“That changeling’s a pony!”
All work in the main cavern ground to a halt as the shout echoed through adjacent chambers and connected tunnels. Hundreds of blue eyes turned to the newcomer standing at the entrance tunnel, who stood tense with one hoof pointed straight at the supposed culprit.
Frowning, Max sneaked a glance behind to see if she had anyone hanging from the ceiling with her, but her nearest sibling was a good twenty paces away, working on a different support column. So Scrape was definitely pointing at her. Which was really odd, since she wasn’t wearing a disguise at all, and neither was anyone else.
“The heck is wrong with you?” Max called out indignantly. “There’s clearly no pony in here!”
“That’s exactly what a pony would say!” Scrape retorted. “I’m onto your game, Maxilla!”
“Eh? How does that even work? Look at me!” She thumped herself in the chest. “Last I checked, ponies don’t have chitin. And they can’t stand upside down on the ceiling.”
“They’ve developed new spells for that!”
“You’re an idiot.” Max shook her head and went back to secreting more resin to plaster on the ceiling and support column, but when the cavern remained eerily quiet, she realised that everyone was still kind of staring at her. Some were even whispering amongst themselves. “Wait. You guys can’t be taking him seriously…”
“There have been rumours…” someone said thoughtfully.
“Yeah. It would explain why Queenie’s ordered more guard patrols lately.”
Max snorted. “Oh, please. Someone’s just been smuggling cider into the hive again. Scrape wouldn’t know his tail vent from his horn if he didn’t keep notes, and he clearly has no idea what he’s talking about. I mean, even if the ponies have found a way to replicate our abilities, how does that single me out?” She swept a hoof across the cavern and scoffed. “We all look the same right now!”
Scrape grinned. “I’m so glad you asked.”
“Oh, this should be good.” Max shot back a similar grin and coolly leaned against the column. “What is it? You saw me transform into a pony or something? Ooh, scary.”
“I’ll get to that in a moment. But first…” Scrape turned around and beckoned to someone in the tunnel behind him.
An armoured guard trotted into the main cavern, dragging a hefty sack along the ground.
Max’s heart skipped a couple of beats.
Oh, horseapples.
The guard upended the sack, spilling out dozens of books, scrolls and a couple of posters.
Scrape cackled triumphantly as he grabbed one of the volumes. “Fourteen Daring Do novels, seven issues of Power Ponies, tickets to a Star Trot convention, several hundred pages’ worth of writing – secret messages, no doubt – and two posters of Shining Armour.” He tossed the book back onto the pile and sneered. “These were all found hidden behind a loose rock in one of the abandoned air shafts, and you’ve been seen regularly going in and out there during your breaks.”
“Th—those aren’t mine,” Max stammered as she fought to maintain her nonchalant grin. “I don’t even know what half of those things are.”
“Is that so?” Scrape levitated up the one-of-a-kind, very rare and very irreplaceable first edition of Daring Do and the Temple of Dune. His smirk then grew as he placed it cover-first on the ground and dangled a dirty hoof over the pages. “Then you probably won’t mind if I just do a little dance right over here.”
Gritting her teeth, Max just about managed a shrug. “Eh, I don’t care.”
Scrape’s hoof slammed onto the open pages, and he twisted it this way and that, grinding dirt into the pristine paper.
“Okay, okay, stop! I do care, just leave my stuff alone!” Max yelped. She dropped from the ceiling and dashed to save her collection, but the guard leapt forward and barred her way with a warning hiss. Startled, she skidded to a halt, overbalanced and landed on her rump.
Silence reigned.
Max gulped as she bore the brunt of dozens of suspicious glares. “I… I can explain.”
“Sure you can, Max.” Scrape practically strutted in a slow circle around her and added with a hiss, “Or should I say, pony? I followed you into the abandoned tunnels once, and just when you thought you were safe and all alone, you shed your disguise and started writing secret messages to your Princesses!”
Green flames swallowed Scrape for a second, then died down to reveal a roguishly handsome unicorn stallion garbed in battle armour. He had a rugged, sky-blue coat, red eyes and a long, flowing mane and tail as dark as the night sky.
