By Land or Sea or Foam
The crash of the waves. The smell of seawater. The inviting blue of the ocean before them, as the surf rolled in. It was all so wonderfully familiar.
And that familiarity made it putrid. Hateful. A reminder of all that was lost.
More than ever, Adagio missed the power of her old body. Through necessity, much of a siren’s time was spent airborne, seeking creatures that could be driven to rage, that oh-so-delicious rage. Sentients underwater were limited – the seaponies had retreated long ago to Mount Aris, and while there were rumors they may have recently returned to the ocean, Adagio had failed to locate their new kingdom – and driving dumb animals to violence produced little satisfaction, so expeditions inland were a necessity to create the necessary chaos they lived for. But a siren’s home was underwater, where the weight of their massive bodies felt real, where they coursed through the sea with powerful tails that sliced through the world around them, diving down to the crushing depths knowing that they were the top predator, and even the largest of whales and sharks feared their mighty jaws and hunger for meat.
On some days, Adagio knew it’d be better if she’d simply stayed in that world, where she’d been queen, and limited herself and her subordinates’ aerial ventures to the coastal towns, where their intrusions were a known and reluctantly accepted threat. But being the top predator of one realm had made her all-too-eager to claim another, and her intrusion into Equestria’s borders had had… consequences.
Adagio glanced down at her much-loathed new appendage. Her right hand.
She wasn’t eager to dwell on the strategic logic of recent events at the moment. It distracted from the fantasies about eating the damned wizard where he’d stood.
The new world she’d been banished to, days before, left her in a near-perpetual state of wrath. Gone was her size, with her new form reducing her to the meek scale of all the realm’s other inhabitants. No longer could she leer down and watch as the world around her crumbled into madness, entire towns caving to the fury she generated, destroying themselves. Gone too was that essential power of flight, and indeed, she’d been left with the disgusting sensation of having to learn to walk. Something any siren should quite literally be above.
Perhaps most enraging, though, was the loss of her beloved tail. Well, almost. In what constituted the most egregious case of insult to injury, there was still a bone where the tail should have been. But it was a pitiful remnant, its function improperly and humiliatingly replaced by these overgrown, incompetently-designed fins.
Each night, Adagio dreamed of tearing the wizard limb from limb.
It was a small mercy that their song remained. Upon arrival, they’d manage to drive the small village of the apes they now resembled into an all-out fistfight before escaping into the nearby woods. But now, confronting the weakness of their new bodies, they found that they’d retained a less appealing aspect of the siren form as well.
Hunger.
Basking in the madness they created with their song was deeply satisfying for sirens. Going without it for long would surely end in disaster. But it still wasn’t the same as food. Of course, being able to find nutrition was of minimal concern for a gargantuan creature of the deep, but here, it was a different story. With just a few days spent in their new form, the pangs had become unbearable.
And so it was that Adagio now stood, Aria and Sonata flanking her, on the outskirts of Canterlot Beach in the last hours of Sun, barefoot on the hot sand, staring into the magnificent blue body that should have been their new home, but never could be.
“...So are we ever gonna get in there, or…”
Adagio shifted her gaze to where Sonata stood, quizzically staring, wearing her choice of the swimwear they’d stolen from a group of three friends they’d left beating the stuffing out of each other under a beach umbrella. Had there been more strength in her body, Adagio would have been sorely tempted to test her new limbs' strangulation capabilities, a utility she'd briefly observed in some of the brawling townsfolk; instead, she merely grit her teeth. “Does it look like I’ve gotten in?”
Although Adagio was only starting to figure out how to read the expressions of the ape-faces standard to this world, she could still detect the blankness on Sonata’s, as her fellow ex-siren apparently needed to ponder the question. “No?”
“Then you can wait,” she snarled.
“Why?” Aria cut in curtly. “Do we just want all the fish to swim away while we fail to catch them, or…”
“Because I am handling this, Aria!” Adagio hissed, her words tinged with flame as she whirled on her ever-grating second-in-command, murderous fantasies momentarily diverting to her. “And you will know your place!”
Aria opened her mouth to respond, but seemed to think better of it. Adagio turned back to the ocean.
Of course, they’d both had a point, but Adagio wasn’t exactly about to admit that swimming with only the sad remnant of her tail, these “legs” potentially having to serve as pathetic replacements, would be the most humiliating experience of her life.
But it couldn’t wait any longer.
After a few further minutes of feigned deliberation – her compatriots couldn’t be allowed to know that their insistence was what had caused Adagio to finally move – she took a tentative step forward. Then another, then another, then another until she was running towards the surf, making it almost the way there until the filthy overstretched fins managed to cross in front of each other and send her careening onto the sand.
She slowly raised her head and spat out a mouthful of the vile dirt, mentally cursing her stunted body once more.
