A gentle and steady clicking clicking noise echoed through the ship, putting me at ease. The smell of grease and the melody of clicks and whines from various parts played a happy lullaby for my tired body.

Actually, the real reason I had been woken up was because I had to use the bathroom really badly and I had apparently drooled the entire night.

Waking up in a puddle of drool is not the worst way I've woken up. I mean, there was the time I woke up in slavery, or all those times I woke up and was still a slave, or that time I woke up and a dragon had decimated my island, or that time I woke up and a shoggoth had decided to snack on everyone...

Actually, maybe I should find a way to avoid sleep? I'm sensing a pattern in just when the universe decides to fuck my life over.

Hm...

At any rate, I hauled myself off of the floor and looked around. "The ship...?" I blinked the tired out of my eyes and shook my head to clear it. I was in the underside of the ship and it seemed rather steamy. "What...?"

It was a room that I recalled getting smashed to pieces on the shoreline.

I looked back at where I had been laying. A wrench and a screw driver lay next to the spot. I sniffed the air.

My fur was singed.

"What the actual fuck?" I muttered, looking through the previously destroyed corridor. My hooves clanked against the metal floor as I tried my best to remain calm. "Fuck my life..." I mumbled, looking around.

"I didn't sign up for this..." I muttered, rolling my eyes at the clicking. "And what the hell is that?" I grit my teeth and went topside on the ship.

"Guys?" The nozzle below where the balloon should be had been radically altered to the point I hardly recognized it. It was familiar all the same. A single, tightly drilled hole rested in the top which altered pressure from what it had been before.

There was one less metal plate on the ship and I could guess where it had gone.

I pulled out a gem from my satchel and found that the large diamond I had been messing with was gone.

"Fuck my life..." Fuck fate.

"Malice?" I tried, looking around the world outside the ship. I could see where a campfire had been, but not much of where my companions might've been.

For once, the spider who was the bane of my life didn't respond. In fact, none of the spirits that I had decided dwelled in my head were doing much either...

I pulled out one of the prepared fire balls and looked around. I couldn't hear any animals. I couldn't hear anything except for the steady ticking.

I drew upon my magic and found my reserves shockingly drained beyond anything I could imagine. I barely launched the ball of fire in the air and it barely cleared the ship before it detonated, enveloping the sky with a massive firework explosion that did nothing but make me feel drained.

Tick.

Tick.

Tick.

After a long while I gave up on hearing an echo, figuring that the trees must have dispersed it or something.

And then it hit me.

I was dreaming.

I heard a sigh of failure before the world faded around me.

-----

"I think... he's waking up..." A familiar zebra said.

"Take it easy on him, none of us have any idea what he actually did, and if this follows every other time this has happened he won't either." Boss's no nonsense tone was bored and tired.

"Take it easy? Fuck that idea. He converted the ship to fucking steam and repaired it. AT THE SAME TIME." Catastrophe called from a bit further away from the others, but loud enough to make up for the difference. "If he can do that on command, then fuck letting him take it easy."

I cracked my eyes open to find Canary staring directly into mine. "Get out of my face." I grumbled, shooting a dirty look around at everything. It wasn't quiet. I could hear myself think and I could hear the others talk and move, could faintly hear the ship creak on top of the water.

Canary smiled at me and obliged my command. "Yes sir."

Boss walked away. "Can you try to tell us when you decide to freak out and start hurling sheets of metal everywhere?" She grumbled out loud in a probably rhetoric manner.

"Not a clue what you are talking about." I replied cheerily, hurling myself off of the ground and practically bouncing around. It was great to have people near me. Even if they were comprised of a dog, a sadistically sexy griffon and a zebra that seemed to keep mysteriously learning magic when I wasn't looking at him.

Seriously, when the hell did he learn a healing spell? I mean, I was with him almost constantly since we left the island and after I got into a fight he suddenly knew magic?

I felt like I was in a story written by a bad writer, like some other person was controlling the spider through the threads of fate and he, in turn, was trying to control me. Some crack pot writer was trying to make a psychological thriller action story while also trying to pull off deep characterization.

That's crazy talk.

But... it wouldn't do to try and follow whatever person was controlling the story.

