Somewhere Below the Sea

by TheSkeletalGent

Seal tight, keep dry, cook tender

The world was sinking.

The world was shrinking.

That was the terrible feeling which was invading his head, clouding his thoughts, clawing away at his insides. The gaudy flashes of silver and red felt that had looked so wonderful in the artificial lighting of the cave now looked dark and dead. The little window that was now his only opening to the outside world was growing dimmer, dying out.

If Honeydrop had been riding the blues, then he was definitely riding sky high on the reds; his blood was up, he was jumpy, antsy, restless. He was not quite afraid, but he was sweating like hell. There was that sounding, that steady traffic at the back of his mind that would not abide, like a whining, warbling claxon. An alarm. It was waves of bright anger battling the first rudimentary flutters of claustrohpobia. It was a sign pointing ‘GET OUT’ in great biological neon.

But he could’t. To deny it was unrealistic, to try it might be suicidal. He was imprisoned in a cell of glass and artificial hydrolics. Outside that, deep pressurre, cold thermals, certain death. He was sure that if he dared to look out of that little port window his mind, as it was, would happily try to eat itself up with all the fresh horrors it could provide. He needed to calm, he needed control, if not of the situation-- at least himself.

He sat back, breathed out, began to shudder. He felt his back melt into the soft material of the booth, his mind clear up. The claxons began to fade down to background noise. What replaced it was the heated buzz of circuitry achieving contact and as he watched, the darkness of his little world melted away before the light of twin beam cones. The dark wasn’t really dark; it was -moving, peaceful, a shimmering haze of blues and greens.

The vox unit nestled above him just above the entrance/observance port had been painfully silent since the sudden and certainly involuntary send off to this newest journey. The entity which he had begun to think of as the machine ghost- and disturbingly, ‘her’- for although he still though of Abbey as a construct of informatics and jewelthurmancy, that recent and unpleasant interaction had yet managed to inflict her with some small semblance of personality- she could not, or perhaps, would not speak again; he had tried to reach her several times, and tried loudly.

That same breath of thought brought up a nasty twist of fear, and something like foreboding; how was Honeydrop supposed to reach him? How was she even to know that he was still alive? She herself was stuck back on the surface, but in a lair full of aging machinery and something that might or might not wish to do her harm. She had shelter at least, and a source of food; the strange refrigeration block that had come spiralling out of the ground might feed a filly for a week, and he was sure he had spotted more at his brief look around the underground wharf.

What of himself? Booze and a cupboard full of snacks wouldn’t keep him, but the lack of space and real, honest sunlight would probably undo him long before that, he might begin to feel that need long before his throat would begin to parch or his stomach start to shrivel. The thought that he might escape one contraption sinking to it’s doom only to step willingly into a slow, lingering death of another, that brought him closer to that earlier panic-- and to something that was a little worse; a kind of bitter, unwelcome sort of humour.

Dark thoughts they were. It was appropiate acclimization to the world outside. A helpful little device just to the side of the entranceway was at first mistaken for a thermometer; but as the vessel went deeper, the number went up, not down, and the temperature had somehow remained on the same easy level it had been when he’d stepped into the craft. They changed at a steady pace; 20, 30, 40 something fathoms. Outside the world was black. Black as space. Black as a cave entrance with the door swung shut. Two little beams of light between him and unseeing oblivion. There was very little to like about that wavering, weakening light. He looked away.

Down. Down. Deeper. Down.

Long, endless moments seemed to trickle by like drip fed mercury. At some point he had begun opening the built in cabinets and the ornate cupboards to take a number of what could be thought of as supplies, when the bottom hit.

A great trembling impact rocked through the whole of the compartment; his front legs, grounded firmly on the ground to support the rest of his body quivered to jelly in a moment and buckled beneath him. An assortment of small flasks went rolling on the floor and lit his face with gaudy, shimmering coins as they reflected what light managed to fall in. He finally dared to look outside; the world had gained a grainy, more murky quality as the sand all around the center of impact was thrown up and then floated away on the currents.

Silence descended.

For a while he could only bring himself to stare outside and watch the aquatic dunes settle again and rest amid waving seaweeds and twisted corals, the first curious groups of darting fish already beginning to flock to him. He was shocked with normality, almost hypnotyzed by the simple beauty of his view, and the break it provided from all this strangeness. Then a moments look into the dark beyond made him see movement, a great theater spook spreading it’s cape. Maybe not such a great image, under the circumstances, but sometimes your mind went where it wanted. He quickly spun his thoughts around other matters; how he might escape, for one.

His hopes went a little like this; the radio unit was at the moment his best (and only) shot. He had some experience with radio technology and if he were able open up the vox unit and some more of the inner machinery (with no tools of course- just hooves) he might be able to make an adjustment here, set a calibration there, and actually reach someone who could possibly be of some help.

A shock; that batch of darkness moved again, too big, too vital for him to shrug off as anything he would even want to imagine-- a great bloated shape, more things shooting off of it, a suggestion of far too many limbs to be sane. It was convulsing it’s way through the water like something that was only barely solid in itself, the main body of it led ahead, deflating, inflating, deflating again, each movement at once perfectly fluid and sickeningly quick. Mere moments before it would have hit the capsule head on the thing blew up one final time and rocked itself backward in one graceful motion, all of it’s limbs spread wide and latched themseles onto the surface of the capsule with an audible slime-slicked sound that made the skin want to crawl right off his bones. Wander fell away from the port window and struck the wall of the cabin shoulder first; even with the padding (the wall was carpeted and, from the feel, undercoated with some resilient stuff), the blow was hard enough to numb him-- yet the cry locked in his throat was not one of pain.

