Surviving Sand Island

by The 24th Pegasus

Field Notes

The two waterlogged, half-drowned ponies stumbled their way back to their shelter some time later. Almost as soon as they were within sight of their hut, Rarity collapsed in the sand. Groaning, she rolled over onto her back and stared up at the sky. “I wonder how many times the sea will try to claim my life before it finally succeeds or we get off this blasted island.”

“Hopefully that’ll be the last time for a while,” Rainbow groaned. She staggered over to their shelter, dropped the satchel inside, and brought out their basket of fruit. Placing it between the two of them, she sat down next to Rarity and started helping herself to a meal. “At least we’re alive and we learned something.”

Rarity forced herself to sit up so she could eat as well. “I suppose it’s something,” she said. “But what does it all mean? We know that there’s some sort of shrine beneath this island, but what is it for?”

“Don’t know, but I think I know somepony who might.” She went back to the shelter, retrieved the dripping satchel, and brought it back outside. “Maybe there’s something in that pony’s notes that were left there. I didn’t really get a chance to look at the journal itself before we had to get out of there.”

Once more she unfastened the protective flap, and her blue hooves fished out the journal. Its corners were a little damp from the seawater and all the swimming she’d done with it, but when she opened it up, she could still make out the writing on the pages. She gingerly pulled apart the pages, her eyes scanning across them for anything interesting.

Rarity cleared her throat. “Well, what does it say?”

“Huh? Oh! Right, sorry.” Rainbow flipped back a bit. “Well, the book’s by some dude named Uncharted Lands. I think Daring Do might have referenced him in one of her early books, but I don’t remember. It’s been too long since I read them. Anyway, he had a small vessel and some crew that he was using to explore and map the oceans, and they ended up getting shipwrecked here.” She raised an eyebrow at Rarity. “I guess we weren’t the first, huh?”

“So it would seem. Does he know anything about what these islands are, or what that temple is?”

“Hmmm…” Rainbow flipped through a few pages, quickly glancing over the contents. “Ah! Here’s something. ‘October seventeenth: After exploring the island for a few days, I believe that we’ve stumbled upon the remains of a tiny pony nation once known as Ponynesia. The land we’ve seen so far matches what little records we have from some of the first ponies to cross the seas ages ago. The island upon which we’ve made camp has a large hill near its southern banks that overlooks a serene lagoon. From this hill, we can clearly see three other islands along the horizons. The seas between the islands were once supposedly busy with ponies in outrigger canoes, but now there’s almost no trace of them. My crew is assembling a raft from the remains of our ship to explore some of the other islands while we wait for rescue.”

“Ponynesia?” Rarity asked. “Hard to imagine that there were once ponies living out here in the middle of nowhere.”

“Apparently there were. I’ve certainly never heard of it.”

“But where did they go? How come we haven’t seen any trace of them apart from whatever we saw beneath the island?”

“Well, don’t you think there has to be a reason that the ponies aren’t here anymore but the minotaurs are?” Rainbow asked. She flipped through the book some more. “It looks like they spent the next week putting together a raft and tried to sail it to one of the nearby islands, but they were attacked along the way by minotaurs in canoes. They managed to fight them off, but their raft was damaged and the minotaurs came back with more canoes and bigger numbers.”

“Oh, dear.”

“Hmmm… ‘October twenty-sixth: I don’t know how I’m alive to be writing this right now. The minotaurs destroyed our raft in the open waters and started picking off the survivors of my crew as we floundered about in the waves. Somehow I managed to swim away and return to where we started without being attacked or drowning at sea. Now it’s just me, left to suffer alone until the end comes for me.”

Rarity shivered. “Pleasant fellow, wasn’t he?”

“He kind of got boned over really hard,” Rainbow said. She flipped a few more pages through the book. “That’s interesting, though. He thinks that the minotaurs don’t come to this island because they might believe it’s sacred or cursed or something. He did see canoes going between the other three islands, though, so he thinks they live on all of them. They kicked the ponies out and took the land for themselves.”

“Does he have anything to say about the temple?” Rarity asked. “I’m going to make the assumption that the skeleton we saw down there was his. Did he leave us any notes before his dreadful passing?”

Old pages flipped as Rainbow went to the last entry in the book. “‘December twenty-fourth: I’m writing this entry from within an ancient structure buried beneath the island. I don’t know what it’s purpose is, but I can feel a sort of energy here. There’s old magic at work in this chamber, if the sensation in my horn is anything to go by.’ Say, did you feel anything like that, Rares?”

