Getting to Know the Castle (Morpheus) - Revised V2 Part 1

Changing Time’s Notes: As I reread this report in preparing it for the manuscript, I feel it is perhaps a bit unfair of me to target mostly ponies with this book. There were and still are some changelings who try to destroy the peace our nations are trying to maintain. These are the outliers though. They have, for the most part, already been handled by the prince.

Indeed, I find myself disappointed that the changelings are so ahead of us in this respect.

Getting to Know the Castle: A Report by Morpheus of House Sycadia

My first technical day in Ponyville was a political nightmare. In hindsight, there were so many mistakes I made, some of my own design and some from our hivemind musings.

My first real day – the day that I always think of as the first – is something I will always remember. It had both its good points and bad points, but it was a fair first day – far better than I deserved.

After the negotiations, Twilight led me to my room. Our thoughts were whirling through a myriad of calculations as the princess led the way. The meeting had not gone as planned and ve needed to adjust our equations accordingly. With the diarchs furious at me, I could no longer count on their support if any complications arose on our end.

It was a frustrating development. By forcing me ‒ and only me – to sign the Unbreakable Contract the other lords were now free to interfere with our plans. Ve hadn’t been lying when ve said that stunt had been meant as a mercy, but there was so much more to it than that. Events became much harder to predict without the leverage that original contract had provided both the princesses and us over certain changelings.

Then there was the whole issue with mother and the plans I knew she was bound to be plotting.

Already the probabilities were beginning to spiral out of control in our head. Ve were going to need a team of analysts for this. I could only hope the few analysts I trusted would be enough. Filing our preliminary calculations away, a brief flick of my magic alerted the right changelings as to the location and access code of the data in the archives.

With that done I shook myself from my musings to find we had arrived at my room. I nodded my thanks to Twilight, but she barely acknowledged me. Her eyes had a faraway look, and I could only assume she was processing the day’s events much like I was.

I let her go and entered my room.

It had a simple yet comfortable bed with egg-white sheets. There were several empty dressers and a small desk with a chair. Ve believed the wood was mahogany at a glance, but couldn’t be sure without more tests.

It was altogether completely unremarkable, and I let the filters on my other senses slip to feel exactly the same thing.

The air tasted sterile in the most extreme sense. While there was only a faint smell of cleaning products and disinfectants, there was a strange lack of all the other smells that labeled this either a home or a castle.

There wasn’t the faint aroma of the constantly active kitchens castles always had, and ve found a distinct lack of signs that another pony had even been here. There wasn’t the natural earthy musk of earth ponies, nor the salty tang of pegasai, nor the oddly natural perfume of unicorns. Even the smell of the furniture was somehow muted. Ve had smelled mahogany before. It normally has a rather rich aroma, but here it was dulled. The aroma was the same, simply lacking in vividness.

I heard nothing but an uncomfortable silence or my own actions, and my hearing is sensitive enough on its own to travel several halls when I’m not filtering background noise. To hear nothing like that was off-putting.

Traveling the room, I ran my hoof over the floor, walls, and furniture. There were no unseen nicks or indentations. The bed was as springy as the day it was made, and the carpet had neither wear nor tear to it. No pony had even been in this room before.

Finally, I tasted the emotions in the air. Without the princesses around, the air should have been mostly empty – at least, assuming this part of the castle was as untouched as it seemed – but, like before, there were several incredibly strong emotions around me. It was such an oddity that it took me several confused seconds to pinpoint the source.

The castle itself was radiating emotions all around. Emotions from the walls, the floor, and even the furniture. It was lonely, exceedingly so. I had tasted that loneliness while meeting the princesses, but ve had not questioned it nor its source. It had been much more muted there – an insignificant bit of background noise compared to here and now. Here it had such strength that it transcended normal taste.

Even in the split second it took to filter the emotions down to a manageable level I saw enough to empathize with the castle. Such loneliness tasted like the salty dry desert air to the far east. It tasted of our home – the Badlands – and I could see myself wandering under its empty sky as I had done during my nymph-hood days.

There was more than simple loneliness, however, as I finally put the filter in place. Thankfully, there was a warm welcoming calm to it that tasted like well-steeped tea with copious amounts of delicious honey. Its loneliness had yet to make it bitter. There was love, and it was directed at any and everypony.

Everypony except me, that is. The castle was cautious of me.

