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Flirting & Stuff (Part I)1,662 words
Emotions & Stuff (Part II)2,697 words

Emotions & Stuff (Part II)

This Chapter is from Skystar's Perspective
Text in Purple is in the Arissian language

After sulking in my room for a few minutes I heard a knock on my door.

“SkyStar?”

“Go away, Pinkie...wait how are you breathing down here?”

“I used the pearl ring you gave me a few years back, the one that utilizes the magic of the MacGuffin pearl,” yeah, I forgot she still had that.

“Pearl of Naga,” I said half-annoyed.

“Yeah, that. Anyway, do you want to talk about this?”

I flopped (somewhat literally) on my stomach with my head facing the door. “Personally, I would like to never talk about this again.”

“Oh come on, we’ve all embarrassed ourselves before, remember the time I brought fireworks to Fluttershy’s….”

“You were tricked into doing that, it was totally different.”

“Ok, bad example.” Pinkie Pie, knowing that I probably wasn’t going to stay stand-offish for long, opened the door to my room and made her way towards me. She had shed the tank top and shorts she was wearing earlier, either being taken off before transforming or being “vaporized” (for lack of a better term) during it, and now wearing only her pink gem necklace that apparently allows her to blow things up along with the orange pearl ring that allowed her to change into this form, leaving her rather large breasts completely exposed.

Along with her lack of clothing, her legs had also fused together into a scaly light-blue tail not unlike mine (except mine is reddish-orange with blue fins), with a tail fin at the tip and a dorsal fin on the back, both magenta-colored and cut in a curvy shape reminiscent of her hairstyle (except flat and fleshy). There was also a bright, faintly-bioluminescent pattern on her dorsal fin resembling the yellow-and-blue balloon design she compulsively wears on everything for whatever reason. She still had pale-pink skin from the waist up, with the exception of fleshy light-blue webbing between her fingers, and gills on the sides of her neck, the tiny slits opening and closing as she breathed in and out.

Even though I had already seen her like this several times, she was still extremely attractive in her aquatic form, I’m not sure if it’s because of the way she looks and moves in the water or just natural beauty (we are merfolk, after all), but her beauty was hard to deny, even if we were no longer an ‘item’ as she puts it.

“But still…” she closed the door behind her with her tail and swam over to my bed, moving quite naturally for someone born on land, I might add. “I can’t pretend not to know what you’re going through.”

“You don’t understand, Pinkie.” I flipped myself over onto my back and grabbed the rubber swordfish (an old birthday gift from one of my cousins, I think his name was ‘Terra Nova’ or something, Naga I need to get out more) on the floor next to my bed, and held it against my chest, squeezing the nonexistent life out of it.

“Hey, I wasn’t exactly super-duper smooth around Spada, either.” she ‘sat’ at the foot of my bed, her hands resting on her tail as she leaned over to me. “Heck, I’d think anybody would be flustered around a guy like him, now that I think about it, he looks a lot like that guy who played Clark Kent in that Superman show Marble likes.”

Normally I’d ask what either of those things are, but frankly, I wasn’t really in the mood to be confounded by humans. “Yeah, but it’s different for you. This kind of thing comes easy for you. When you make a fool of yourself, you know how to take it in stride and laugh it off. You know how to appeal to people, how to make them happy, how to make them like you…” I turned on my side, away from Pinkie so she wouldn’t see me cry (I mean, my tears would just dissolve into the ocean around me, but still.) “...I, however, don’t know the first thing about any of this, any time I think I know what I’m doing, I always do or say something that scares people away.”

“You never scared me away.” Pinkie said hopefully.

“That’s cause nothing seems to scare you or creep you out.” I flicked my tail as I stared out the large glass window to the side of my room, seeing what I presumed to be a married couple swimming home from some sort of date from the way they were talking to each other. Which only further reminded me of my own failures in being romantic. (In hindsight, I probably should have taken mental notes on them.) “Thanks for trying to save my tailfins before I threw up on him, by the way.”

“No biggie, Skies, what was up with that anyway?”

I sighed through my gills. “I ate some...questionable krill earlier today, and I don’t think it agreed with me, I’m fine now.” I looked into the swordfish's sand-dollar eyes before tossing it up into the water. “Anyway, as I was saying…” I rolled back over onto my back as I watched the swordfish descend slowly to the ground, using my tail as a paddle to send it back up. “You saw the look on Spada’s face when I was talking to him, I practically terrified the guy.” I swatted the rubber swordfish back up into the water as I reached over and grabbed a purple bracelet laying on the table beside my bed, cut out of an amethyst and bearing the royal crest of my family surrounded by a carving of a swordfish and a dolphin with their tails intersecting, (a common symbol of Arissian culture).

