//------------------------------// // Ludicrous Speeds // Story: Caravel // by Odd_Sarge //------------------------------// “Where the hay are you?” A few minutes after the sudden lurches had stopped, I had made way outside, only to find that the sails were whipping violently as we sailed further and further away from the port. My ears flicked that way and that as the wind passed me. We stayed on a mostly straight path, the rudder moving us very little. “I’m all around you!” I heard Keel’s booming voice yell through the wind. I spun in a circle on deck in confusion, looking for the ghastly griffon. “What do you mean?” My shout when unanswered for a time, and I continued to look around the deck from where I stood. Suddenly, bits and pieces of wood around me slowly began to glow a vibrant cyan hue, the bright colors slowly encroaching upon me. I shielded my eyes with a hoof as the glow grew tenfold. “Hold on! We’re almost in the clear!” My whole body shook as I stood in place, the harsh winds threatening to bowl me over. A few seconds later, I found myself diving to the hard plank floor, but I hadn’t dove because of the wind. In fact, a bright flash of blue and a calm wind had come over me. I stood up from my position on the ground and rubbed my muzzle with a hoof. My eyes swept across the deck of the ship once more. The sails had been rolled up again, and I was still able to see the cyan glow around them, albeit at a much more manageable light level for my sensitive eyes. I looked around, noting the glow still remained on everything. Besides that, nothing else seemed out of the ordinary. “We’re here!” I heard Heavy Keel sing. Still rubbing my muzzle, I took a moment to examine the planks all around me a little bit more closely. “Why is the ship glowing?” “The better question for you to ask, is why am I glowing?” Well that answered a bunch of things for me. He's actually a ghost ship. A literal, ghost ship. I was still seeing more and more evidence of how well a trip with this griffon was going to be, and this strange occurrence was immediately deposited into the ever growing list. All of a sudden, the light seemed to evaporate from all the planks, shooting out of them and into a quickly forming condensed ball of light in front of me. I averted my gaze instead of diving this time, and only stood when a brief flash of light alerted me that the process was over. When I looked back, low and behold, there stood Heavy Keel. “Still a ghost I see,” I grumbled as I went about dusting myself off. He smiled at me and pointed off to the starboard side of the ship. “You’ll be glad to know that at least ‘something’ changed then.” I sighed in response and followed the direction his talon was pointing at with my gaze. What? No really, what? Maybe a couple thousand meters out from us was a rather large island, the beach nearest us lit up in the night with the same strange glowing cyan light. I’d examined the maps of the area around Haybinger Port, and from what I had gathered, the closest land from the port was nearly fifty miles away. The trip had only taken about three minutes. This was incredible, and it was also just as impossible. But yet, here I stood, fifty miles away from the mainland on a sleek looking caravel with a crazy, old, and quite dead griffon. “How did…” I stared slack jawed, honestly speechless. “Magic,” Heavy Keel snorted, making his way over to the stern of the ship. I continued to stare at the island, but now looking at the beach in a hopeless attempt of spying out other details besides the torches. “Yeah, just keep your mouth open, just like that! You might just catch me a fish I can eat.” His laughter sounded from the stern of the ship. I managed to close my mouth and tear my gaze away from the island, now opting to eye the captain with awe, and maybe, just maybe a little bit of newfound fear. “That is, if I could still actually taste things,” Keel muttered to himself as I approached him. He was standing behind the ship’s wheel, which remained glowing. Keel stared off at the island in a seemingly neutral state of thought. “Uh, Captain—” “Call me Keel. You are my passenger after all.” “Well then, um, Keel… Care to explain how the hay we got all the way out here so quickly?” He looked at me and rolled his eyes. “Such impatience, I was just about to get to that.” He took a breath to begin speaking, but paused. “Wait, really?” Here we go again. I blinked at him blankly, still awaiting an answer. “That’s your first question? I mean, it’s a good question, but you didn’t even bother to begin with the fact that everything was all glowing and… stuff?” “Well I was going to get to that—” “See, impatient!” He barked, pointing an accusatory talon at me, mere inches away from my barrel. I frowned and pushed the talon back to the ground where it belonged. Keel cleared his throat rather loudly and wiped the frown away to replace it with a smile. “Sorry about that, but to answer the question, in laypony’s terms, we went really, really fast.” “I’m aware of that.” “Alright, alright, calm down! We’re in no rush here.” I blinked at him again. He groaned and began ticking off steps on his claws. “Well for starters, I had to channel some seapony magic through the water and into