Emerald's POV

The ocean, the ocean! I had caught a glimpse of it before, and now it was calling me again, the breeze, the scent. Freedom was just around the corner, all I had to do was reach out to it. Just a little bit more.

I ran towards the light with everything I had. It was a faint light, if that was the outside, and I was almost sure it was, it was not daytime. It was still night? Or had a whole day passed? I had to admit, I didn't have the best grasp on the concept of time, a bad sense of how much time had passed.

And there it was, the exit! I burst through… and almost fell down the rocky cliff to my death. Nah, I probably wouldn't have died. Ray would have saved me, or then again, maybe he would not. I rubbed my arm where he pushed and left a little scratch mark. But I didn't think I would have died there, anyways. That would have been a lame place to die. There had barely even been any adventure between the two of us. That would not be a good story.

The mouth of the cave, it was the same one I had come to just a few days ago with the kids. The kids… I wanted to see them, tell them everything would be ok before I left. They deserved to know it was going to be ok. Those kids… I wasn't abandoning them, but I needed to think of my own safety right now. I couldn't advocate for them or do cool things from them if I was dead, you know? I hoped they would know. I hoped the kid that fell would not be too resentful. I wasn't leaving forever, though. I'd at least come back for them.

The cave opened on a nearly straight cliff face that went all the way down to a deep, dark, tumultuous ocean below. I knew it probably wasn't that scary down there, but life or death situations, plus the darkness of the night, made everything a little bit scarier than they usually were.

"Now will you fly me?" I asked, just the tiniest bit bitter.

"I suppose I don't have much of a choice. However, you will not tell me how or where to fly. You have no control over my flight, and you never will. The sky is mine. You are merely along for the ride." He said. Harsh words from Ray, but I was pretty sure I understood. He did not want me intruding on something that was his. He did not want me to take away from it, or to take it for myself.

"That's fine. Are you good to go?" I asked. Ray nodded, and then positioned himself so that I could climb on his back. As soon as I was in position, we took off! And I mean we rocketed out of there, I had to hang on for dear life. I wrapped my arms around Ray and squeezed so I would not fall off. He was basically a flying snake, so there wasn't a lot of place for me to comfortably sit or anything. Something told me Rayquaza were not meant to be a steed.

Still, even with the wind rushing in my face, a feeling I wanted to feel for so long… with a Flygon. Those had a good place to sit. I was royalty, though, and I never wished I was not more than now, when I saw what being royalty meant for the rest of the family, weird dark magic, and making a people disappear. My father chose them to disappear.

I got off track for a second there. Even with the wind, I managed to look back to see the place we were leaving. The place I was born and raised, the place I never left in my entire life. It was just a large crater in the middle of the ocean. Ocean seemed to go on forever. There had to be other land somewhere. These western shore people had to be somewhere, after all. Unless it was the western shore of the lake? But nobody lived right on the shore of the lake. Whatever, I had to go under the assumption it wasn't there. I had people to save, people on the western shore.

Of course, now I was completely dependent on Ray to not drop me. Wait, could he even drop me? Was that a thing he could do, or would the tether drag him down with me, or would I just sort of hang in the air, dragged through the air by Ray? Would that hurt? I didn't particularly care to find out.

"Let's go west." I had to raise my voice significantly to be heard over the wind.

"One, I don't know which way is west. Two, what did I just say about you being along for the ride?" Ray replied. Oh, that was right. He didn't want me, and especially didn't want me on his back. I guess having a hundred plus weight on your back wasn't the best time.

"But what about those people. We have to save them, yeah? I know you wouldn't let a whole settlement of people be wiped out." He had to have some heroic bone in his body, some sort of empathy. It wasn't his species, and it wasn't his life, but I would do the same for a group of Rayquaza. Was that expecting too much of him? Who could say? Ray stayed silent for a long time, probably thinking about it. It shouldn't have been that hard to think about, but I would ty being patient with him.

"How about we find some land and some food, before we entertain any other ideas." He finally said. That was fair, there were priorities when it came to survival, you know? We couldn't save anybody if we were dead.

The crater that was my home got smaller and smaller, until I couldn't see it at all. And then my home was gone, and I had only Ray and the vast ocean. I could not see anything in any direction but the lapping of the ocean in dawn's gray light. The sun was going to come up soon, the dawn of the first day on my own. Maybe now that all we had was each other, Ray would get along with me better. Maybe, at some point, we would go back, and it would turn out it was all some elaborate prank my sisters were pulling on me. But no, they never went that far as to threaten my life, and they wouldn't attack a familiar, because they knew about the pain sharing deal. Well, they technically didn't do that, some guy I had never heard of with a Rattatta did. I thought I had met and helped just about every citizen in our kingdom, but I did not recognize most of the people in that court.

I had no idea when, but at some point, I fell asleep on Ray's back, because when I woke up, I was laying down on some sand, and my body felt like it was covered in a film of some sort or… something? It felt really weird, and I didn't know what it was. I felt really dirty. I was fine getting dirty for adventures, but I was always able to go home afterwards and wash off. Now, I could not go back, and my body felt absolutely disgusting.

Ray was nearby. He had to be. If he hadn't been attached to me by force by some metaphysical bond, I was sure he would have ditched me by now. He would have tried to find a way home by now. Instead, he was out a little ways in the ocean. He would look thoughtfully into the water, then strike his head into the water, scoop things up, spit out the sea water, and swallowed the rest of it. He repeated this process a few times, then made his way back.

"Ah, you're up." He said, disinterested, merely stating a fact.