“Look at me…” I said, thinking out loud “...I’m supposed to be the heir to the throne of Arissia. When my mom dies, this entire kingdom is mine. I’m the princess of a kingdom, something people like you can only dream of, and I can’t talk to a guy I like without looking like a complete freak of nature...” I angrily smacked the rubber swordfish across the room with the full force of my tail, it bouncing off the glass of my window and landing on the sponge bed I had set up on the floor next to the window. Feeling for the first time what it was like to be angry at yourself “...Arissia is doomed.”

For a while there was silence between us, the only sounds being the ambient noises of the sea life swimming around us.

Pinkie finally broke the silence. “Wow, Skies I-I Never knew you felt that way about…” she paused, trying to find the right word “...all this.”

“That’s cause I’ve kept these feelings inside me for so many years...and you had to watch it.”

“Hey, it’s ok, it takes a lot of maturity to say something like that.” Pinkie put a hand on my shoulder.

I buried my face in my pillow. “You’re just trying to make me feel better.”

“Hey, it’s true. Trust me, I’ve had to go through that realization myself.” she arched her back and stretched her arms, before laying down on her back next to me with her hands behind her back and the tip of her tail dangling from my bed. “It’s a start SkyStar, being honest about your problems is a big part of being in a relationship, both the kind where you hold hands and kiss and the one where you just hang out.”

“You think so?”

“Definitely, it is my brain after all.” she reached over to a knob to the side of my bed. “Mind if I turn off the lights in here?”

“Nah, Go ahead.” Pinkie turned the knob away from her, dimming the intricate lighting patterns on the walls around me as our bodies began to emit a faint bioluminescent glow in the darkness.

Pinkie laid back down on the bed. “Look, Skies I think you’re being too hard on yourself, I know I’ve probably said this to you before, but relationships take time.”

“Where are you going with this?” I put the bracelet back on my bedside table, it reuniting with Shelly and Sheldon.

“This is partially my fault, I should have given you some advice before I told you to talk to Spada. I’m not the best in the world with the romance thing, but if you want my advice, you were trying too hard with Spada back there, and with the way you were talking, well, let’s just say we save it for...how do your people do it again?”

“Well, first the male gets inside the female’s egg sac and…”

“Ok Skies, I got it, no need to push this past a T rating.” I raised an eyebrow at this but just shrugged it off as a human thing. “The point is, you only use that tone if you’ve been together for a while and feel comfortable with talking that way (or at least after the first date, not that you should be getting any ideas) not with a guy you just barely met, if at all.” she pulled out a piece of hard candy out of her hair and sucked on it, offering me a piece, which I denied just to be safe. “Also, no licking people.”

“Yeah, that probably should have gone without saying.”

“Yeah, anyway as I was saying before, all relationships take time, you have to work up to this kind of stuff, think about it this way, did we start talking like old friends who knew each other for years when we first started hanging out and I was trying to gain your mom’s trust.”

“No, not really.” I thought back to the days I was first getting to know Pinkie “...it took a few days just for us to warm up to each other. It took me even longer just to learn to speak proper English.”

“That’s exactly my point, Skies. Despite what some of my other friends might tell you, there isn’t really ‘love at first sight’, at least not from my experiences. Personally, I think before you love someone, you have to like them, if there’s a boy you like, talk to him, not in an overly sensual or flirtatious way, but more like how we talk to each other. Talk about what you like, how you feel, find common interests, look for something in him. If there’s a connection between you, then you can move on to the more mature stuff like making out and stuff.” Pinkie looked up at the ceiling as if there was something else she wanted to say. “Oh yeah, and don’t try to make every aspect of your life sound flirty and kinky. Guys don’t exactly like a girl talking about their overprotective mother as if it were some sort of fetish. If you don’t know what that is I don’t think this is the right kind of story to explain it.”

I laid on my back, looking up at the ceiling, resting my hands on my stomach, my webbed fingers interlocked. “That was...good advice. I’m glad we had this talk.”

Once again, there was silence between us for a bit before I heard another knock at my door and the unmistakable boyish voice of Spada. “Hey, Princess...do you still want to talk.”

“Speak of Dee-cade…” Pinkie muttered to herself. I’d ask who Dee-cade is, but I decided to save it for later as I opened up the door to face Spada.

“Hey, sorry about my...weirdness earlier...and for...you know, throwing up on you, I ate some krill this morning that…”

“Hey, it’s fine.” Spada smiled in that cute way that always made me blush. Like Pinkie, he had also shed his t-shirt, jacket and pants, his legs having been replaced by a metallic-gray tail which complimented his pale-grey skin quite nicely (Naga and Ray, this isn’t going to be easy.) He also had spiky dorsal and tailfins reminiscent of his hairstyle, complete with the yellow streaks, which now had a bright glow to them as a bit of a counterbalance to the faint glow of the rest of his body. He had also retained his yellow swordfish tattoo, it having a bright glow as well.

