Lost at Sea
Chapter 6: Water, Water, Everywhere
Admiral Biscuit
One moonless night, Cloud laid on her back and looked up at all the stars. It was terrifying—it was as if she was floating in a void with nothing but tiny sharp pinpricks of light above her, and yet she was afraid turn her head away. She felt like she was the only pony there was, and everything else was her imagination. Maybe this was the only thing that was real. There might not even be a cloud underneath her back.
She thought that this could be death. She might have died in the storm after all, and this was the darkness that came after, and all she had to do was let go and drift off to freedom.
Sometimes the cloud under her felt less tangible, like it was slipping away. Maybe it was a ghost cloud, and she was just a ghost pegasus floating along on it.
Cloud closed her eyes, but the image of the uncaring stars was burned into her retinas, and she couldn’t unsee it.
She tugged some of the cloud with her wingtips, pulling it over her, digging herself into the cloud, becoming part of the cloud.
• • •
The nights were getting colder, and all she could do was burrow down into her cloud when the sun went down, inside a little bowl that would hold some of her heat in as long as the wind didn’t suck it right back out.
She had stopped counting moons. There was nothing but the clouds and the ocean. Land was a distant memory, something which might have been imagined. Every day was the same day, repeated and repeated and repeated and repeated.
Down below her, the ocean was almost black in the false light of the moon, and she sometimes saw large shadow-shapes moving just below the surface. Every now and then, a fountain of white would shoot up from the water from one of these shadows, and she was sure that it was something trying to catch her. Some leviathan of the deep that wanted to knock her cloud out of the sky and gobble her up.
Her cloud was high enough to be clear of them, she hoped, and if it wasn’t, she was too weak to fight them off, so she closed her eyes and tried to think of her friends back in Chonamare. Tried to imagine what they were doing.
Tried to remember what bread tasted like.
• • •
Cloud’s ribs jutted out from her barrel and her teeth felt loose in their sockets. She could wiggle them with her tongue and that didn’t seem right to her. Her mane and tail had lightened in the constant sunlight or because she couldn’t remove the salt that encrusted them, or maybe it was both.
Some of her feathers had fallen out, and she didn’t know if that was because she was moulting or if it was from her not eating enough vegetables and grass.
She climbed to the edge of her cloud and looked down at the emerald-green sea below her, her eyes searching for a school of fish or a few pitiful clumps of seaweed.
It would be easier to just stop looking. Easier to just sit on her cloud and wait for the end.
A group of silvery flashes that weren’t the sun moved below her, and she dove, speeding towards the water, effortlessly calculating how much she needed to lead the herring. She scanned the school, watching for open spots that might be caused by a shark or some other fish that was eating the herring and might want to eat her.
She held her forehooves out in front of her to break the surface of the water, and she folded her wings just before she hit. Cloud felt a fish in her mouth and squirted the saltwater through her teeth, then swallowed it whole as she was coming back up out of the water in preparation for another dive.
She felt better with a full belly, and climbed back into the sky, her eye on a distant albatross. Maybe it knows where land is.
Cloud climbed up until she was flying parallel with it.
She flew up alongside and he regarded her with a beady black eye and squawked at her, then turned his head forward and continued flying.
For most of the day, she flew alongside him, always keeping watch below for clouds so she’d have someplace to land. Her old cloud was forgotten—there was nothing there that she wanted, and making a new cloudhome would give her something different to do.
When the sun was only a hoofspan above the ocean, she broke formation with her flying companion and glided down to a thick cumulous cloud. It was big enough to build a cloud-mansion if she’d wanted to, but she didn’t. She found an outcropping near the west side of it and bashed a small depression in the cloud, then settled down for another chilly night adrift.
• • •
There was nothing but ocean below and sky above and some days she hardly knew the difference. The ocean was a reflection of the sky, or maybe the sky was a reflection of the ocean. It didn't matter, really.
One day, she tore off a little lump of cloud and made it into a kind of pony shape, and she talked to it, giving it a moment-by-moment description of her life. It didn't talk back, but that was okay. It felt better to be talking to something. Even if it didn’t talk back.
The next day, she thought it might be hungry, so she put a small herring on it and pushed it away.
She had never imagined that she would see land again. It was only a distant memory, and maybe not a real one.
She's halfway to turning into a sea bird, judging by how refined her hunting skills have become. Also halfway to dying of scurvy... or to going insane and let herself be swallowed by the big blue.
Please let her find home one day.
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And then, when they found her, it was because some sailors noticed Cloudsdale had somehow ended up in the middle of the ocean. Or, at least a full-sized replica of it.