“What are you waiting for?” she screamed. “Get in there!”
And she lay in the sand as Aria and Sonata passed her and dove into the water, before beginning to feebly claw her way towards the shoreline.
It had gone about as well as could be expected.
Of course, none of them had been able to swim with any efficiency, but Aria and Sonata had managed to get the hang of things enough to make a few catches. Aria had emerged with a few handfuls of herring. Sonata, with triumph in her eyes, carried and laid down a small shark.
Adagio’s swim had gone less successfully.
How her compatriots had figured these new bodies out well enough to swim was a mystery. Her tailbone had refused to budge, even as she poured all her focus and energy into getting it to swish back and forth. She hadn’t expected much from it, given its size, but at the very least the stunted thing should have moved in the water where it was needed. Her subsequent efforts to lock her two legs together and mimic the needed tail motions accomplished little.
In the end, she’d crawled out of the water defeated, with nothing to show for her attempt, but regained her posture quick enough to reestablish dominance.
It helped that her failure had pushed her fury to pyroclastic levels.
“Give me that,” Adagio snarled as Sonata picked up the shark.
“It’s mine!” came the nasal, insipid reply.
“I. Don’t. Care!”
Adagio dove forward, tackling Sonata and, with what little strength remained in her sad body, wrested the big fish away from her companion. She opened wide and lunged, excited to at least, at least, have the satisfying taste of crunchy, scaly fish to make up for everything else that had gone wrong with this wretched day, all these last few accursed days, and…
“BLAAAAAAAUGHHH!”
The vile flavor spread along every inch of her mouth as she frantically spat and gagged, making another run to the water to gargle it and wash out the scales. A mild bit of luck came her way, at least, as she managed not to trip all over herself this time. Storming back, she stared in stunned amazement as she found Sonata picking up right where she’d left off, tearing off a chunk of the horrid fish flesh.
Then the disbelief boiled over into open seething.
“That,” Adagio fumed, “is wrong. That is not what that tastes like!”
Sonata stopped chewing to consider the statement. Then she resumed, swallowed, and shrugged. “Eh, this whole place is wrong. Can’t do much about that.”
Steam billowed from Adagio’s ears as she watched Sonata nonchalantly resume munching on the shark. Beside her, Aria downed a whole herring in one bite; her face scrunched up violently as it went down her throat, but she managed the feat.
After a few moments, the steam ran out, and Adagio collapsed onto the ground. Reaching out, she picked up one of the herrings, with Aria not resisting. She held it over her mouth and, after a heavy exhalation, dropped it in.
The nails at the end of the appendage-within-the-appendage, her “fingers”, dug deep into the rest of her hands as one of the single worst experiences of Adagio’s life came and went in the span of a few moments.
Her desire to watch the wizard beg for mercy as she destroyed him had quintupled in the process, but there was at least finally something in her stomach.
One hospitalization for food poisoning later, the trio had learned some more important details about the diet of their new forms, apparently named humans.
Most significantly, raw, wriggling fishes didn't exactly agree with their digestive systems.
(The doctors had also been insistent on seeing something called “ID” from them; however, a quick dose of siren song had nullified that issue.)
And so it was that Adagio now sat at a booth at what was called a “burrito joint”, with Aria and Sonata facing her from the other side.
Together, they stared at the freshly-made meals now before her, abandoned by their original patrons, who were occupied with an ugly wrestling match in the parking lot. Adagio’s plate bore a set of tacos, made with Marelaskan white fish, Appaloosan cheddar cheese, tomato, and lettuce.
Spite dripped from her as she looked at the lettuce and its leafy, repulsively green texture, placed prominently at the top of the whole thing. Sirens did not eat vegetables; they tasted like nothing, and were barely even digestible for an oceanic superpredator.
But Adagio was an oceanic superpredator no longer. And this siren would have to eat her vegetables.
She carefully handled the first of the three tacos on her plate, the shape of it awkward in her fingers as she tried to keep the soft, flat bread from spilling all its contents. She bit into the thing, bracing for more vileness, or at best flavorlessness from how much of it all was the lettuce, and…
It was alright.
Her tongue did not revolt.
Her mouth was able to chew, and the taste that spread throughout her palate was reasonable. Even the texture of the lettuce was surprisingly inoffensive.
She swallowed.
As she contemplated this turn of events, she looked across the table. Aria seemed content as she bit into a bulkier entree, a burrito. Sonata, meanwhile, had also received tacos, and from the look on her face as she bit down on one, an observer might have assumed it was the single best food in all existence.
Adagio stared down at the rest of her tacos. They would be an acceptable meal.
That was one comfort, at least. That something in this new world of theirs could be as good as acceptable.
She took another bite, the taste satisfactory enough that she almost didn’t stop to envision bringing her jaws down on the wizard instead.
Almost.