If ever he had wanted for a large calibre weapon at his hip, now was a time to trump it. The thing was demonic. It’s underside was a nauseating patchwork of pasty pink and blotched white flesh, shiny and elastic as rubber. Large suckers of different sizes spread unevenly over the surface of the limbs like diseases boils. At the center a great orifice, a wicked looking beak that served as a mouth or perhaps a sphincter (or both, for all he knew) opened and snapped shut like a steel bear trap that had been given sentience. They pushed forward every second or third snap and hit the glass with a heavy thack! thack! thack! that filled him with a far greater and more immediate dread because before long
-- yes, oh dear Goddess yes--
he already began to see a crack forming on that plated glass. If he looked hard enough he would no doubt be able to follow the tiniest fractures as they spread out from the main fault line and spiderwebbed out-

He imagined what might happen to him if the glass were to break and he were sucked out with the suddenly depressurized air right into the waiting tentacles of yonder great and terrible beast. He got a quick but clear image of one of those tentacles ripping his head from his body like a flower from a stalk, perhaps left to float for a moment, eyes staring, mane rippling, the muffled, dry crunch as his body was being snapped and broken by something like mechanical shears...

And then there was light.

Great bright light, and a deep electric blue that flooded the cabin (Not again! was his only coherrent thought) and it made him slam his eyes shut after so long in the murky gloom. For a moment it was so bad that he felt like someone was pressing their hoof right against his sockets, and then it faded, he could look-- and three things came to mind; the window was cracked, but seemed to be holding. Also, the black, oily substance now clouding the water outside was likely monster blood. Finally, he managed to catch one glimpse at the prodding antennae jutting form the vehicles front through the now unnobscured view port. Blue lines of power still arced lazily from it’s metal tip, the outer segments retracting before it folded neatly back into it’s vessels shell.

There was that low thrum again, but this time there were no lights.

He began to move forward.

There was blue sand everywhere. Coloured corals flashed into vision: deep red; dull chalky purple; seizure inducing white. Schools of fish shimmered in every bend of the rainbow, some of them zipping through the black things that looked like shifting snakes but weren’t and which themselves twisted through it all. The way was closing in, the shapes surrounding him began to harden, to grow; there was a sound all that was constant and deep and terrible, like a howling wind of the ancient depths. He felt a change in the pace of the sphere, a fearful crawl in his belly, a pang of excitment. He felt like falling.

He had entered a long tunnel of some weird phosphorescent rock, and the walls glittered and twinkled with thousands of minute starbursts. He saw everything touched with an eerie, horror-house glow.

Ghostly wisps of seaweed clung to the walls around him, poiting towards the flow. Watching it made him realize the brute sound was a river... or as close as one could be in this place. It was channeled to him by the confining rock, magnified in its own natural amplifier. Yet the sound remained oddly constant, even as the walls were widening, drawing back. The angle of his ascent was becoming more pronounced.

Something passed him by his right and caught his attention. Outcrops above him covered in pointless scribbles. The fact that they might be languages didn’t occur to him until the last one appeared in perfectly readable Equestrian; TRACK 10 TO SURFACE AND POINTS WEST. This was so strange to him he might have written it off as a vivid daydream, but a moment later a second sign came up, equally clear and proclaiming; SCENIC ROUTE ENDS HERE, the lettering, bright and urgent in their contrast to the all around glow, died away as the rocky tunnel grew bare.

There was a light ahead. How far he couldn’t say, but as little illumination as there was it could be miles away, or mere minutes. Then the shape clarified into a square, the tunnel began to open up; he saw other lights joining it. One became three, five, a dozen. More lights appeared above. They grew from the size of toy windows to gigantic entranceways

As he approached the source of the glow he saw that the rock wall to his left had fallen away and (what he assumed to be) tracks had been joined by others which crossed in a complex spider web. The light laid them as burnished vectors on the sea floor, on some of them there were dark boxcars, a stage on metal rails, something that might have been a passenger car. All looked dark and empty, like ghost galleons in a ships graveyard.

None of it was recongizable. He caught himself hoping for a serial number, a readable license plate, possibly the good old logo of the Equestria Pacific, reasoning, maybe, that all this was the testing ground for a new and revolutionary underwater roadworks; he saw nothing he knew about. Even the design of the vehicles themselves seemed unfamiliar; each model looking streamlined, too extravagant, and straight from a art decoration concept for a science fiction hardbacks. In those kinds of stories, the light ahead would be from a meeting chamber from some wise counsel of fairy creatures, creatures who would serve him a feast drawn from stores deep in the raths core and send away with a convenient AA approved travel map to guide him straight home.

The truth, when the light got close enough to identify, was hardly that dramatic. Even strangely disappointing.

What he saw was a housewife. A housewife holding a satellite dish and heating a box dinner. Her family was hazy and cartoon-drawn. Their smiles looked cheesed off.

And he could only think; Bring on the wise creatures. Bring their counsil, and their creations of handy-dandy dirt removers. Oh yes.

He was sure he must be going a little bit crazy.