Yeah, I'd say Cloud's lost her mind if she's making little pony replicas and talking to them. Still, despite the overall darkness of this chapter, I really love the general descriptions of Cloud losing her hope, giving into despair and the overall bleakness of everything.
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Actually it was one of the POTR movies: specifically the one with Blackbeard called On Stranger Tides. ...Though now that I think about it, the Mermen from the Goblet of Fire may have been man eating... Not sure. I'd have to re-watch the film.
Ouch! She is getting worse!
And then her savior came... I was expecting the sea ponies to be the one to point her to land, but nice mr.Albatros is cool too.
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Maybe she will turn into a seabird.
She's not likely to actually die of scurvy. More likely, if it weakens her enough she'll either starve to death, or fly off her cloud and not be able to get back.
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Fully inhabited with cloudakins, under the leadership of a completely insane Cloud Climber.
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She's in good company with that.
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That might be what I was thinking of. I just remember seeing it in a movie, and thinking that that was the first time I'd seen anybody portray mermaids as man-eating.
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Months of isolation and an improper diet aren't doing her any good at all.
The albatross might not be all that much help. Albatrosses can fly for months at a time. In fact, they spend so much time in the air that they're really bad at landing, and tend to tumble.
8517638 This equestria we are talking about though, where bird and ponies help each other on a regular basis.
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Horses can synthesize their own vitamin C.
Then again, horses can't fly, so who knows.
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Oh that is a relief. (Errr... Assuming the good Admiral's pegabirbs can do the same)
Scurvy though... *shudder* What a lousy way to go. Just ask Robert Scott et al.
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Oh its the story silver glow was talking about where a pony made it around the world by getting lost and talkking to seaponies. Im so excited for the end.
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Most mammals can, actually! Most birds and reptiles too. One major line of primates (of which we, alas, are a part), guinea pigs, and I think bats are the major mammal groups that can't, IIRC. It appears to be one of those 'unintelligent design' things, as far as I know.
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The best thing about Biscuit-fics is the learning factor :b
I did a little research as well and found this: "Horses also appear to have the ability to synthesize vitamin C from glucose (Pearson et al., 1943; Stillions et al., 1971a)." Excerpt is from here: (Chapter six, page 123).
Yes i know this is overly academical and assumes Equestrians function like real horses, but would Cloud get enough glucose from a raw fish-based diet to do this? Synthesis processes also work best in healthy individuals with low stress levels... I'd argue Cloud is neither. Seaweed contains pretty much everything she'd need, although it's of course not that readily available in colder climates and it's not well digestible in raw form. Biscuits contain sugars in sufficient amounts though. Also contain a lot of nerd-triggers.
Poor silly pegasus. Just pick east or west and always move in as straight a line as you can. You'll reach land eventually, certainly in less than two months! Equestria's planet can't be all that huge, certainly no larger than Earth. Trans-Atlantic crossings by fast sailboats have been done in less than 6 days, and pegasi routinely fly faster than a mere 35 mph or so.
She probably got caught in a large anti-cyclonic system and has been just going around in circles.
Silly pegasus, she does not know how to nerd properly.
Find a lemon, Cloud. There's got to be one somewhere out here in the ocean, right?
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Well, I hadn't actually thought about it too much . . . on the plus side, I wasn't researching scurvy for the story. Still, I'm happy to learn it is something ponies probably can't get.
At least it's not mercury poisoning. <--shameless self-promotion.
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It is indeed!
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Well, it's not the only thing where some mammals do and some mammals don't.
Another relevant fact (which you probably know) is that most male mammals have non-functional nipples. One of the ones that doesn't is the equine, which I think might confuse them if they saw a shirtless man.
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And while I'd like to brag it's all me, I learn a lot from the comments, 'cause all of y'all know all sorts of cool stuff and are willing to share it with me, and by extension, anybody else who reads through the comments on my fics.
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That's a good plan, so long as she can navigate reasonably well by the sun, and the winds are blowing in the same direction she wants to go. If they're blowing in the opposite direction, she's never going to gain much ground, because while she's sleeping on her cloud, it's going to be going the other way, and she might not make much progress at all.
Yup.
I'll be honest, I know my way decently around a sailboat (although I'm no expert, and way out of practice), and I doubt I could successfully navigate across the Atlantic without a compass. Maybe I could, but I'd just as likely get caught in the doldrums and float around until the food ran out.
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Sea lemons are kinda adorable.
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"Tremble, little ponies - the cloud cover will last FOREVER!"
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