Potential cosmic jokes aside… I’m not sure if this new addition would be enough to carry me all the way over. I continued hopping like before and during one of them I tried to leverage my tail to achieve some thrust… and oh boy did I get some- You ever see a video of a crocodile jumping out of the water to reach some meat in a trainer's hand? Well if you have then just replace the hungry crocodile with a scared spiky boi and you’ve basically got what I just did.

I launched myself several meters clear of the water while flailing my limbs every which way. I’d been attempting a small push to keep myself from sinking! I guess being a roided up little beast with muscles on muscles made me have a bit more thrust than I’d anticipated. I face-planted back into the water (Didn’t hurt anything but my pride) and started quickly sinking once again… gonna have to learn some fine motor control with this rudder on my ass or I’ll end up launching myself with every slight twitch.

Attempt number 2- Instead of aiming my tail downward and potentially getting some air again, I aimed it behind me to try and see if I could stably swim (blindly fire) myself forward. A few attempts that involved running my face into the muck or some random rocks and presto! Not amazing levels of control but I could at least make small direction changes and keep myself off the river bottom and honestly that's enough for now. I have a long swim ahead of me and plenty of time to practice.

I continued swimming upstream… okay I passed some residential areas a while back… but this looks deserted as hell… actually I take that back, hell certainly has more residents than this. Point is this wasn’t what I was aiming for, I’d lost the map a while back and I couldn’t see any roads in the vicinity, I really don’t want to backtrack… I mean this leads out to sea so maybe I’ll just swim along the coastline?

Both ways should have cities along the coastline- worst case I’ll just tail a large ship back. So I made my way forward and eventually came across a wide exit to the sea, left or right? I could tell the left smelt more like crap- usually a good way to locate living things, so that's where I went. A few jumped shark nets and a long swim later I could see some shining lights on the horizon… It was currently dark and I couldn’t see any large ships docked anywhere after a quick look around.

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I hopped out of the water a fair way off from the main city (town maybe, this place isn’t too big compared to cities I’d seen), there was enough bushland to obscure me while I kept an eye out for any cargo ships… and got some shuteye, also there was a little parking lot nearby- apparently I’m at somewhere called east point (real creative these people).

10 Days came and went before any ship I’d call ‘large’ showed up… and my standard of large had dropped considerably. It wasn’t a large cargo container or massive fishing vessel… I think it was an oil carrier? Well either way this was what I was looking for, it took another day of waiting before they set off with me shadowing them, I gotta say I’m really glad this tail turned out so strong, aside from literally grabbing on and hoping for the best there was no way I’d be able to keep up.

I’m not sure how long this journey took, I was usually under the ship (hoping if they have a fish finder they just think I’m an adventurous croc) and it was raining (It obscured me enough to poke my head out for a bit). You know something I didn’t know until just recently? The ocean looks fucking terrifying and scares the crap outta me! In the rivers or along the coastlines I could see the bottom or land nearby… but having a massive black maw beneath me was bringing back some memories I’d rather not remember.

I just tried my best to ignore it for the entire trip. There were some really interesting parts though- a pod of dolphins was something out of this world to me, they were cute enough for me to kinda understand why Lobo (Basically deadpool superman) would die for em. Even with my intimidating looks they still came over to play and I even got to pat one! Beyond that I also got to see an actual shark, not a great white but the funky looking ones I’d mentioned earlier! Despite the Hammerheads looking like a skyrim character that had accidentally maxed out eye width I found them cute too.

I think being turned into a scary rage monster was making anything less scary than me start looking cute, I mean when I thought of a bunch of dangerous creatures (barring mutants) I just couldn’t find them intimidating… probably a bit hard to find them scary when they aren’t an actual threat I guess.

The only other eventful part of my sea crossing was getting tangled up in a boxy looking jellyfish. It made me feel like I’d covered myself in poison ivy (actual poison ivy, not that demon leaf from before) for about 10 minutes before a quick red glow solved that problem… Also I’d eaten it, my compassion doesn’t extend to the equivalent of floating barbed wire………..also I wanted to see if the turtles were onto something, spoiler - they’re not.

And after all that I was finally in the next port, I couldn’t read many of the signs but one large one in english told me my current location- Manila.

Perfect.