Turning Human

by RB_

Turning Up

Her gold-scaled fin slipped easily through the clear water. Light, shimmering down from the surface, glinted off her lithe form. Her gills pulsed as she breathed.

Beneath her, the seabed glided by, sand and rocks and seaweed. Bright coral dotted the ground, and among it swam fish, crawled crabs. A school of minnows swam below her, and she could feel them, feel the little vibrations their small fins made in the water. Little ripples in an endless ocean. She reached down with her head and snapped at one that had dared come too close with needle-like teeth. The others scattered, their constellation broken.

This was her ocean.

With a flick of her tail, she propelled herself forward, her body snaking through the water. Where was she going? Nowhere in particular. Like a queen surveying her kingdom, so did she move with grace and purpose.

Then, a shadow. It passed over her, great and fearsome, clouding the waters for an impossibly long moment before moving on. She snapped her head up and around, looking for the thing’s source, a twinge of fear lit in her heart, but there was nothing there.

She floated there for a second, weightless, caution in her eyes.

But there was nothing.

She snorted, little bubbles emerging from her snout, and thought nothing of it. She turned with a twist of her body, and set off again with a flick of her tail.

Except she wasn’t gliding along now.

She was sinking.

She flapped her fins, but her fins were gone; in their place, a pair of arms stretched out in front of her, ten long, slender fingers grasping for purchase in the water. She desperately tried to flick her tail, only to find it gone in its entirety. Hair, long and golden, bunched around her face like so much seaweed as she sank.

She opened her mouth to call out, and water rushed in, air escaping in bubbles that got smaller and smaller as they rose away from her. She thrashed about with her new appendages, but nothing could gain purchase as she slipped deeper and deeper still.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

The light faded, and everything became pitch black. The seabed was gone; there was only void beneath her, a void that drew her in ever further.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

She couldn’t breathe. She sank downward, drowning, drowning…

---

Adagio Dazzle shot awake, breathing heavily. The alarm she’d set rang insistently in her earphones. Beep. Beep. Beep. She shut it up with an angry tap on the screen of her phone.

She glanced to her left, at the other bed and its occupant. Sonata was lying almost perpendicular to the piece of furniture she was lying on, with her arms and legs splayed out, tangled around her blanket and pillow. She snored, but quietly. Adagio’s lips twitched.

Letting out a quiet sigh, she slowly turned and slid out of bed. On went a pair of jeans and a t-shirt. Low-profile clothes, for her at least. She did up the zipper as silently as one can.

She had someone to meet, that morning, someone she was not looking forward to seeing. She couldn’t afford to wake up her roommates. They’d ask questions, ones she didn’t want to answer.

She pulled on a hoodie, a gray one, the sort of thing you wear when you don’t want to be noticed. Not that it would matter; at four in the morning, it was unlikely she’d run into anyone anyway. No one except… well, she’d get to that when she got to that.

Opening the door to the bedroom, cringing a little when it squeaked on its hinges (quietly, in reality, but to Adagio it sounded like a train whistle), she slipped out into the main room of the apartment. Slunk past Aria, sleeping on the sofa with a scowl on her face, like always. Incidentally, Aria did not snore. Just scowled.

Taking a deep breath, she put her hand on the doorknob, turned it slowly, eyes squeezed shut. It moved smoothly, and the door opened.

And so it was that she left the apartment—and her companions, for lack of a better term, they certainly weren’t her friends—behind.

The message she’d left for them on the table read as follows:

Going away. Don’t bother looking for me. I’ll be back.

-Adagio.

---

It was a cool autumn morning, and Adagio shivered a little as she walked towards Canterlot High. Not a place of happy memories—not for her, anyway. And not a place she’d normally go willingly.

Normally. But there was an exception to everything.

She turned the corner, and there it was, in all its high school glory. The place looked different in the cool grey tones of the early morning; more foreboding, less welcoming. Or maybe that was just because it was her. Either way, she headed towards the courtyard, and the statue of a horse in the middle of it.

A figure stood under the statue’s shadow, leaning their back against the pedestal with one leg propped up. It turned at the sound of her footsteps upon the sidewalk, and Adagio got to see a face she’d never wanted to see again—not unless it was under the heel of her boot, anyway.

“Sunset Shimmer,” Adagio spat, with all the venom of a cobra.

“Adagio,” Sunset replied, coolly but much more calmly. “Are you ready to go?”

Adagio’s fists clenched and unclenched in the pocket of her hoodie. She needed her. She had to keep reminding herself of that fact. Otherwise, it would be too much to bear.

Too much to bear that she needed Sunset Shimmer’s help.

“Obviously,” was the one-word answer she settled on. “Otherwise I wouldn’t be here.”

“Fair enough.”

It hadn’t been hard for Adagio to track Sunset down. She knew where she went to school, after all; it had just been a matter of following her back to her apartment, waiting for her friends to leave her alone, and then pacing back and forth in front of her door until she worked up the nerve to knock.

Not that she was nervous, no; it wasn’t that at all.

She’d been met with suspicion, at first, but Sunset had been surprisingly willing to listen to her. Thankfully. She hadn’t had a plan B.

She suspected Sunset pitied her. Well, whatever. She could work with that.

“So,” Adagio said. “The portal back to Equestria. Where is it?”

“You’re looking at it.” Sunset gestured towards the statue.

“You’re joking.”

“I’m not. Look.” The other girl extended her arm out to the edge of the stone… and in a burst of dim light, her hand passed through it. “Come on, see for yourself.”

She beckoned Adagio over, a gesture which Adagio reluctantly followed. She reached out cautiously and put her hand to the surface of the stone… only there was no surface. Her hand slipped right through, as if it were water, only it was warm on the other side, and she could feel something—Equestrian magic, she thought—faintly brushing her fingertips.

The sensation was fainter than she’d have liked.

“This is it?” she said. “This whole time, the way back to Equestria was here, right under our noses?”

“That about sums it up.”

Adagio let out a growl, ran a hand down her face. “Figures.”

“Don’t worry about it. It’s only open now because of Princess Twilight.”

Adagio looked at Sunset. A sneer crossed her face. “I guess I don’t need you now, do I?”

“Hey,” Sunset said, frowning. “That was our deal, remember? I take you back to Equestria, you let me tag along as your chaperone. Besides, I don’t think you’d get very far without me. Things have changed a lot since you were banished.”

She was right… not that Adagio would admit it. “I was joking.”

“Good.”

Adagio looked back at the smooth stone surface of the statue… the portal. Back to Equestria. Back home.

She took a step forward…

Something caught her foot. She tripped.

“Whoa, careful!” Sunset grabbed her hand, catching her before she hit the ground.

For just a split-second, Adagio could have sworn her eyes flashed white.

But then the moment was over. Sunset pulled her back to her feet. Adagio glared at her, ripped her hand away. “Don’t touch me,” she hissed.

Sunset put her arms up, a reconciliatory gesture. “Sorry.”

Taking a deep breath, Adagio once again turned her attention to the portal.

She took a step forward…