NO! DON'T DO IT!"
Hughbert ran directly towards the swelling, approaching Smooze. He leaped into it, reaching out with both forehooves. "Be my love!" he shouted. "Take me forever! Make me yours!"
He was sucked beneath the surface, and didn't come back up. Celestia slowly retreated, backing away, waiting several minutes for her 'prince' to resurface, or to at least stick a straw's tip above the surface for air.
As Celestia backed deeper into the jungle, she finally said, "Buck it." Her horn glowed with a light brighter than any other pony's eyes could bear to behold. The sun's glare grew brighter, penetrating even to the jungle's depths. The scent of scorched vegetation filled Celestia's nostrils.
The island's trees and shrubs were burning. The entire world, perhaps.
With an enormous, world spanning, disgusting, nearly defeaningly loud "SPLORRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRCH!" the Smooze exploded.
***
"And that," Celestia explained as she set down her teacup next to a cheese sampling plate, "is how I accidentally saved the world, by finally not caring whether I lived or died, and kind of trying to burn myself and the rest of the world to death."
Luna nodded gravely, and swallowed. "I can understand your desperation. From outside the Smooze, it really isn't obvious that creatures it's swallowed up aren't swiftly suffocated to death. But we weren't dead, we were just...resting. The Smooze isn't a murderer, it's just the world's biggest cuddler."
Next to Luna, Twilight snorted. "It's kind of annoying, but it isn't nearly as bad as Fluttershy's brother."
Luna asked, "The brother who you put in the hospital twice?"
"Yes," Twilight agreed. "THAT brother. The one who's had many of his bones broken by mares. The one who now has a magical restraining order on him, to keep him at least five hundred hoofsteps away from me at all time."
Celestia's brows quirked. "Twilight? You never told me about this."
Twilight shrugged. "It's not a big deal. And even if I accidentally crowd him off the edge of a cliff or something like that, he has wings. It's perfectly safe. Well, as safe as he deserves. It's an easy spell! The Equestrian Mareist Society has a pamphlet about it, and some other useful spells too."
Twilight levitated a pamphlet towards Celestia, laying it on the tabletop. "See? It's a special spell that targets the most persistently annoying and noxious pests. Like Zephyr Breeze." She sighed. "Too bad it only works on creatures with bones."
After a few minutes of reading, Celestia said, "This is remarkable."
"How so?" Luna asked.
"If we'd had this 'Mareist magic' a thousand years ago, Discord would have been a lot less trouble."
Luna nodded. "True. But no use crying over spilled oats."
Meanwhile, in the deepest part of the largest ocean on the opposite side of the world from Equestria, a droplet of green goo absorbed a scrap of plankton...and grew just the tiniest, slightest amount.
Someday, it would return...to demand MORE HUGS.
Even if you're stranded on a tropical island, lye can be made from ashes. (Tip: making lye from seaweed ashes uses a different process than making lye from wood ashes.) Of course, as a true jelly and jam fanatic, long before 'the apocalypse' Jellius read up on how to use JELLYfish as food JUST IN CASE.