Caution is an odd and variable mix of emotions. Lots of things can make a creature cautious, although ve had no idea if the same rules applied to buildings. Ve had never seen a building with its own emotions. Some buildings and places were imbued over time with strong ambient emotions – like the Everfree Forest – and some buildings channeled the emotions of the inhabitants like the capitol of the Crystal Empire, but this castle was actually emoting. There were subtle and glacially slow shifts in its feelings, and it was a completely new experience for us.

Friendship Castle directed a small simmering anger towards me coupled with a tiny amount of fear. It was insignificant compared the sheer scale of emotional energy it devoted to everypony else. I was simply a fish in the ocean to it.

Its anger was of a spicy variety, and the fear – I guess dread would be a more accurate term – added a cold, dry and icy texture to that. Oddly enough, there was no bitterness to its cautiousness. It was wary of me, but not outright distrustful.

All and all, it tasted like rainbow snowcones.

Sighing, I reraised the filters on my senses and decided to worry about it later. The room itself seemed sufficient, after all.

It was just missing one thing: a proper web.

Looking to the ceiling, I licked my chops. “Alright… Ve know the memories are here somewhere….” Years worth of nymphhood memories began to play before my eyes. “Can’t believe I forgot how to do it. I know the drones grow faint at the idea of me doing it myself, but, really…”

The correct memories found and analyzed, I started weaving small strands of silk together. Eventually the microscopic strings became twisted ropes, and I began to fly up to the ceiling to place them. What didn’t stick in place was glued into position by careful application of an adhesive form of saliva. The recipe was old, and I just knew it was going to gum up my gums and glands, but it was the only recipe ve found.

An hour or so passed, and I finally finished to wrap myself in a suspended cocoon of fresh silk. It was only as I closed my eyes to retreat into slumber that it occurred to us that Twilight probably expected me to use the bed.

Ve did not dream as a pony would normally think of dreaming.

Pony dreams are murky and chaotic things. Ve don’t understand them that well ourselves, but, from what ve have gathered, the dreamer often has little control of the dream.

Ve retreated into our own personal ‘node’ in the hivemind to catalogue the day’s events, run any calculations or simulations ve needed, and to simply explore what was new to the archives.

And best of all there was no concept of me – only us.

I was resting and recuperating my body. Ve saw fit to tackle the problems of the day I had been too busy to properly ruminate over.

Ve tried to organize our thoughts on the negotiations of the day before, ve replayed events over and over in an attempt to gain an understanding of where things went wrong.

From there ve cross-referenced those moments through various archives in an attempt to figure out why they went wrong. From that theoretical understanding, ve began to run various simulations on what ve could have done differently to project various outcomes for an ideal situation – most of which ended in dire straights.

Simulation R was particularly bad.

Ve barely acknowledged a royal engagement to Twilight before vetoing it. It was unlikely the princesses would acknowledge anything other than a proper loving union – especially Cadance – and ve didn’t have time to sell them on the idea of a purely political marriage. Ve doubted they could even understand why ve couldn’t provide anything else, anyways.

Regardless of our failed musings, I woke early that morning, refreshed and ready for the day. I grinned as I wriggled out of my confines to drop to the floor – stretching the kinks from my joints as I stood. The previous night’s simulations were much more amusing in hindsight. I had no idea how ve could have possibly been thinking straight to consider a political marriage of all things, and the option to hijack the sun by connecting Princess Celestia to a potato clock was just ludicrous.

The team of analysts I’d called yesterday had had much more luck with their nightly projections, and ve were confident ve could turn things around with Princess Twilight at the least, if not necessarily Celestia.

That at least gave us a chance.

They had already laid a sizable groundwork for the web of probabilities. Chances of success were somewhat higher than everyling originally predicted, but that was mostly due to how pessimistic the lords and analysts had been about initial contact.

However – despite surviving contact – circumstances could have admittedly been better. The sheer number of new outcomes that might arise from other lords meddling was worrisome.

I updated the web with the few significant musings ve had concocted overnight, and a spark of magic signaled the analysts again. I grinned at the lack of any backlash. I hadn’t dared to trust last night’s results when my body was still adapting to the Unbreakable Contract.

Now I knew I had kept my second ace in the hole.

I had almost accidentally ruined it when I revealed the hivemind to Twilight, but no pony had caught on.

Magic I could use without permission was incredibly limited by the contract. I did have permanent permission to the most simple of spells such as light and telekinesis, but I was otherwise unable to do anything impressive.

