Fluttershy woke up with a start to a grumbling sound, she was still in a bubble and no it had not been a dream that she was trapped in one drifting in a void. This was the fourth time she woke up to this and she had finished her carrot already what she assumed was days ago not wanting it to rot and become useless. She hadn’t really thought that dying of thirst would come before dying of hunger. What was there to say? There was no one else around for what looked like forever to say it to if she did have inkling as to what she would discuss.
Sighing she could use a drink right about now, she was really weak and suffering from the lack of food and drink. She looked around, the universe was a beautiful place and it just wasn’t a place that a pony from her world was ready for quite yet. The first lesson was a harsh and memorable one; bring a lot of food and water with you if you’re going to be traveling randomly through space.
Some part of Fluttershy wouldn’t give up the ghost as she looked around, she could see a sun that was not quite the one from her world. There were so many small orbs in quite distance from her and if only her bubble would float close enough to… did she feel some weight beneath her hooves?
Looking down Fluttershy couldn’t help but feel a bit of trepidation as her bubble started to fall towards a planet, a world not like hers that looked to be entirely covered by an endless sea. Her bubble slipped past the cold upper atmosphere easily enough, but when it hit warmer air the bubble suddenly burst with soft popping noise and she fell, she barely had any strength to give a half hearted scream. She fell for a few minutes before hitting a thick cloud and her momentum left her legs sticking out the bottom of the cloud she had struck.
She inhaled with her nose, the air smelled of salt water, quite a thick amount of salt water considering the world was obviously covered entirely by an ocean. She was just glad she could breathe at all and only hoped that whatever alien organisms or bacteria she was breathing in didn’t end up killing her. She weakly pulled each leg up and on top of the cloud and ripped up a large puff of the cloud up to hold to her mouth. She tiredly squeezed at the cloud and forcibly swallowed the fresh water that poured into her mouth.
Fluttershy was praying that what she was drinking was actually pure water as it tasted quite refreshing the second it hit her tongue. At this point she could care less if she was drinking acid rain; Fluttershy needed the reprieve of good fortune. What she truly needed badly right now was food, she didn’t see any other creatures in the sky and she rightly assumed that any creatures she saw here would be water bound.
Looking over the edge of the cloud and at the horizon on all sides of the cloud she stood upon, she saw nothing but sea water. At least she’d never go thirsty as a pegasus can separate fresh water from even the most toxic sludge, if there was any fresh water to be had in it that is. She wouldn’t have a large effect on the environment getting drinking water or even doing the pegasus form of showering.
What of food though? Fluttershy’s stomach gurgled again in the throes of pain, her ribs were noticeably showing and her hair was starting to get matted. Grabbing another chunk of cloud she squeezed it above her head to wash some of her weariness away. She wouldn’t want to swim in the unknown ocean without food clearly visible or near the surface; she’d have to eat kelp and moss. Her best chance was to find a nearby underwater mountain.
Fluttershy jumped straight up and flapped her wings, only to fall back into the cloud. She was too weak to fly or the atmosphere was a bit thicker than normal, it was definitely a combination of both as far as she could tell. She started taking apart her cloud and shaping it, drinking what water she could from it while creating a rectangular shaped cloud. Upon finishing she nodded her head to herself in thought; her weary mind was almost getting to her and at some point she might lose hope of ever getting home. As long as she lived there was a chance she’d see her friends again no matter how miniscule it seemed.
No matter what her condition or how her personality changed she wanted to get back home to her friends. Slowly flapping her wings while hugging the cloud tightly she drove it forward with minimal propulsion and tried not to cringe at the ache in her stomach and the lack of what wasn’t in it at the moment. She looked over to side of the cloud every now and then for a dark unmoving spot in the water near the surface, all she had to do was find a underwater mountain and there would be kelp and moss that would promote her survival no matter how lacking in nutrition it might be. It would be enough for her, it just had to be.
Even a little time on a planet covered in water with no landmarks was not kind to Fluttershy. Water was an easy resource to get and after only what she thought was a few hours she found food was truly hard to come by. It wasn’t a problem with finding it; it was a problem getting to it without getting attacked.
Fluttershy dove into the warm water having found a mountaintop in the sea; she immediately went to work leaving her cloud hanging just above the water like a pool toy waiting for her. She swam to the top of the underwater mountain and started collecting green and brown seaweed and some bright green moss that looked particularly safe to eat. When she felt movement of something swiftly going through the water she immediately went for the surface with what little she had gathered. She only got her cloud twenty feet up when she saw what had interrupted her foraging.
It was one of the many scary creatures in the murky waters of the planet and it shocked her to witness the suicidal starfish like creatures that, after failing to catch her on her way back to her cloud, blew up violently. The fact that they exploded and were covered in a strange muck from the glimpse she got told her something was very wrong; she didn’t believe that creatures would naturally do something like that.
Her eyes filled with tears as she moved her cloud higher from the surface of the planet, something felt very off now that she looked at the waters. She felt the danger from her position in the sky. She knew that for the next few days it would be hard for her to get enough food to fill her belly. She was glad that she was better at swimming then she was at flying, those lake krakens back in Ponyville really helped her prepare for this kind of situation.
