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Parcly Taxel: Comparatively, I had eaten less and exercised more yesterday than the day before, so I was feeling better when I woke up. Outside the partially frosted window in my hotel room was a green wall and a palm tree, providing a soft lighting effect on the adjacent table. Aching in my front hooves was not the result of the massage, but the swimming.

Spindle: There was also a 500 rupiah coin left over from our shopping sprees, all but one higher denomination being realised with notes. This is made of aluminium, like the one yen coin of similar value, yet their utilities differ by a gulf: because giving exact money and exact change is a courtesy in Japan, the yen coin is in wide circulation. In contrast, as long as enough money is paid, the Indonesians are happy. Customers will often forgo collecting the smallest change, leaving it as a tip.

Parcly: Since we began our local food adventure at Made's Warung, it was natural that we should end it there. I had beef rendang and gado-gado (long beans, bean sprouts, peanuts and tofu) for brunch, enjoying the external scenes a little quieter than before.

There is a lot of the island of Bali we did not explore due to time constraints. For one, Mount Agung provides all the volcanic material found closer to its shores, a theme also found in other Indonesian islands, while the northern regions are scarcely touched by modernisation and globalisation. I was mistaken about Bali being a small island; it only looks small because of Java and Sumatra to its west, Kalimantan above and New Guinea to its east.

Spindle: Still, to many tourists who descend upon this destination, all the relevant places are concentrated in the south, giving a veneer of convenience. The price for that is an abundance of touters. As long as you don't look at them or their products, they won't pester you back, just as windigos prefer not to be disturbed by non-windigos during a hunt.

To give Parcly some time to digest her brunch, we took another dip in the hotel's pool. This time I gave her an ice floe to play with, mending it when needed under continuous sunlight. Continuing her exploration of the forms in the necklace, she grew her seapony tail and slid it across the floe, emulating some conditions around Seaquestria.

Parcly: I looked to the sky, then my necklace. The aura that developed left behind feathery ears and fetlocks, wings to rival Celestia's and darkened claws where my front hooves were. My voice's timbre changed too, to a more chirpy quality reinforced by a thin-walled beak. Further aerodynamic enhancements came to my hairs, which straightened out. I moved in and out of the water, changing between seapony and hippogriff each time, tasting the fluidity between these two forms.

Spindle: After drying out and packing up the luggage, loaded by few tangible souvenirs, we headed to Ngurah Rai across the busy main roads. There is no public transportation system across Bali like in Canterlot, but this deficiency is much loved by everypony, both locals and tourists. It means more interactions in each journey, meaningful conversations with endless possibilities, not all sweet and boring.

Parcly: Just before my flight I had dinner at Last Wave, a cosmopolitan surf-themed restaurant – the name was an uncanny fit. I ordered truffle macaroni and cheese and accompanying sirloin steak, both of which I consumed as a hippogriff due to the species's affinity for meat and grains. For "The Rocks", a chocolate fudge brownie dessert, I reverted to an alicorn.

Thus I took off with the night in full swing, looking down upon the laces of lights demarcating streets and locations of interest. More lights shone in the distance, representing islands up and down the chain from Bali. The cries and beeps and clinks, each an individual expression of vibrant life, merged into a uniform background din and then faded into howling stratospheric winds.

Spindle: Finally, we landed in Canterlot at 21:40. Rather than the castle's topmost balcony, we took to riverside where we could admire all three domains of the creatures of the world – land, sea and sky. The same domains were encompassed in the precious necklace from Ocean Flow.

Parcly: I saw in that necklace the vague shape of a Julia set, a depiction of the boundary between domains of a particular dynamical system. At the same time, the up-pointing sapphire could stand for the sky, the down-pointing one for the sea and the other two on left and right for the land. The fact that the whistle-like device ported by most hippogriffs/seaponies only allows conversion between the first two domains was why Flow needed to make something new for me, lying in the third domain.

Sweet Luna, it is simply gorgeous.

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Posted previously at: 2018-05-22T17:20:33 | Posted previously by: Parcly Taxel