Kaelynn wasn't a person who could be idle. It didn't matter how much work she'd done before, or how justified her idleness would feel to anyone else. Kaelynn couldn't bear to sit still. She'd been caught before, and spent a few nights in lockup while waiting for the lawyers to do their work. But at least then she had a book to read, or some paper she could use to sketch things out. Anything was better than sitting around to wait.

This time there would be no bribing the police to let her go, there were no legal actions to file, no defense to be made. Kaelynn was trapped, as completely as she could be. She had searched her entire cell and failed to find a way out. Even worse, her captor threatened terrible things if she ever detected a shred of resistance.

For a few hours she had curled up in a corner of the strange prison, as though waiting would eventually wake her up. She'd be back in the Bright Hawk's tank, her friends just returned from their mission to Earth. Maybe the Worldgate would work, maybe it wouldn't. But either way, they would be together again. She wouldn't sleep alone, she wouldn't wake up in fear.

It was just a dream. Kaelynn woke sore and stiff from her position, body wedged awkwardly into an opening barely large enough for her. Nothing whatsoever had improved—not her present, or the outlook for her future. She was doomed.

Kaelynn did not go back to laying in the corner. Ultimately, it didn't matter how bleak things seemed. Morningtide could lie all she wanted about her friends leaving her behind. She could proclaim the cage a perfect prison, and the guards outside eager to kill her.

She can't take my songs away. I've used the transformation spell before, I can use it again. I can walk out of this prison.

Kaelynn searched her prison again, but this time her search was very different. Instead of looking for a flaw in the cell, she searched for resources. What had their jailer given them that they could use?

That proved the first piece of good news she'd seen. Morningtide had filled the cell with all kinds of "comforts" for her captive. It was hard to say what good a grand piano or rugs would do for their morale underwater, slowly corroding. But a piano was a source of cable, wire, and steel. A rug could be sliced and braided into rope. Fine furniture could be shattered into wood and scavenged for screws.

Most important, all this gigantic crap proved there was another way into the tank, a way so obvious she'd almost missed it the first day. There was a steel door on the top of the back section, made of two overlapping plates obviously fastened down together. They couldn't be so lucky as having the mechanism secured on their side, but that wasn't the end of the world.

Steel might be unyielding, but it was ultimately fastened to stone—stone that could be eroded and weakened over time. Stone she could defeat, with the tools and the time. She had an endless supply of the latter, so all that left was the former.

So Kaelynn began gathering up the scrap she'd discovered around the prison. Taking apart Tellin's beloved possessions one by one would probably not earn her much cooperation—but there were plenty of old things left abandoned in corners, gifts that he obviously hadn't cared for. Kaelynn started with those, taking an old basket with a strap covered in deposited saltwater, and gathering up bits of discarded metal and wood that didn't immediately crumble in her grip.

That was what it took for Tellin to finally swim over to her, emerging from hiding near the walls to trail just behind her. He spent a good few minutes in total silence, watching as she dug through sediment on the bottom of the tank, fishing out rusting toys, models of Equestrian buildings. Her most interesting find came after about an hour, when she shook off what she thought was a length of wood, only to expose as a book underneath. A book, with genuine paper pages, almost-leather cover, and everything.

"How..." She settled it down on a clean rock, flipping through it with one foreleg. Yes, it still felt like paper to the touch, and she could turn through its sections without making the entire thing crumble. A physical impossibility, but somehow a clear reality.

"Did Morningtide ask you to clean?" Tellin hummed, finally letting himself drift closer. "She usually lets me do whatever I want in the tank, as long as the display window is nice. Nopony looks back here, you probably don't need to do that."

"I'm not cleaning," she said, eyes skimming over the book. An Illustrated Account of Encounters with Ponies Dwelling Below the Water. The few pages she saw did have images of seaponies, often floating along beside ships. Real ships, not the airships that she'd seen dominate Equestria today. Interesting stuff, but for now she just put it aside with everything else. It wouldn't be useful for making tools, anyway. "I'm collecting materials. I want to make things, but I don't want to break anything you like."

She couldn't conceal her fear—that was the downside of all this singing. Maybe that was why she had got along so well with Ryan. He was going to read her emotions anyway, so it wasn’t like she could hide anything more.

Tellin circled her once, tail dragging slowly with his confusion. "Make things? Why would we need to make things?"

She had to choose her words carefully—any lie she told would come out as an insincere, out of tune mess. But she couldn't be silent and expect someone as emotionally developed as a child not to go repeating what she said to unsavory ears.

"Before I was kidnapped, I was an engineer. I make things even when I don't need to make them. Creation is rewarding all on its own."

He hung in the water there, apparently lost in thought as she continued away from him. She picked up a few more interesting scraps before he caught up with her again. "What are you gonna make?"

