(Rose)
We're sailing toward the next fragment of coastline south, rather than a real island, or old island let's say.
The maps in the ship don't match what we see. I expected it slightly.
Either the continents around this sea have moved, or the magnetic poles have shifted a little, or the coastline as I suspect has been destroyed and reshaped in depth, older shorelines mostly sunk, leaving a newer sea and newer island in their stead.
Meanwhile, as we sail and wonder about this, our friend is singing a ''cara mia'' song joyously, a grand smile over her face and body. She's carefree joy personified and makes even us look grim and blue.
She literally, in a way, keeps drinking herself to death, without a second thought. She has no painful side effects either obviously.
Anyway, we reached the new island. Its earth is yellower. There's an old fort on top of it.
As we get to the shore, our friend grabs a full bottle and just dives there. We then see her swimming to the shore with ease, while we slowly follow with the boat, before we can anchor it and climb down.
B - Such energy she has.
R - I wish most our encounters with beings-like-her were with likes of that one.
B - I hope she will regrow next year...
R - Who knows? It may very well be.
As we set foot on the beach, we still hear her singing with her merry voice.
We climb the island and reach the more or less old krag fort. The walls seen from the sea looked old. Once there, we notice the modern manufacture and equipment.
The rust has eaten all the barriers, doors, knobs, pipes... Well, everything metallic has become uneven like long eroded rocks, and everything is a mixture of these ochre stones and orange to red rusts.
We visit the empty place without finding anything but carpets of dirt everywhere. All we can hear beside the wind is our friend humming or chuckling for no reason. Nothing is grim looking to her.
This island is only empty ruins, without any mysteries to offer us.
~
As the day slowly sets, we sit on the edge of a rock above the water. I hold a fish line.
A little further on the beach, Grape is making sand castles right where the waves stops, most of the time.
There's not much to do while we wait for the next day, so we're looking at her play.
B - She's like a child.
R - in some aspects, yes. She's not the first one I meet that is trying to find its balance in life.
B - What do you mean?
R - Well, we all pursue an everlasting and evolving balance between our desires, our morals and so on, with what we know and how we relate to the world. When I came to this world, it was mostly a balance between being human, being a monster, and being a flower, with their respective aims. Now for her, there's still a bit of that. She's another lifeform whom set her mind to a choice of balance between humanity, childishness, adulthood, monstrosity, and so on...
B - So you're saying that life is looking for its equilibrium.
R - Feels like it to me at least. It's as if the world we're in was the child of our old one, and theirs. It's young, they are young these new things, living in between. They are interesting to meet...
Bleue looked at me in disbelief for a few seconds, but then smiled softly in a way I've rarely seen.
B - yeah...
After a few hours, I caught a few fishes, and even a squid. They all were fried on the ship's electric stove instead of our usual wood fire roast cuisine. Because we mostly have nothing to burn here.
We eat as night falls. Grape drinks.
We sleep in the boat and as the next morning comes, we leave this island like that.
We only left a few empty bottles to mark our time there. Then we sail all day long.
An entire day, slowly navigating between reefs of the sunken land, heading to the new shoreline south we still can't see.
We anchor the ship for the night.
The stars are bountiful in the night sky.
Grape keeps nibbling at our hands or feet when sleeping. It doesn't hurt but it tickles.
She doesn't sleep much anyway.
The next morning, something goes slightly wrong.
We kept heading south hopefully as the day began, but we find ourselves heading directly east, toward the sun.
Maybe the compass is broken.
But it becomes worse as the day goes. Despite us correcting the course, from what we see in the sky and the way shadows lean over time.
The compass doesn't like it and nor does the boat's computer system.
They want to orientate us to the east, up to a point where it suddenly shifts direction against our will.
Bleue and I then turn it off and resume commanding the ship fully manually.
Bleue spots a storm far away in the East, quite as I spot another one far away in the west.
We keep heading south as we debate whether we should change course or not.
She oddly thinks the computer was trying to take the safest course for us, saving us from the western storm.
I think it was trying to have us trapped in the eastern one, as a being-like-her trap.
Hard to say. The computer doesn't speak nor shows anything we can understand. Grape has no clue nor opinion on the matter at hand. Well...
The two storms slowly catch up to us and meet above us in the sky. It remains unclear which is worst to face.
Grape is then laughing at the unchained elements without any worry. Thunder begins to appear.
Dark clouds and heavy waves begin to make our sailing uneven in this space.
We keep heading south though we're about to be surrounded by the storm.
Thunder cracks in the sky louder, going horizontally inside the colliding clouds.
We face the downpour and do our best keeping our direction.
In the middle of the rain on either side, we spot quiet and slow bolts of thunder. They're like giant nervous insects flying erratically while spreading their light behind them.
We spot these quiet bolts of thunder many times over as we keep going. The boat has quickly lost most of its power though, without the sunlight to fuel it.
It goes like that in very agitated sea for a few long minutes. It's like the bolts are swimming alongside with us, in their mixture of air, sea water and rain.
Finally, normal thunder cracks loudly right above us, and we get stunned for a minute.
And then, the storm is letting us go.
Softly, as we keep sailing, everything becomes gradually calmer.
The stormy weather eventually fades in the distance behind us.
When we are all look behind for a while, at the storm wall that rose abruptly over the sea, I end up being the first to turn and look ahead again.
Oh.
I see the coastline.
Our ship sails swiftly toward the Egyptian shores right there.
~