"Yeah. You were doing some fishing?" I replied, sort of intoning my voice in such a way that he could tell I was really asking him if he brought me anything to eat.

"Yep, would have been better cooked, but survival is more important, right now." He put his hand to his body. "My stomach might not like this one." He completely ignored my implied question. I guessed I would ask more directly.

"Did you catch anything for me?" I asked, still somewhat delirious from the lack of food and water.

"Huh?" He asked, as if he hadn't expected that. "No. You can find your own food. I'm not helping you." Ray said, as if the fact that I merely suggested he do something like that offended him. I got what he was thinking. I wasn't going to help him with his life, so why should he help me with anything?

He didn't understand. I couldn't send him back, I just couldn't. I refused to send him back. He had a sour attitude, and I was almost certain he was just going to keep causing me trouble, but I still couldn't do it. I had worked too hard. I was not about to lose it all, my identity, my colors, my magic.

See, there was a way to send Ray back to his world… back to the woman he was going to marry, but it was quite difficult. The natural flow of things went from there to here. Our magic reached out to them, and they came to us. Trying to reverse that flow took quite a bit of effort, and all of your magic. All of it, no matter how powerful you were. It involved making a portal and severing the bond. Severing the bond, from what I knew, hurt physically, a lot. It was not enough to kill either of us, but it was very painful. That, I could handle, though. The portal part was the unacceptable thing. When I said it took all your magic, it meant all your magic, ever. Your magical prowess, the thing you needed to build in order to get your familiar in the first place, was your total magic potential. After using it, you needed some time to build up magic to do certain things again, but the potential never went down. If you had the potential to do something once, you always had the potential to do it… unless you sent your familiar back with a portal. When you did that, your magical potential dropped down to zero, and you could never build it back up again.

It was difficult to survive in this world without any magic whatsoever. So many things were built around it… If you had none… well, I would be a complete pariah, a hopeless outcast forever. Plus, it would be harder to survive. So… no, I couldn't send him back. I had no idea what would happen to me if I did. I got it, he had a life before he came here, but I wouldn't have a life after he left. I would have nothing, and if I was on the run like this… I would probably die fairly quickly. I didn't know if I could make him understand that. It didn't matter if he did or not. The fact remained, I was not going to send him back. That was the end of the discussion. And he hated me for it, but he couldn't leave, either. The bond kept us too close for him to ditch me in any significant way. Which left a question, why was there a film on my body. I sniffed myself. I smelled like the ocean.

"Why do I smell like the ocean?" I asked.

"You fell in when you fell asleep. I had to fish you out if I didn't want to be stuck in the ocean forever." He said.

"Ah, well, thank you very much." I said, giving him a little bow to show my gratitude. He was only helping me because I was connected to him, and by helping me, he was only helping himself, but I was still grateful. He didn't so much as make a noise acknowledging my thanks. That was alright, too.

Ok, we had found land and Ray had found things to eat. Now I needed to find something to eat. My stomach was making some seriously concerning noises. I took stock of what was around us.

We were on a sandy beach that stretched out for a while and then curved backward. We were either on an island or a peninsula. I hoped for the later. Or, I at least hoped that if we were on an island, it was a significantly big island. If it was just a little one, it probably wouldn't have enough resources for us to get started. Beyond the beach there was some greenery and a few palm trees on top of a slope, which dropped off after that so that one could not see what was beyond from there. I could hear some minor signs of life, if I listened hard enough, chittering, scurrying. If there was life here… that was a really good sign. That meant there was food here. That meant I could survive, and hopefully I would not have to try to fish. I didn't know how, and besides, raw fish sounded awful. Maybe Rayquaza were able to do it, but not me.

I walked up the beach towards the trees, and Ray floated behind me, silently. I should hope he didn't have a problem with this. If he wasn't going to help me find food, I would have to do it myself, but I couldn't do that without moving, and therefore, moving him. Unless what he actually wanted was to have me starve. I didn't know if he was that kind of guy, honestly. I liked to think he wasn't. But me starving, would that even affect him? I wasn't sure. There was a lot of documentation about the effects of various things on a human and their Pokemon, but starvation was not one I remembered hearing about. Starvation… wasn't something that really happened in our kingdom, and typically familiars did not have a spite against their human. But hey, I always knew I was a unique individual, so why in the world not?

I wondered if any of the grass or leaves were edible. I had not studied survival in anything besides caves, and I was always able to just go home, then, and I always had snacks. So I didn't really see the point in figuring out what could be eaten in nature. It didn't really matter to me, because I didn't need to eat in nature… before now.

One of the trees had bright fruit, it was kind of high up, though. That was no problem, all I needed to do was climb a bit. I gripped onto the tree, but the bark was smooth and rounded, not like the rocks I was used to climbing. I dug my fingernails and tried to gain some leverage to climb this thing. The bark was soft enough that my nails could sink in there, so that worked. It hurt my fingers, but I was able to climb in this was. Even though Ray could have just lifted me two feet or gotten it himself with much more ease. He wanted me to do it. I could almost feel him smirking up at me, amused by watching me struggle. When I finally made it to the top, I wrapped my legs around the trunk and pulled at the fruit. With a few good tugs, it came loose, and I fell down. Thankfully the grass was soft and I hadn't been that high up. That actually got a laugh from Ray, but I would be the last one laughing. I had the fruit. My stomach rumbled, and I shoved my face into that fruit, sunk my teeth in…

And immediately spit it out, it tasted absolutely disgusting.

Hope you enjoyed, and have an awesome day!