If there was.

SHUT UP WITH THE THINKING.

"Steam... I think we might have enough water in the tanks to make it around..." I faintly heard the griffon muse. I walked over to her and stared at the complicated mechanisms responsible for controlling the ship.

"So... what the hell happened while I was out."

The griffon looked at me with a bemused smirk. "You started glowing and shit and repaired the ship." She looked over the controls. "Converted it to steam."

I nodded like I really cared. "Right. Sounds interesting." I smiled at the bright happy skies.

Tick.

Tick.

Tick.

GODDAMNIT.

My right eye lid twitched as I pushed the noise away. "Onward to new adventure?"

Catastrophe rolled her eyes. "Where should we go, oh mighty one?" She snarked.

I blinked and thought about it for a long time.

There was a wondrous hiss of steam as the balloon inflated from vapor pouring into it. The Scourge was in the sky again.

"Rej. We should go see what we can salvage from my island."

I walked away without a word. I was thirsty and needed something to drink.

I rummaged through some supplies below the deck of the ship and ulled out a canteen, stopping only when a flash of blue hit my eyes. Specifically, my own blue eyes caught mine.

And I stared into my reflection on the shiny canteen and couldn't keep my eyes off of it. It was the ultimate injustice; I was fucking adorable.

Thick lines surrounded my face in the cartoonish style that I had grown accustomed to. A single black stripe sliced over one of my eyes like a failed attempt to make me look vaguely menacing, like someone had done their best to make it look like I had one of those bad ass scars.

My eyes were the same as they had always been, blue as could be and seemingly endless in their depth. I had a long muzzle that seemed to scream of innocence and weakness.

Damn. Can fate be much more of a dick?

I was like someone had taken an angsty anime character and smashed it into a little girl's show gone horribly wrong. In a way, it put it into perspective precisely what I had gone through that I was only just now really noticing my appearance.

I had what looked like a cross between a spiked wheel and a spider on my flank in what I could only assume was a tribal tattoo. In other words, something that would probably haunt me later on but I would ignore until then because why the fuck not.

And I had a scar across my back. Looked pretty cool, all things considered.

I was rambling in my internal monologue and I was still thirsty so I drank the water and tried to forget how cutsy wootsy I looked.

And for good measure, threw the canteen away from me.

----

Honestly, if she was truly being honest with herself, Ivan was her new alpha. It bothered her, and unnerved her to think that she didn't know when the transition had been between being partners to her obeying, even caring about his well being. She was the stronger animal, she was the predator.

And yet... She was following a prey animal which occasionally did something unexpected. Taming a dragon...

It didn't add up. At all.

She had taken him in when he showed up at the edge of her camp site, back when she had two idiot lackeys and not a hope of getting anywhere in life with them.

Like a golden opportunity, she snatched him up and boarded a slave ship, selling him without a second thought. The few gems he had gotten her had been tasty...

And then she had been deemed to be useless and unceremoniously thrown into slavery. Forced to work beside the slaves that she had been responsible for capturing. Ivan had saved her...

He killed an Alpha. The weak pathetic zebra had killed an Alpha. She needed answers...

"Canary." She stated. The zebra she mentioned poked his head out of a book.

"Yes?"

"Explain to me what the hell Ivan is." He nodded at her and put the book down.

Ivan was her Alpha and she needed to know what she could to help him.

----

I think I figured it out. There were two less souls swimming around my head begging to be remembered. I had somehow used them as a battery.

I had converted the souls to make me fix the ship somehow.

A massive energy surge associated with the destruction of souls. I idly wondered exactly what the conversion ratio might be while staring at the gem arrangement that heated the balloon. My diamond was in there along with a topaz and a ruby. It was pretty hypnotizing and it took my mind off the fact that I could still hear the ticking noises.

Tick.

Tick.

Tick.

I had literally destroyed what little remained of two souls just so I could fix a ship.

I felt horrible about it, but I didn't feel guilty. Actually, I felt satisfied, like some sort of pressure had been released in my mind. It was sickening... and it felt great...

God. I needed help.

Also, if the tiny chance that this is actually a book that I am somehow the protagonist in, I have one thing to say.

Fuck all of you and I hope you burn.