The hivemind, however, was a biological function – not a magical one – and Celestia had only bound my magic.

With that in mind, the spell I was using to signal the rest of the hive was one of the first spells every changeling learns. It’s a small message spell capable of sending only a few words. Unicorns tend to overlook it since they have better options, but changelings use it all the time to tell other changelings where they’ve hidden information in the archives.

With the contract in place, I could not personally defend the hive, but that did not mean I couldn’t execute any of my plans via proxy. It would be even more of a necessity now that the dissenting lords were free to interfere.

Grabbing a quill I began to write out orders for my various agents. I would need to pull out many of the infiltrators I had monitoring other nations to monitor the lords instead. It was a pity. The Minoans were gathering for war again, and I had almost found out who they were targeting. At only a two percent chance of invading either Equestria or the hive, however, ve needed to monitor the larger problems at home.

Several sheaves of parchment later I set the quill down to double and triple check my work. When the images of the pages were all but burned into my retina, I scrambled and stored the sensory data in the archives for my agents to decrypt.

Another flick of magic sent the appropriate signal as I tossed the evidence in the fire within the hearth. I picked myself up to go find Twilight. I had a feeling she’d have questions after last night. The sooner I answered them the sooner I’d get an actual ally here.

Given the time, I felt confident in leaving my room and not running into anypony else. There was Twilight’s assistant, but ve were confident he had been informed of the situation already.

Upon standing, however, I noticed the hollow feeling within my heart and the grumbling in my stomach. I was hungry, and – while it was easy to sate my physical hunger here in Ponyville ‒ it was less easy to appease the emotional one.

That needed to be addressed quickly.

I picked up the pace and trotted down the halls. Several minutes later I picked up a small taste of emotions with my extended senses. Following it led me to the most magnificent library ve had ever laid eyes on.

Thousands of years of scuttling about Equus’ shadow – searching every nook and cranny of the world – and this was the library to top them all. It even topped the oldest memories ve had on the lost library of Star Swirl the Bearded.

While not as wide or expansive as Star Swirl’s library – at least, according to ancient hivemind records – the library of Twilight’s castle was easily as large in that it was incredibly tall. I was in what appeared to be the central hub of the library. It was a large spherical room dotted with various floating islands – all of which contained tables or pillows or desks with which one could read and relax. In the center there appeared to be a floating magical construct of some kind, its gears and gizmos ticking and turning. Glowing crystals were carried by gyroscopic arms in hypnotic patterns, and a slow heart-like thud could be heard from its center.

Around the walls on each half of the library were alcoves and balconies filled with various shelves or equipment. There were maps, charts, taxidermic collections, planetariums, books – can’t forget the books – and plenty of other things I wasn’t sure of from just a series of simple glances. It was almost more of a museum than a library, but the sheer volume of books won out in the end.

At the bottom of the spherical room, the library continued down through the trunk of the crystal tree. Taking some quick estimations, ve hazarded a guess that it ran all the way to the base of the tree.

Of all the rooms I had seen or passed so far, this was the both the grandest and the homeliest – truly fitting for the Castle of Friendship. There was the lingering scent of different ponies searching for their books and the musty smell of parchment and ink from used books. Some ponies smelled fresh and strong, while others were somewhat faded and rare.

It was almost as quiet as the rest of the castle had been, but it was a fitting quiet. I could hear small fires crackling in several of the reading alcoves, and the soft rhythmic beating and humming of the construct in the center lulled me into a sense of contentment with the relative silence. Running my hoof in circles on the ground, I got a feel for it: the floor already had signs of wear – a testament to how much this library had seen use given the castle’s relative youth.

Taking a small taste of the emotions in the air I found the room overflowing with the love and affection of the castle. The not-so-little centerpiece of the library was radiating so much emotion in here that I couldn’t pinpoint the source of Twilight’s emotions, and with that much love around me I couldn’t help but consume a hint of it. Immediately, the device in the center of the room swiveled one of its gyroscopic arms towards me – the crystal glowing intently as if it were staring at me. Remembering that I did not want to displease the emoting, possibly sentient, castle, I quickly re-erected my mental filter to prevent myself from taking any more.

“Sorry! I couldn’t stop myself with that much emotion in here.” I called out to it and cocked my head to the side. “Can you even hear or understand us? Ve’ve never encountered something like you before, and ve’re somewhat at a loss as to how ve should treat you.”