the ship, which I then absorbed it into my spirit itself, giving me that slightly brighter color that I oh so love. Secondly, I pushed my spirit into the Blue Veil herself so that I could possess it with my own spiritual and seapony magic, and then after all of that, I unleashed the magic in one huge beginning burst, expelling most of the magic through the sails in the form of wind, but leaving behind just enough that I could control it with short bursts.” About halfway through his speech, I was already missing the cheery captain, and wishing that the information dump would move on so that I could be free. One characteristic that he had mentioned about the process interested me, however, so I listened carefully, despite my ear’s protests. Oh, the things us unicorns do for knowledge. “Seapony magic?” I’d heard about seaponies once or twice in mare’s tales, but if they were real… “Yup,” Heavy Keel smiled brightly at me. “It was my job to help the seaponies in any way that I could out here. I was actually quite important to them, seeing as how I was the only connection between the seapony civilization and Equestria.” He sighed, as what I assumed had to be nostalgia filled him. “It’s just too bad that the Royal Navy seems to have forgotten my position.” “Well,” I began. “You’re a ghost now, and you’ve shown me that you can interact with the living, and now the nonliving, so why can’t you go talk to the seaponies at… wherever they are?” He sighed and turned away from me back to the wheel, turning it experimentally with a talon. “That’s why this ship hasn’t set sail out here this far in years. The only physical beings that have been on my ship were the stupid collector, and the sailors he had hired. The sailors were the kind of ponies that only did anything if they could get money out of it.” Well that explanation wasn’t very… explanatory. I opened my mouth to speak but I was stopped as Keel held a talon up. He set the talon back down on the deck slowly, exhaling loudly. “I can’t go underwater. No matter how hard I try, it’s like some sort of curse on me.” He turned back to me, a frown clearly visible on his face. “I’m cursed like a seapony, but in the exact opposite way. I used to have to dive down and speak to them, because it was the only way we could. They couldn’t go above water at all. They could have, if it weren’t for some barrier that we had been trying to break for years.” He shook his head sadly. “That’s why I’ve been waiting for a worthy pony to actually come aboard my ship, just so I could take them away to talk to them about the seaponies. It’s… it’s ridiculous!” he huffed, throwing his claws up. “I tried to go underwater almost immediately after my death and I just… I couldn’t. I spent the first few years trying…” He leaned forward against the wheel, spinning it slowly. Oh no, I did not like this one single bit. I took a few quick steps forward to place a hoof on the griffon’s shoulder. He had been looking down, but his head had shot up once he had felt my contact. The feeling of my hoof against his body wasn’t as I had expected, it was cold, but I could definitely feel tufts of fur below my hoof. It was almost as if he was real. He wasn’t a ghost. He was a living being, just like me and anypony else. “Now don’t go start beating yourself up over it, because that’s where it sounds like it’s been heading.” I was tempted to say that he had probably been doing it before as well, but decided that it probably wasn’t the best time for that. “The ‘curse’ was probably around for years before you, there was nothing you could do about it. And don’t keep worrying about the seaponies, if they could survive long before you or the rest of Equestria made contact with them, they’re still alive.” I smiled broadly at him. “Plus, if you’ve managed to become a ghost and not move on to wherever ponies and griffons go when they move on, then that must mean fate has something good planned for you… and me,” I added the last part cheekily. He laughed quietly. “You’re… you’re right, chick.” His lips twitched ever so slightly as he tried to smile again. He sighed and brushed my hoof of his shoulder. “Sorry for getting all sappy on you there, but sometimes, I just remember how old I really am.” He shook his head hard. “No, let’s not do that again. After all, we’ve got work to do.” Keel smiled widely and turned back to the wheel. "Go ahead and unfurl the sails, I can’t always expunge that much seapony magic. It’s probably going to be a lot longer than usual anyway, I’ve only used very tiny amounts before, and I wasn’t even sure we would survive that.” I paused mid step and turned to stare at the griffon in surprise. “Ha! As if I would ever do that. I’m a sea captain, not a loon. Now get going!” “I thought I was the passenger,” I quipped back playfully as I trotted down the stairs, laughing all the way to the sails with the captain ready at the ship’s wheel. “That was just for the trip out to sea, chick!” I smiled, unfurling the top and main sails of the ship with a bit of telekinesis. This trip was already starting to look a little better. Things seemed to be starting like it was straight out of a mare’s tale! Seaponies and barriers to cross? That could be fun. It really could be.