• Published 24th Apr 2017
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Ultimate Equestria - Leo Pachino



What happens when Twilight Sparkle and her friends are pushed to their limits? How does their friendship and strength hold against a series of evil none like ever before?

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Chapter 006: Siren Gulch

It had only a few hours after the two ships had changed course, with The Perfection leading the way, before odd occurrences had begun. A thick fog rolled in from nowhere and covered Twilight’s galleon while Korsan’s airship flies over. Deathly moans and creeks echoed from the imperceptible distance.

“What the hay…” Applejack said as the grey sheet of fog obscured her view. “Where’d this fog come from?”

“Is this Korsan’s doing?!” Rarity asked, lost in the haze.

“No,” Twilight answered at the wheel. “We’ve just entered the Central Ley Line. Brace yourselves girls, we don’t know what’s ahead.”

Rainbow Dash flew up to Twilight from behind the ship and landed with a sharp thud.

“What is this?” Dash asked in annoyance. “I can barely see two metres ahead of me and whatever I do, I can’t change it.”

“Relax Dash, this fog probably can’t be affected by pegasi like normal weather.” Twilight told her.

“Then how are we supposed to follow Korsan?” Dash then asked.

“Pinkie Pie is out on the bow. I’m going to need you to slow down our ship while Pinkie directs me with her vantage point.”

“We’ll lose Korsan at that rate.”

“His ship usually flies straight from what we’ve seen. We’ll still reach whatever destination he’s going even if he’s far ahead. More importantly, we don’t know what’s ahead and it could be very dangerous if we hit it hard before we can react.”

“…Fine.”

With a beat of her wings, Rainbow Dash took off into the air.

“Pinkie Pie!” Twilight called out.

“Yes?” A chipper voice echoed in response.

“I’m going to need you to tell me whether to turn left or right and by what angle!”

“Okey-dokey-lokey!” She said.

Twilight then turned to the others and said, “Applejack, Rarity, I’m going to need you two to each take a side of the ship, see if anything’s coming at us. Fluttershy, help Rainbow out.”

“Got it!” The three replied.

“Spike,” Twilight then said.

“Yes Twilight?” The baby dragon responded, standing right next to Twilight, much to her surprise.

“Oh! You’re here! Listen, if anything happens to me, I’ll need you to take the wheel. Got it?” Twilight asked.

“Yep,” Spike nodded confidently.

“Sharp rocks ahead!” Pinkie exclaimed. “Turn an itty-bitty-smithy bit right.”

“Okay, fifteen degrees clockwise…” Twilight said to herself.

Carefully, she used her magic to turn to wheel a very small bit, causing the entire ship to shift right.

“More sharp rocks! Turn an itsy-bitsy-smoothie left.” Pinkie then yelled.

“Thirty degrees counterclockwise…”

“Whoa!” Rarity exclaimed from the starboard. “Turn right!”

“No!” Applejack retorted. “Turn left!”

“There’s a giant rock wall on my side.” Rarity said.

“There’s also one on this side.” Applejack replied.

“Turn a kissy right.” Pinkie yelled.

“Thirty nine degrees clockwise…” Twilight muttered to herself as she turned the wheel.

Spike stuck close to Twilight as the boat swayed left to right and back again. He looked out over the railing of the upper deck, only to see more cloud. As he focused more on the white abyss, the shouting of the mares dwindled, soon replaced by something.

Something that was, supernatural.

“Hey, Twilight.” Spike spoke up.

“What? Can’t you see we’re getting into a tight ravine?” Twilight sharply spoke back.

“Do you hear that?” He asked.

“Hear what?”

“I don’t know, it’s very soft and faint… like… singing?”

“What?”

“Listen.”

Soon, Twilight also began to hear the faded sounds coming from outside the ship. The singing started to surround her. As she focused her hearing onto it more, the sounds eventually turned clear, and transformed into very calm hums and vocal enchantments.

“I do hear it, sounds… beautiful.” Twilight uttered.

Meanwhile, at the bow, Pinkie Pie was also hearing the singing. Slowly, she felt her senses dulling out, despite her efforts to keep awake.

“So pretty,” Pinkie mumbled to herself, becoming more and more entranced in the music.

With the fog starting to lift a little, a shadowy figure, surrounded in a light blue aura, could be seen ahead in Pinkie’s vision. As the ship slowly drew closer, the figure revealed itself to be a large, pink stallion standing atop a rock poking from the water.

“What are you doing out here?” Pinkie drowsily asked. “You big, strong, stallion you…”

The mysterious stallion motioned a hoof to Pinkie, becoming her to come towards him. The mare obeyed the gesture, and leaned herself over the front of the bow, puckering her lips and closing her eyes as her instincts hijacked her mind. However, a large slam suddenly erupted throughout the ship. It crashed into the large rock and pushed it under, launching Pinkie back from the tip of the bow.

“What in the world?!” Applejack hollered, having nearly lost her hoofing in the short-lived crash. “Pinkie, did something happen up there?!”

No response was given.

“Pinkie? Are you okay?” Applejack asked once more. “Rarity, how about you?”