The construct continued to stare at me.

I shook my head and launched myself into the air. “I’ll assume that’s a no for now.”

Tasting the air gave me a faint trail to follow. Twilight Sparkle, like all unicorns, had a natural perfume-like scent. Ve found her to be reminiscent of lavender and lilies – a rather pleasant smell. I savored it for a moment before leaping into the air to track it.

The trail led to the upper reaches of the far side of the room. There I found Twilight dozing amid a large pile of books. Bags were under her eyes, and her coat and mane were somewhat dishevelled. Glancing at the books around her, I found many political classics from the ages. Civil Disobedience by Freedom Herald, The Law of Civilization and Decay by Gold Standard, The Prince by Golden Plot, there was a veritable hoard of essays to go through, and ve couldn’t help but to whistle in appreciation. Her head was even resting on Sun Tzu’s Art of War – a Kirin work that was as good as banned in this day and age, given Equestria’s usual stances on war.

Approaching the princess cautiously, I gently nudged her with a hoof to try and wake her. “Princess Twilight?”

She twitched slightly before murmuring something half audible about spreadsheets and checklists. I nudged her again with a little more force and met success this time. Groggily, she raised her head and gazed about with bleary eyes.

“Eurgh… Morning Spike. Remind me not to drink coffee after two in the morning. It gave me that dream about my checklists coming to life and deciding to check me off again.”

Ve paused momentarily, cocking our head to the side. Mixing us up with Spike was understandable. The princess had yet to look directly at us. Ve, however, had no idea what context ve were supposed to take the idea of a pony being checked off in. There were at least three different ways ve could interpret that, and all of them left us feeling slightly queasy for completely different reasons. In the end I decided it was probably best not to pry.

“Spike isn’t here, princess.” Her head jolted to look at me as I spoke. “Do forgive the intrusion, but I’ve discovered a small problem with my stay here.”

“You mean besides the fact that I’m housing what most of Equestria thinks of as public enemy number one?” The snark in her voice was so sharp it could pierce chitin.

I flinched slightly, and made a slight adjustment to the master equations.

She sighed. “Sorry. I’m not a morning pony, and it gets worse when I pull an all-nighter. Just hold on a second.” Her horn lit up and a second later a small cylinder labelled Emergency Morning Elixir appeared in front of her in a flash of light. Twisting the top off she began to guzzle copious amounts of what smelled like high quality coffee down her throat. Several cups later, she teleported the cylinder away with a contented hum.

“Alright, what’s the problem?” She cocked her head at me.

I hesitated slightly. “Well… I’m starting to get hungry, and I may have forgotten to bring a form of emotional sustenance for me to consume during my stay. I can go a couple days without emotion, and I’ll probably be able to gather at least some ambient emotion around town, but if I can’t get ahold of a good source of emotion soon…”

Twilight sighed. “Of course… I don’t suppose there’s a way to fake it until I can get the town to marginally trust you? Is there another substance that we can substitute for love? A drug? A stimulant? Anything?”

I shook my head. “There is love poison, but that can have… side effects…. We don’t need to necessarily worry yet, though. It’s entirely possible that Ponyville will have enough ambient emotion to provide for us. For hive’s sake, your castle alone could provide for me and an entire city of changelings alone if it wasn’t so cautious towards us.”

Twilight tilted her head slightly – ear flicking back and forth. “My castle?”

I nodded and gestured to the centrepiece of the library which was still staring at me. “Yeah, your castle seems to actually be alive, or at least capable of emoting. See it watching us now? It’s basically handing out free love to every pony in town except me. Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing. Ve have no idea what feeding off of the castle would do to it or us.”

Twilight’s eyes had slowly widened, pupils dilating, as I said this. She began grinning manically, and a small sparkle crept into her eye. It was a look ve knew all too well from some of the archives.

“I can’t believe it! I’m living in a living castle? This is going to make such a great research project!” She made a noise I can only guess was a squeal, and I momentarily blacked out from the pitch of it. “I’m going to need to spend at least a couple nights on background research. Oh! This’ll be so much fun.”

I hesitantly tried to bring Twilight back from her own little world. “Do you really have time to do any research now, though? I thought we were going to introduce me to the town today. We need to get our stories straight for that.”

She casually waved a hoof at me as her horn lit up. “Oh! Don’t worry about that!” New books began to gather from various corners of the library while the books around her scattered back to their places. A small folder that had been buried beneath the table sorted its contents and winked out of existence. I barely caught the label of Princess Lessons upon it.