"Tools, to start. These will be... the worst possible conditions to begin. No drill, no press, no forge..." She winced. "Basically a desert island, without the coconuts and sunshine. After that, we'll see what I can figure out. I've thought about how seaponies might be able to build a civilization. You can't even swing a hammer properly underwater. Feels like we would be stuck primitive forever."

The hippogriffs had seemed about as advanced as ponies, but half their civilization was above water. Anything they needed to do on dry land they could just build there, then bring underwater. Ryan could probably give her a whole lecture about all the different ways science and technology would be stunted.

I don't have to discover anything, just make some basic tools. Or ask for them... How bold could she get in her requests from Morningtide before she realized she was trying to escape?

"I don't think the others were... stuck." He swam along beside her now, which unfortunately meant he blocked her view of the discarded bits and pieces that might be useful to her. "Morningtide tells me about them, sometime. She wants me to help save them, one day. It doesn't seem right to let the Storm King wipe us out."

She gave up her search, and instead turned her attention on a large desk up against the wall. It was in bad shape, and clearly Tellin didn't use it much. That made it perfect for her.

She would need a chisel and hammer first, something she could use to strike stone. That meant something heavy, cord, and metal strong enough to resist repeated impacts. She started sorting through what she had gathered, pushing aside anything that didn't seem promising.

"I don't think that would be right, either," she said absently. "It's not the worst purpose a pony could have. But I'm not what you think I am, or what Morningtide wants me to be. I'm from another world, kid."

"So?" He watched from the water above her, not actually interfering. That was good, she probably would've snapped at him otherwise. "Lots of us went to other worlds. We had a song that could open... gates? Fish could swim through whenever they wanted. There were songs for all kinds of things—songs to build buildings, songs to heal sick fish, songs to weave cloth—Morningtide knows, ask her!"

She really doesn't think you're an escape risk, if she told you all of that.

Kaelynn stopped, holding up a long shard of metal. It hadn't rusted like much of the other stuff she could find. All it had to do was hold up long enough to pry apart that piano.

"I might," she said, considering different handle materials. She didn't get very far before realizing the obvious—she didn't have hands, so she would need something she could hold in her mouth, while somehow still exerting enough force to use effectively.

A force-dampener system, or maybe a harness for someone's forelegs. She could already imagine a few different designs, using springs and various shapes of jointed metal. Some were simple enough that she could probably throw them together in an afternoon, with a workshop and a pair of hands. Unfortunately, that was her entire problem.

She slumped her head against the desk, and the music of her voice must have conveyed her defeat. "Do you know any of those songs?"

"No," he said. "I thought you did! That light one you used, without even trying! Do you think maybe our other songs work kinda like that one?"

"I'm sure they do," she agreed. "I had a whole songbook—actually, Morningtide has it just outside. She seems to like you better, you should ask her to give it to us. It had all kinds of songs in it."

Kaelynn had tried to sing all of them, before she understood the importance of matching the spell's required emotional tone. Too bad she didn't have the same memory for songs that she did for machines, or maybe she could just try one of those defensive spells from memory.

"Really?" Tellin circled around her once. "I wonder if she's out there now!" He zipped past her, back towards the tunnel.

That left Kaelynn alone with her work, at least for a little while. With her work, and a kid who had spent most of his life in this stupid tank. Tellin wasn't really on her side, yet. Whatever escape she tried would probably take winning him over first. Somehow.

She turned back to her work. She took a lump of wax, and used the desktop to sketch out what she would do. The marks were crude and would wipe away easily, but it was something. Kaelynn hummed quietly to herself as she worked, without even really realizing what she was humming. She needed something to distract her from the painful absence in her tank.

Metal sounded against metal as she finally went to work. She had only scraps of cloth to bind things together, and nothing close to an anvil or hammer. She wasn't going to make excuses for herself. If she started down that road, she might as well just give up and submit to Morningtide's whims.

"Kaelynn!" a voice called from behind her. She turned to look at Tellin, and realized she was both hungry and sore from labor. How long had she even been working? "Kaelynn, you're doing it!"

"Doing what?" Then she looked down, gasping at what she saw on the desk before her.

Somehow, impossibly, Kaelynn had made herself some tools. They were clearly made of the scrap metal she had to work with, speckled with patches of corrosion and rust. They had mouth grips of worn cloth or wood she had scavenged. Yet the quality of the workmanship was... impossible.

There was a wrench here, a hammer, a vice, a hand-drill. "Impossible," she stammered, nudging one of them with one of her hooves but if she expected the hammer to puff away into bubbles before her, she was disappointed. "I don't know any other songs."

"Looks like you do," Tellin hummed. "Show me how you did that!"

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