After a while of floating above the water eating her meager earnings, she tried again several times to forage in the turbulent sea and the reactions of the native creatures kept getting even scarier. Whatever was going on here on this planet, Fluttershy didn’t feel the humongous lightning jellyfish creatures, the frighteningly mutated looking anglers or exploding shellfish were normal. Each time they tried to attack her in concert working as if they had one mind, they were however quite slow to react to her presence and only moved on her when she went deeper than ten feet at most as she could estimate without a visual aid. They only came after her a minute or so after she touched the waters of the infinite ocean giving her precious little time to dive down deep enough to get food for herself. It was as if there was an intelligence driving all the creatures on this planet to try and kill her even if it meant destroying themselves to do it should they fail, she got covered in foreign blood a few times in the last hour or so and was hit by stray bits of shell and or organs of the creatures that died trying to end her life.
She did manage to get more food and would be capable of surviving a little longer, but she was incredibly sad for the creatures that lost their lives trying to end hers. She barely even noticed that her hair wasn’t taking the salt water, blood and or bits of exploded aquatic creatures very well. Thankfully it all came out of her mane when she dried herself off using chunks of cloud as a towel to rub it all out until she was dry and clean.
She might need a comb or a brush sooner or later, but until then she could clean her hair out with cloud matter. It was something that Rainbow did all the time and she wanted to be remembered as she was when she left, so she didn’t feel like making drastic changes to her appearance at this time. She didn’t care how silly, inane or even vain the thought was, she wanted to retain her appearance as well as she could to live up to the standards Rarity thinks she somewhat has.
Eating the moss and kelp helped her stomach temporarily stop gurgling, those animals sacrificed their lives to try stopping her from getting food and she wouldn’t let their unusual sacrifices go in vain. The moss tasted pretty bad and the kelp was somewhat more tasteful, now if only she had some rice and vegetables to go with it. She had a little more strength, but all the swimming and moving a cloud around was taking its toll on her stamina which was nowhere near as lasting as her friends, such as Applejack in a particular.
Fluttershy may be stuck here forever, but her spirit wouldn’t let her quit. She was a survivor, a nature nurturing naturalist of a pony and she would push herself to live for her friends. She knew that even with the tenuously stretched connection that her friends missed her greatly and were wondering where she was.
“I want to go home.” Fluttershy muttered to herself curling up on her personal cloud, she didn’t like this world or the creatures that seemed to all be messed up by something. If only she knew a method for getting home or at least a direction to travel in to get there. She fell asleep upon her cloud and would collect more food tomorrow; survival was what she needed most right now.
The next day she had found out the truth of the problems of this world, upon waking up and once again scrounging the depths of the dangerous tides. She forged her path to filling her water resistant saddlebags with food. She stayed close to the surface as she could, not wanting to make more of the native sea creatures sacrifice their lives in such a horrific meaningless manner. Their blood was on her hooves quite literally.
The truth was that there was something hurting the creatures of this massive ocean, she was lucky enough to have been missed by whatever the metallic objects were that flew through the general areas she foraged at. They were dumping strange substances or chemical into the sea before flying up into outer space. Fluttershy knew they were foreign to this world and they were upsetting the natural ecosystem with whatever it was they were doing or trying to accomplish. She could do nothing to save this world from those metallic flying objects; she wasn’t strong, brave or a fighter like her friends. She was also technically a pacifist, even if she did truly want to make those metallic things go away to wherever they came from and leave these poor sea creatures alone forever by force.
The numerous unidentified flying metal objects were accompanied by even larger ones in fewer numbers that seemed to carry the smaller ones. They were all coming from the same sky from which she fell, what they were doing here wasn’t nice at all. She was glad that she was able to wrap her body in cloud and get close enough without being spotted; she just had to see what was inside the strange quick flying machines. The sludge they spewed was definitely toxic, of that she had no doubt. She could smell the stuff even from what she guessed was a mile up from the ocean, she would steer well clear of where they dumped their toxins. Fluttershy did not want to get sick without any chance of medical aid as there were no ponies here to help her if she became ill and was so far barely managing to avoid sickness in her weakly state.
Couldn’t they see that they were destroying what looked like a beautiful world from what she saw beyond the atmosphere? What could be a good enough reason for wanting to destroy the planet like this? It didn’t make any sense and it was madness that they’d hurt all life on this planet badly enough to drive the creatures of the sea into a suicidal frenzy. While Fluttershy hadn’t been here long she was already missing her nice safe home and all her wonderful little animal friends, her Homesickness couldn’t be cured as she had no idea where her home was amongst the stars.
She wished she could do something to stop the atrocities these hairy bipedal monsters were unleashing upon this world with their machinery and technology. They had to be the reason why the animals looked unnatural, even in this environment animals didn’t normally kill themselves without reason or worked outside the food chain to attack intruders. They were destroying this planet and they were doing it on purpose, she was a helpless little pony that could do nothing to stop them. She idly thought of sneaking aboard their massive ships to escape this world or to somehow convince them to leave, but she didn’t think she’d survive the attempt.
Fluttershy was fighting with herself before long over her indecision of whether surviving to see her friends again meant more to her than trying to save this planet and the life here that was being ruined by these monsters from the stars.