“So dreamy…” Rarity’s voice resonated from across the deck at the port side.

“Rarity, quit your daydreaming!” Applejack commanded. “Pinkie’s not responding and this darn singing’s making me sleepy.”

“…”

“Rarity?”

Applejack started to turn her head to look at Rarity, but stopped midway upon seeing a figure with a light blue aura in the distance, hanging onto the tall stone cliff edge.

“Who’s that?”

Drawing close, the ship revealed that the darkened figure was a buff, orange stallion, standing on a rock platform low enough for the crashing waves to splash just a little onto it. Almost immediately, Applejack’s mind melted and her senses were knocked out upon seeing the stallion.

“Oh, hi there, you seem to be quite a fine looking stallion, especially around these parts.”

Gently, the new stallion motioned a hoof for her to come to him.

“If you say so…”

However, before the orange mare could walk off the side of the boat to the mysterious stranger, the ship smashed against her side of the ravine and grinded against it for a few seconds before pulling out, causing some rocks to smack into Applejack and cause her to trip back.


“Applejack? Rarity? Pinkie?” Spike, now nervous, hollered at the edge of the poop deck, looking into the thick fog ahead for his friends. “Rainbow Dash? Fluttershy? Does anypony hear me?! Twilight!”

Upon turning to Twilight, Spike was shocked at the sight of her, nearly asleep on the wheel.

“Twilight! Something’s wrong with the others! Wake up!” He shrilled.

“Just put the bacon in the pancakes,” Twilight cooed.

“What? What’s bacon? Snap out of it, this ship’s going to sink at this rate!”

The galleon then slammed into the other wall of the ravine, sending Spike and Twilight flying a short distance to the left.

“Twilight!” Spike cried.

“I can’t, you’re my cousin’s uncle’s great grandfather’s brother’s nephew twice removed…” Twilight groaned in her rested state.

“What’s gotten into you and the others?!”

Slowly, still deep in her daze, Twilight got up and slowly walked into the thick of the fog towards the bow.

“Hey!”

A sudden drop then hit as the ship fell down from a small, unseen waterfall. Spike recovered from the fall quickly and ran towards Twilight, following her to the other mares, all gathering around at the port side of the bow.

“Stop!” Spike demanded.

He looked over to where the others were drowsily staring at to see that over the side of the ship was a whole team of half-pony, half-fish creatures swimming alongside this rising waves.

Spike instantly recognized them.

“Sirens! I should’ve known!”

With the fog lifting even more, Spike soon discovered that he and his friends were in deep trouble. Now, their ship was circling around in a large whirlpool with a large, dark hole in the center.

“Twilight, Rainbow, Fluttershy, Applejack, Rarity, Pinkie, any one of you! They’re fake! They’re sirens! They’re trying to kill us. Snap out of it!”

“Give me a big hug…” Pinkie sleepily cheered as she prepared herself to jump into what she saw as a handsome stallion pool party.

Spike sprang into action, grabbing a large rope by the front mast and wrapping it around the six. Now clustered together, Spike tied the rope around them and the mast. With a mighty tug at the other end, Spike pulled the hypnotized ponies away from the edge, securing them in the middle of the deck.

“Okay, now I gotta steer this thing.”

Frantically, Spike made his way back to the wheel and grabbed it tightly with his claws. Turning the wheel carefully, he turned the ship so that it circled around the outer edge of the whirlpool and kept it in that orbit while he looked for a way out. After several loops, Spike saw that he is completely surrounded by stone walls.

All seemed lost, but one option remained.

He eventually noticed that a portion of the circular wall was slanted at a fairly low angle.

“If I remember what Twilight told me about centripetal force… if I can get the angle right, I can get this ship to go up there and out of this ravine.” Spike told himself.

However, before Spike could properly execute his escape strategy, a rumble, louder than the sirens’ singing, erupted from the black hole.

“Uh oh…”

With an ear-splitting roar, a giant, monstrous creature burst from the hole. With ten massive, twenty-metre long tentacles armoured in large scales, a tall arrowhead body covered in a shell of tangled metal and wood, and an enormous yellow eyeball, Spike watched the creature in horror reveal itself from its hiding place.

“A kraken?!”

So that’s the sirens are here, Spike thought to himself as he tightly clutched the shuddering wheel. The sirens lure in ships, that giant squid takes down the ship and all of them feed on whatever’s inside. It would be genius if it wasn’t so terrifying!

The large monster reached out a pair of large tentacles from its sides and swiped at the ship. It missed, barely nicking the rudder at the back. With Spike waiting now for the chance to escape, he realized that he’s an open target for the squid. With the sirens’ music growing even louder, even dulling out the thrashing waves, the squid attacked once more, this time striking the front mast, breaking it from the rest of the boat and sending it drifting into the center of the whirlpool.

With only the stump of it left and the six mares trying to reach the edge of the ship, the rope tied to the mast started to slide upwards, towards the jagged top of the broken pole. Panic started to develop inside the baby dragon as he watched the rope gradually climbed. Now halfway from reaching the point Spike needed to turn at, the monster attacked again with three tentacles, bluntly striking the hull with each hit.

