Young Love Is The Tastiest

Buttercream was positively thriving, Carapace noted as she walked over to the space in the main room she had ordered the pregnant pony to bunker down into, possibly semi-permanently if circumstances allowed.

Before, she was already a thick little thing, all curves and round shapes, but now, surely, the word 'little' couldn't be used to describe her. Laying down flat on a bed of pillows, her midsection was simply beyond bloated; it had to be almost as wide as she was tall and it made her look a bit like a overinflated exercise ball that happened to have four legs and a head. Her stumpy little pony hooves still touched the floor, thankfully, but Carapace doubted that would last long.

While she wasn't completely certain about how long the batch of eggs in her would take to fully develop, she estimated it would take within two weeks time for them to be ready, and if the eggs developed properly, well, the word 'plump' really couldn't be used to describe her at that point. 'Round' would probably work, though.

Buttercream was asleep, it seemed, but Carapace found the presence of the blobby mare to be comforting, especially after what had happened earlier. After all, she was a physical statement to how, comparatively, her plans were actually working, even after the headache the two pegusi brought her. Yes, she was growing fond of her plump little broodmother. The sight of the mare still made her feel triumphant, because even now the mare was hosting her brood, to be fertilized by the pegasus stallion in due time.

She frowned as her thought's came to the stallion, because she was still debating if she was going to transform him into a changeling or not. There was a certain danger to having too many free-willed drones walking around, especially in delicate circumstances like this, and it was clear that he held strong feelings for Cloud Chaser, and she didn't want to risk having a subversive servant so early. But having the stallion be a simple breeding stud seemed inefficient to her, regardless of what she allotted the stallion before she put a calming spell on him.

She was also debating on whether or not to have him or Sterling to fertilize her brood. It was all hypotheticals, but she wondered if the species of a fertilizing equine would have any effects on how a young changeling would develop. While it was given that two ponies of different tribes could have a offspring that was a part of a altogether different tribe, the end result of any pony-donkey crossing resulted in mules and zonies tend to get a mixed bag of blessings. Hence, it wasn't out of the question if changelings fathered or mothered by different equine species might have different traits.

But, she hadn't read anything on the subject in anything she had read, which either said something about the priorities of most queens, who were quite fine with simply screwing anything with four legs that neighed. The closest source for pony thralls for Chrysalis's hive, for example, was apparently a small pegasus village that suffered a bout of mysterious disappearances several decades before the Canterlot invasion, and Carapace assumed that the fact that her hive had a reputation for good fighters and fearless solders was no small coincidence. Her own mother's lands was mostly inhabited by earth ponies, and while her hive was small Carapace noted that the individual drones tended to last longer than the ones from other hives.

All this was pure speculation, of course, but if she was going to be successful she was going to find every little advantage she could. She didn't doubt that some of the older Queens knew something about what sort of effects the species of the sire had on the eggs, given how they can produce successful batches of drones year after year, but either they all reached the same conclusions independently or no one ever actually wrote it down.

Carapace actually wondered if it was worth trying to sneak into Canterlot's royal library to see if anything was written down in there about her kind. The book she was using for her own uses was actually written down by a unicorn who had tracked down a young queen who had managed to infiltrate a old unicorn school of magic. It was a good plan on the queen's part, admittedly, right up until the moment she was hit by a stray sleeping spell and revealed her true form in front of two dozen students. The interrogator, luckily, had a curiosity for the magic's of other species, and he did his best to get out every bit of strange arcane lore he could from the unlucky queen.

It made Carapace a little unnerved that changelings didn't have much in the way of their own written texts, frankly, because that was just another sign to her that the whole system of queens-fighting-queens was broken. Even though there were monthly grand councils held by the most powerful queens, nothing ever got done and they usually ended when someone got killed or exiled or fed to the giant spiders the currant high queen was so fond of.

Carapace had no doubts that if all the queens worked together for just a few days, the hives wouldn't have to be hidden away from their food supply. Her mother's hive pushes the limits of what was considered acceptable, given that the castle it was set under had a small village set directly under it's steepled roof, but her mother's hive was small and cluttered. Barely a hundred changelings in all, with a quarter of that tending to be young nymphs that were doomed to die anyway; her mother kept a morbid family tree, one that resembled a short, wide bush with her as the singular root. Carapace knew that her mother often gave the same names to different royal nymphs every spawning season, and that there were five princesses in the hive who had the name Carapace before her, and that all were dead before they left the hive.

Carapace didn't like to think that she might have lived because her mother might have thought that leaving her alive might spice up the routine of culling all the princesses before they got too uppity, but then again it wasn't like any of her sisters were likely to be alive right now. Her mother was slightly famous for both her longevity and her lack of suitable heirs, given that she was the only changeling monarch of note in the entirety of Trotslyvania, a land mass almost a eighth the size of Equestria and having roughly the same population density. But, then again, such unequal distribution of territory to a changeling who had no use for it all was another symptom of how broken the whole system was.

The invasion by Chrysalis's hive was a gigantic farce; her hive was easily a forth again the size of the next largest hive, nearly one thousand and five hundred individuals in all, and nearly a eighth of the entire changeling population was present in the attack on Canterlot. However, Chrysalis either never bothered to ask for support from the other hives, or, more likely, never brought the subject to her fellow queens. Involving the Princess of Love in the whole equation was even worse, because two situations could have occurred that would bring dire straits to the entire changeling people; Candace might have been injured or, worse, killed by Chrysalis's foolishness, and power of love itself might be damaged or weakened, or, in her arrogance, Chrysalis might have tried to convert her into a changeling.

Chrysalis, while undeniably powerful and cunning, was still power-hungry and arrogant, and the thought of converting the Princess of Love was probably on her mind when she captured her. But a changeling with inherent powers over controlling and bringing love would simply be one of the most powerful entities in the world, one who would presumably be able to negate Chrysalis's magics and dominate any other changeling queen.

If the Canterlot invasion went differently, it was entirely possible that it could have either doomed the changeling race to starvation or create the most powerful changeling queen to have ever lived, one with the ability to control her lessers with access to their food and source of power. As it were, it did wipe out half Chrysalis's hive and render her a laughingstock in the counsel, if what she had heard was true.

She wasn't one to ponder the hypotheticals of things like that, but she needed any advantage she could get, after all.