Seattle Seapony

by dNihil

[2-5] Stun

Honk!

That was the sound of an air horn. Cala moaned.

Minutes later, the sound of something approaching.

"Ooh, that doesn't look good," a man said.

She felt the world turn around her, and — disoriented as she was — Cala slipped back into unconsciousness.

↺

She was back in her flooded, rotting room.

She had already been through most of that building. The places she hadn't been, she merely hadn't bothered breaking into them yet, and they remained locked up and untouched since the Event. She only sat in her former room because it was familiar to her, and also so she could be near Jasper, who was usually inclined to stay in or near his own former home.

So bored. There was nobody to talk to. Nothing really interested her anymore.

She bounded over to her closet. Those shelves were mostly cluttered with old junk, but maybe she could find something there to take her mind off how lonely she was. She leaped up onto her dresser and started digging. This was all familiar to her. She pulled out one of the bigger cardboard boxes and took a look inside. It was full of wooden blocks. Oh, this was... yes! The marble tower! Oh, she had completely forgotten about this little gem. Guess what she'd be doing for the next few hours~!

And then something caught her eye.

That's not... no. That can't be right. She reached out and scooped up a pile of broken plastic from the back of the shelf. She knew what this was.

She found a particular shard and held it before her. There was an eye painted on it. It was a green bit of plastic that had an eye on it, and it was dark. Lifeless. It kind of crept her out a little bit with how still it looked. Not at all like she had remembered.

She slowly set it down next to the other pieces. Harper shouldn't have died. It was a resilient little toy. It had been put through so much. Nothing she did to it had managed to even put a chip in its hoof.

She had a suspicion, though. Maybe it had left along with everyone else around her. Nobody wanted to stay home during a flood.

They had all left. Went on vacation. Leave the girl to clean up their mess...

She considered for a moment gathering up those shards and putting them in her bucket to take with her later. But... nah. Harper was dead now. It was a part of her past. She pulled on the box of wooden blocks and sent it tumbling down to the floor. Time to have some fun with marbles!

↝

"Woah," a woman's voice said, "that's the strangest one we've seen yet. Where did you find her? Why is she so...?"

"It was where I heard the barking coming from," the man said. "I guess the dogs did it."

"The poor thing... I'm surprised this is the first time they got to her. It's already been so long."

"Here"— the world spun, and for a second Cala lost track of the conversation —"go track them down. See if I can find out where they came from."

"Good luck. Those mutts are impossible to exterminate. The best we can do is keep them miles away from here." The woman stood there as the man was heard walking away, before a door shut. She sighed. Cala felt her start moving, and felt the different body that now carried her.

It was a much slimmer form, rocking Cala with a gate that swayed her back and forth. Under different circumstances, it might have felt calming, but at the moment all it did was make her feel nauseous. She almost longed for the hard, steady back of the man who had been carrying her earlier. She groaned.

"Shhh. We're going to get you all cleaned up. You look like you've lost a lot of blood," the woman said.

It was a few minutes before they got to where the woman seemed to be going. Cala felt the world tumble one last time before she rested on a still surface. It felt cool on her skin, curving upward behind her head.

As she heard a door being closed, Cala peeked open her eye. The room she was in was... pale, but it was difficult to make out since her vision wasn't focusing. She took a breath of the stale air of the place and could almost recognize the smell of it, something bad, but it wasn't like anything at home.

She felt something take her head and turn her face to the right. No longer in the blind side of the vision, Cala saw who must have carried her there. The woman pulled her forelimb back and simply looked Cala in the eye.

She had striking eyes of her own: a deep, rich purple. The color of her coat was impossible to make out. It was desaturated. Not gray, but neither black nor white in any one place. She looked to Cala's left and reached over to do something when Cala's eye finally focused and clearly made out black stripes on a white coat.

Then Cala heard a horrible sound.

In one fell realization, Cala understood where she was and what this woman was doing. She was in a bathtub. She had been brought into the bathroom and was expected to be... cleaned up!

"No!" Cala began to move her limbs, trying to find a way to crawl out of the tub and get away from the water.

The woman gasped as Cala flopped over the edge of the bathtub and onto the floor of the bathroom. Cala stared up at her, shocked that someone could even think that doing something like that to her was even remotely okay.

Cala glared at the woman. "No. I'm not taking a bath! You're not gonna make me!"

The woman looked at Cala oddly, then reached over and turned off the faucet. "Well, if you insist. I don't really like wasting the fresh water, but you look like you haven't had a bath in days. Your coat looks caked... with..." She did a double take. "You look like a fish! You don't even have a coat! How could you not want to take a bath in the state you're in?!"

Cala squinted at her. Glared at her. Tried to bore into her with a look.

Then she heard someone open the door to her blind side. A new voice said, "Renée, what the fuck is going on in here?"

A beat.

"What are you doing to that thing?"

⇥

End of Part 2

Comments

[dNihil]

So yeah, I had a pretty awful weekend. I made a huge fuss about some stuff and skipped a chapter. Hopefully that doesn't take a toll on the quality of this baby long term, and hopefully doing something new will make up for it. I'll have the make-up chapter, the second interlude, up in a few hours.

[djthomp]

Well, there we go, there's some hope for our poor seapony. She definitely needed a little adult (or maybe just non-herself) help.

[Starscribe]

A little confused at times; thought there might be some humans in there for a little while. Interesting lore stuff going on too. You have an extremely artistic art style, flowing from one line to the next, which makes it a joy to read. Unfortunately, being so artistic makes it hard to be positive about what's happening sometimes.

Might be exactly what you're going for, though.