“We can’t even begin to think about meeting the town itself until you’ve met my friends. I mean, if my friends don’t take to you, I doubt the rest of the town will. And, before my friends get to know you, I need to get to know you. I doubt Rainbow or Applejack will even give you a chance without a proper vouch from me.” She flashed me a smile. “I already put out a notice the library would be closed today so we would be able to talk and get to know each other better. I don’t see why I can’t get some light research done at the same time.”

“This is light for you?” I gestured around at all the books.

The princess shook her head. “Oh, this is just the background research. I’ll start that later tonight when I can actually devote more focus to it. Right now I just want to confirm that the castle is actually emoting for myself. Shouldn’t take too long if I can find the right instruments in my lab.”

I ran a hoof through my mane and sighed. There I was on a mission of peace, and the princess was already almost jumping ship to a new project.

I almost called her out on it, but I couldn’t do it. She was just being herself – royalty or not. Hive knows how often I wished I could do that while juggling at least ten different facades at all the functions back home.

Instead, I forced a grin. “Well… If your goal today is to get to know me more, I suppose I could just show you how the castle feels. Lab equipment is nice and all, but it pales in comparison to actually tasting the emotions yourself. And it would certainly save time from running to wherever your lab is.”

“You can just give ponies the ability to sense emotions?” She arched an eyebrow at me.

I nodded. “Yes. I’d need your permission, of course, given that’d I’d need to cast a spell to do it, but other than that it’s not really that complicated.”

Twilight flinched at the mention of my casting a spell on her. It was barely perceptible to even my eyes, and wouldn’t have even been detectable to a pony’s eyes. She hesitated, and I wondered if I had made a big mistake in offering. I hadn’t been able to properly track her emotions with all of the interference from the castle, and she’d just been so animated about a new potential project that I couldn’t help but offer.

Now I could taste a faint but steady stream of curdled milk.

“Yeah, it’s f-fine. Go ahead.” She finally nodded – her voice somewhat shaky.

We sat there in awkward silence for a moment before I addressed the dragon in the room. “Are you going to actually give me permission? You know I can’t cast magic unless you bid it using the contracts passphrase.

“Oh! Sorry! That completely slipped my mind. I was thinking about the first time I saw a changeling cast a spell.”

Her voice was still shaking somewhat as she used the contracts passphrase, and I couldn’t help but curse mother for her rather forceful approach to magic, politics, and everything in general.

“I, Princess Twilight Sparkle, do hereby grant Prince Morpheus access to the spell requested. He is to be allotted only one cast of said spell – with duration of no greater than 20 minutes – unless permission is regranted.”

I sighed in exasperation. “Princess, I can hear the slight quiver in your voice. I don’t even need to try and focus on your emotions, although the castle’s kind of making that really hard at the moment. If you don’t want me to cast the spell, I won’t.”

She gave an audible sigh of relief and her ears perked slightly at the end of my declaration. “What do you mean the castle is making sensing my emotions difficult?”

I looked towards the construct. “I mean it’s projecting so much emotion that it’s hard to get a good read on anything with the filters I need to set up.”

Her head tilted to the side. “Filters?”

Shaking my head, I chuckled. “Are you going to keep doing this? I can simply give you an explanation on how we taste emotions if this is going to be an issue. How would you like that as a project for now? That might actually be better if you want my help.”

“Two projects in one day!” I found myself momentarily blacking out again at her squeal of excitement. This time it threatened to stretch into an inaudible frequency. This is actually much more impressive than it sounds – impressive as it already is – as the changeling range of hearing is more varied than the typical pony one. It’s not an incredible difference, but I’m fairly certain it’s enough that she was into the range of sounds inaudible to pony ears, and part of me couldn’t help but wonder if she practiced it as such to prevent breaking the library’s rules on staying quiet.

Steadying myself from her exclamation, I chuckled. Twilight was already grabbing a new series of notebooks to replace the books she was going to use for the castle. “Alright. Here’s the first thing you need to know about changelings then. I find it summarizes us quite nicely. Are you paying attention?”

Twilight nodded with at least four different quills floating above separate notebooks.

“The easiest way to consider changelings is to remember one simple fact,” I pointed a hoof at her, and she looked at me quizzically. “It’s something you’re quite acquainted with actually.”

I flashed a grin. “Information is power.”