Rarity shook her head. “I’ve been dealing with a migraine for over a week straight, Rainbow. The only thing my horn is sensitive to at the moment is pain.”

“Yeesh. Sorry, Rares. That sucks.”

“Perhaps a bit of an understatement, but accurate nonetheless.”

Rainbow shook her head. “Where was I? Oh, here. ‘There’s a map of the islands on a dais here, which I find quite odd. Why would the citizens of Ponynesia need to detail their four holdings with such precision? And surrounding this dais are four pedestals, upon which four pony figurines—earth, pegasus, unicorn, and crystal—once resided. I say once, for only the crystal figurine remains. I do not know where the other three were, but if I had to guess, I would posit that it may be more than just a coincidence that there are three other islands and three missing figurines. I will have to see if I can translate some of these glyphs and runes to find more information, but given the layout of the chamber and the energy I can feel in the air, I suspect that they may be more than just simple pieces of art.’”

“Three missing figurines, three other islands,” Rarity mused. “Do you think his hunch was correct? That these other figurines are in the minotaurs’ hands now?”

“It’s really the only possible explanation,” Rainbow said. “But about that mystical power stuff… do you think that’s what’s keeping Luna from finding our dreams?”

Rarity’s eyes widened and she nodded. “Of course! That would make sense! Bear with me, darling, because I think I can see how this all ties together.”

Rainbow raised an eyebrow. “Really? How?”

“Let’s see. So these islands—Ponynesia—were once inhabited by a small group of ponies. They built a shrine underneath this island that has magical properties we don’t understand. This shrine put up some kind of wards around the islands that are blocking scrying and possibly other magic from peering into their holding. Then minotaurs came from somewhere else and ultimately wiped out the ponies, but they refuse to come here for possibly supernatural reasons. That leaves us with some breathing room and a solid base of operations.”

“Huh.” Rainbow looked up at the sky. “So there’s only two ways that we get off of this island, from what I can tell. Either we lie around and wait for an airship or something to stumble across us, or we figure out a way to take down whatever magic is stopping Luna from finding our dreams.”

“Precisely what I figure, darling.”

Rainbow nodded. “Well, one of those two ways involves a lot of lying around and waiting for somepony to find us, and who knows how long that could take. We don’t know either if the magic hides the islands from the sky. That’d be the kind of spooky stuff ancient ritual magic would do, you think?”

“Celestia, I hope not,” Rarity said. “That dramatically reduces our chances of being found.”

“But we don’t really know one way or another,” Rainbow said. “We were only a day’s flight south of our flight path, so you’d think there’d be an airship wandering along the horizon or something, but there’s been nothing since the storm cleared. We really can’t rule it out.”

Rarity chewed on her cheek. “So that leaves us with only one surefire option then, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah. We have to go find those figurines and get them to the shrine. Maybe that’ll do… something. I’d take anything, really. It’d be better than just sitting here and doing nothing for the rest of my life.”

Sighing, Rarity glanced at the palm trees around them. “I guess that means we need to build a raft like they did and hopefully not get killed by minotaurs as we try to cross.”

“And then we gotta steer clear of them when we’re on their islands, too.”

Rarity flopped back down into the sand and groaned. “I hate big adventures. Why couldn’t I have washed up at a luxury resort instead of the middle of nowhere?”

Comments

[RoboRed]

Welp, guess that explains the lack of Luna.

Yay, adventure!

[Aurora Dimmet]

8466784

That's the lack of Luna. Now, what about the lack of Discord? Surely Flutters would be puppy-eyeing him into finding their friends.

[Neece]

8467062
I bet that either it wards against him too (somewhat unlikely), he's not that much all seeing, he's on vacation or he'll only appear if they are one hundred and ten percent bonned. He's not the kind to save ponies left and right if they can get out of it themselves.

Most likely he doesn't know where they are, though. Or he knows not to mess with love...

[Matthewl419]

Amazing.

[FloydienSlip]

Fetch quest time!

[TimeturnerJ]

Ponynesia? Clever.
You just brought one of my favourite cultures (when it comes to myths and spirituality) into this. Very interested in what you'll do with it. :)

[PropMaster]

All right, time to really earn that Adventure Tag!

[zaponator]

Ans just like that, we have a goal! Exciting stuff. As entertaining as it is to watch them just sort of survive on the island, it would have to wear thin eventually without an overarching objective.

[Eroraf86]

Oho, this is getting good!

[Circut Breaker]

<billwurtz>
You could make a video game out of this.
</billwurtz>