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// [1-3] Harper 
// Story: Seattle Seapony 
// by dNihil 
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Thunder boomed.  The sound of rain pouring came from outside.  The filly felt soaked inside and out in lukewarm water.  Not in a miserable way; rather, it felt quite good, as though she was one with the water.  Her eyes slowly cracked open and she examined her surroundings.

She was still in the bathroom.  Above her, gray light filtered in through the long window near the ceiling.  The tub she had slept in was full to the brim; it was overflowing, in fact, and water still poured out of the faucet, gurgling on the surface.  She poked her tail into the stream and it felt slightly colder than the rest of the tub.

Over the edge of the tub, she saw that the floor was covered in a few inches of water.  It flowed out in a sheet, pouring onto the floor of the bathroom.  The door was open; the whole apartment flat must have been drenched.

Sitting up, she looked down at her reflection in the water.  She could see herself clearly now that there was daylight.  She gasped; she had such a cute face now!  Giant hazel eyes looked into her own, shiny and expressive, making her heart clench.  There was an itty little proboscis of a muzzle which stretched wide as she smiled at herself.  A spiraling shoot extended from her forehead, lying dormant yet standing out sharply from the rest of her features.  All this was framed by pink fins coming out her head, complementing her salmon-tone scales.

Looking down at the rest of her body, she found herself to indeed be a sort of fish, as she had imagined in her half-baked thoughts the night before.  If a seahorse grew to a few feet tall, she imagined this might be what they looked like.

All of this seemed familiar, somehow.  She couldn't quite put her fin on it.

She looked back out at the bathroom around her.  All the ground was covered in water now.  She was a fish.  That was water.  Fish swam in water.  So the filly swam in the water.  She leapt out of the tub and splashed onto the ground.  She wiggled a bit and found it much easier to move now.  So then she did.

Her first destination was to the kitchen.  She made it out into the main room and stopped, looking around.  Usually her mom would be out here well before daylight, and have breakfast ready by the time she woke up for her and her sister.

She heard the bathroom door behind her being closed.  She turned around.

With the door closed, she had a view of the whole hallway now.  At the end of it was the door to the second bedroom, next to a closet.  The door to her mom's bedroom was closed; odd, because she always left it open in the mornings.  She swam over and opened it up, using her tail to turn the doorknob.

Like her sister's bed, this one was vacant.  Also similar was that the sheets were strewn about.  But it was strange, because her mom always made her bed after getting up.  She started glancing about the room but found nothing else out of the ordinary.

That's, now, three things that seemed unusual about this.  And three was the magic number.  It always signified something.  In this case, something had changed, and she now needed to do something about it.

Tears spilled down her eyes as she clenched them shut, took a deep breath, and screamed out of the top of her lungs.

"Moooooooooooooooom!"

Echoes of the name were thrown about the room, and she gasped for breath.  Nothing happened, though.  Calling had always worked for her before, but now... it didn't.  Her breath caught and she suddenly felt spooked out of her depth.

She felt something warm on her shoulder.

She turned her head and saw a green unicorn next to her, its hoof on her shoulder and smiling a reassuring smile toward the filly.

"Don't look so spooked, Callie.  There's nothing scary here.  Why were you shouting?"  The unicorn with the white mane stared into the filly's hazel eyes with its own piercing gold ones.  They were inquiring, yet seemingly conveyed a calmness, that the unicorn was sure of the world around it.

"H-Harper?" the filly said, tears still streaming down her eyes.

"Cala," Harper said in turn.  "Why don't you come and have some breakfast?  You must be starved after what you went through last night."  It turned and walked out the bedroom door, going off down the hallway without seeming to wait for Cala to follow.

The sad little fish looked back at her mother's vacant bed, then turned to follow after it.


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