Within a matter of moments, the ship snapped from its orbit and started to descend into the whirlpool and closer to the squid in the center.

“No!” Spike gasped, being only a quarter of a lap away from his goal.

However, an idea sparked in Spike’s head at the last moment. Grabbing the wheel tighter than ever before, Spike quickly turned the wheel so the ship is now aimed a little to the right of the beast. The galleon promptly charged forwards and right underneath the squid’s bulging eyeball. The side of the hull barely skimmed across the metal armour of the monster.

With the sirens’ song hitting its climax, the ship slammed bow first into the stone slab in front of it. The built-up force from before launched the ship upwards. It eventually landed back down onto the rock, killing tons of momentum. The large vessel grinded on the stone block below, with the dissipating kinetic energy pushing it closer and closer to the top of the wall.

Upon reaching the high top of the slanted stone slab, the ship stopped and began to teeter. Spike realized that it didn’t have enough momentum to make it all the way, as the ship soon teetered more to the back, back towards the whirlpool with the sirens and squid waiting for them.

Thinking quick, Spike rushed up the slanting ship and slammed his body into the cluster of tangled mares, throwing them all towards the bow. The extra weight immediately shifted to the front, causing the galleon to lean forward over the wall and slowly drop into the open water outside. The ship bounced back into its normal position, somehow still afloat after all of that.

The singing quickly died down as the ship slowly drifted away from the giant wall and towards the clear, causing the six ponies to quickly snap out of their drowsy states.

“What happened?” Fluttershy asked as she massages her aching head.

“Why is there a rope around us?” Rainbow Dash asked in confusion. “Did we do something last night?”

“My memories’ all fuzzy…” Applejack groaned. “But I remember something about some fog and us going into some Ley Line.”

“I was having a fantastic dream!” Rarity whined, not knowing of the truth. “I was with this dashing stallion and we were going out for a swim before something woke me up.”

“Have we entered the future?” Pinkie asked, having immediately recovered from her mind hijacking. “I knew that everything would be covered in water.”

“Spike?” Twilight grumbled, looking at him forcefully clutching her chest from his body slam. “Did you do something?”

“Yes, I mean, no, I mean, something,” Spike rapidly stammered, trying to collect his words after his near-death experience. “We were in the Central Ley Line, and then these sirens hypnotized us. You girls were anyways, but I wasn’t affected by their singing, maybe because I am a dragon. And then this giant squid in a whirlpool tried to attack us, so I had to take the boat and escape and-”

“Wait,” Pinkie interrupted him. “Did you say that a giant carnivorous squid attacked us?”

“…Yes.” Spike hesitantly answered.

“Ha! I win the bet! Pay up Fluttershy!” The pink pony roared in victory.

“Oh come on!” The yellow pegasus groaned on the other end of the cluster. “Why… why has this happened twice? It’s just as likely as us being trapped inside an alternate universe.”

“Wanna bet-”

“No, no, no, one thousand times no!”

“I hope that explains the rope,” Rainbow Dash said as she climbed out of the bind.

“Oh my gosh,” Twilight gasped as she looks around the destroyed galleon. “What even happened in there while we were out? The front mast is missing, most of the windows are shattered, the bow has a large hole in it, and most of the paint’s chipped. What will Celestia say when she sees this?”

“She’ll say, ‘Wow! What a wreck!’” Pinkie replied.

“Not helping…” Twilight quietly hissed.

“It’s fine.” Spike comforted the purple alicorn. “The important thing is that we made it out in one piece.”

“You’re right. Thanks Spike.”

“And besides, look at this in a good way. Things could’ve been a lot worse.”

Suddenly, Applejack’s voice exclaimed from behind Twilight and Spike’s sight, “Applebloom?!”

“Oh…” Spike lamented, realizing that he had tempted fate.

“Sweetie Belle?!” Rarity exclaimed as well.

“One more,” Spike commented.

“Scootaloo?!” Rainbow Dash exclaimed also.

“I just had to open my mouth…” Spike groaned.


“Looks like they made it, Korsan,”

“I knew it.”

“So, back to Thieves’ Hold?”

“Correct.”

“I just don’t get it, Korsan. Why are you so persistent about that one mare? A wench like her can be found pretty much every country. There’s even one in Thieves’ Hold that you liked.”

“Dear Cousin Isyan, we all have our preferences and standards. And I have a very selective preference and a very high standard, so only a hoofful of the finest mares in the world would suit me. As such, I have very few chances of getting on their good side. I’m not cutting any corners with this one.”

“You realize that you’re putting the crew at risk with this mare-hunt of yours, excluding the fact that your childish leadership and this goal you’ve been raving about for years has already put them in more than enough trouble.”

“Huh, you know what’s funny, Isyan?”

“What?”

“That was the same feeling I had when I let you join my crew after your little incident.”

“…”

“Please, Isyan, don’t try to challenge my authority. You know the consequences.”

“Trust me, cousin, the thought of mutiny against you is something only the most ambitious of stallions have, and you’re one of the most out of anypony I’ve known.”

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