“Whoa, I cannot stress enough how flippin’ GORGEOUS you are.” I closed the door behind me with my own tail.

“Hey, you’re pretty beautiful yourself, Princess.” Oh my gosh, as if his looks weren’t enough, the way he referred to me as ‘Princess’, no wonder I was trying too hard around him, who wouldn’t?

“So, why did you want to talk to me? I thought I scared you away!”

“Well, you did at first, but then I thought about it for a bit and I realized that, in all honesty, you meant no harm, and...well.” he looked up nervously before letting out a sigh through his gills. “...you speak Arissian, right?”

“Yeah? Why wouldn’t I, I’m the Queen’s daughter”

“Good, I’m not good at explaining the emotional stuff in English. Anyway…” He Immediately switched over to the more...hypnotic and ethereal (if those are the right words) Arissian language. “I felt that in all your...weirdness, there was a nice little girl with a good heart with the sort of naive charm that I actually...kind of like. And besides, when a princess shows interest in me, of course I’d want to take that chance that rare.” Spada laughed and rubbed his head the way humans tend to do when they’re nervous, flicking his tail back and forth as well. (Probably another nervous habit of his.)

“Is..is that all, Spada?”

“Another thing, SkyStar, the way you were talking, the way you described life with your mother...you never had many friends outside of Pinkie, have you?”

I looked down on myself, putting my hands behind my back. “No, not at all, that’s part of the reason why I acted like such a creep earlier, sorry about that again by the way.”

“Hey, don't be so hard on yourself, this is all probably new to you.” I grinned in agreement as Spada continued. “To be honest, I’ve never had a lot of friends as a kid, either. The thing is, my father was an Arissian ambassador and he and my mother had a very long-distance relationship. I never had the opportunity to make friends because I was constantly going back and forth between my mom’s place and whatever embassy my father was working out of at the time. The only reason I stopped moving so much is because I got my own place down here after taking over my mom’s fish cart. So, yeah, I'm not exactly the best with this stuff myself, better than you, but still.”

“Wow…” I rubbed my arm, looking into his bright yellow eyes. “...I was worried we wouldn’t have much in common.”

“Well, there you go, Princess.” Spada let out a yawn before switching back to English “Anyway, it’s getting late, do you want to meet at the boardwalk tomorrow so we can have have a do-over, without the weird inflection and bizarre flirting.”

“That would be nice, Spada.” I giggled, finding it hard to contain my emotions (as usual).

“Ok, I’m gonna hit the sack. See you later, Princess!” Spada waved at me as he swam away. Smiling back at me with each pump of his tail. I turned around and opened the door to my room back up swimming over to my bed, ready to say goodnight to Pinkie…

...Only to find her already asleep on my bed, snoring loudly with the blankets strewn about, her hair completely straight and lifeless, as well as drool somehow coming out of her mouth as her tail looked like it was twitching in her sleep.

“I’ll...take the sponge bed on the floor.” I swam over to the guest bed on the other end of my room grabbing the rubber swordfish and putting a blanket over my tail, laying on my side as I fell asleep to the sights of the sea creatures swimming outside my window, smiling as I saw Spada briefly zoom past.

Author's Note:

What, you thought a highly advanced society with their own customs, beliefs and politics would speak strictly english?

Like I said, the Arissians in my EQG head-cannon have been living underwater for centuries, (as opposed to the Hippogriffs/Seaponies in the main universe, who have only been living underwater since the Storm King came into power.) and thus have their own beliefs and language (which I will also expand upon in future stories. And no, the Arissian language is not dolphin or whale noises). To stick to examples from this story, Naga and Ray, (who are brother and sister, respectively) are the two main deities in Arissian Culture. Naga represents the sea and Ray represents wisdom.

Also, I was debating between having a traditional mermaid design for Skystar or something more closely resembling the movie's design. bet eventually I decided to go with the more classic mermaid design arguing that since (like the Sirens) the Seaponies were based on Hippocampi, their human counterparts would be based on mermaids, though I did throw a few design elements from the Seaponies like webbed fingers, dorsal fins and bioluminescence.

Yes, Arissia is technically a nudist society (with them being merfolk and all.) clothing is seen as optional in their society and they mostly wear clothes on the surface to keep up appearances.

I'd like to think the transformation from feet to fins would remove most of their clothing, since it would kind of get in the way when your legs are being fused together.

And one final note: yes, I totally based Spada's look on Smallville's Tom Welling. (for those of you wondering, the name "Spada" comes from Kyuranger and his swordfish tattoo is also a reference to that)

Anyways, that's my two cents, MJP out.