A pit opened up in Max’s stomach. Her ears flattened and she winced as murmurs drifted amongst her siblings all around. Her heart fluttered, her wings felt flushed with heat and colour, and she was pretty sure that she looked exactly like a schoolfilly staring at her crush.
Hot dang, he’s got the look down pat.
Valiant Dawn looked even better in third person as opposed to a mirror’s reflection, with his perfectly chiselled features, unshorn fetlocks and tight flank. Not a single hair out of place, and he stood tall with indomitable confidence and stallionly charm. It was really too bad that she couldn’t see him at a more convenient time, preferably one where she wasn’t the victim of some paranoid inquisition. But in spite of that, she raised a hoof, just wishing she could get a little closer to touch those firm muscles, and maybe bury her face in his warm coat…
Another flash of green, and Valiant Dawn turned back into Scrape. She almost gagged at the realisation that she’d just swooned over her brother.
“Face it, pony. It’s over,” he said.
“Well, what are we waiting for? Get him—her, I mean, it!” someone shouted.
“No, wait!” she yelped. “It’s not what you think!”
“Oh, this’ll be good,” Scrape retorted, still wearing that insufferable smirk. “Go on.”
“I… I was…” Max moaned and shrank in on herself. “I was – oh grub why is this happening? – writing fanfiction. That pony you saw was one of my original characters. I transformed into him because it… it helps me get into character when I’m writing, ‘kay?”
Ugh… Kill me. Kill me now.
If a quarray eel decided just then to burst out of the ground and swallow her whole, she probably wouldn’t have minded. Heck, she might even have thanked it.
“Hah. Likely story.”
She turned to the murmuring crowd and threw up both hooves. “But it’s true! At best, all this just proves that I’m a fan of some pony stuff, but I’m not actually a pony!”
“Liar!”
“Traitor!”
“No! I’m telling the truth!” she cried.
“Only ponies enjoy stupid stuff like that. It rots your brain. Max was always a weirdo, but this is way beyond her usual kind of crazy.”
Max whirled around and glared at the one who’d spoken. “I heard that, Scritch! And Daring Do is not stupid; it’s actually quite intellectually stimulating in the themes it explores!”
Another one of her brothers, Vertex, shuddered and pointed an accusing hoof at her. “Fanfiction? Eww.” He then shook his head slowly, dragging out and over-enunciating each word whilst looking like he’d just swallowed rotten eggs. “I’ve done things I’m not proud of, but you… you are vile vermin. How do you even sleep at night?”
Max considered shifting into pony form just to roll her eyes at his theatrics, but settled for an exasperated sigh instead. “Hey, it’s not my fault you guys are being so narrow-minded about this. Writing fanfiction is a perfectly functional form of stress relief.”
“Keep digging yourself deeper.” Scrape trotted up to her and shook his head sadly. “Face it, pony. You were just too weak-willed to live without your pony junk, weren’t you? You’re a spy!”
“Oh, for crying out—are you being dense on purpose?” Max rose to all fours, baring her fangs. “I am a spy, you idiot! A changeling spy! I was part of the infiltration team in Vanhoover!”
“Then why are you still talking like you live there?” another voice called out.
This time, some angry mutters were mixed in with the murmurs. A few of her siblings were baring fangs and hissing as well.
“I, uh…” Max’s ears flattened as she retreated a couple of steps and rubbed the back of her head. “Well, I guess I was under cover for so long that I must’ve picked up a teensy weensy bit of an accent. But it’s nothing to worry about. I’m the same Max that Mother sent out on that mission, I swear!”
The crowd rippled and buzzed with agitated wings.
When it was clear that they were pretty close to devolving into an angry mob, she tensed up her glands and swiped her foreleg in an arc at the ground, flinging resin from her pores. She then pointed at the sticky green splotches on the ground. “See? Ponies can’t do that. I’m your sister, for crying out loud! I was hatched here. I grew up with all of you. You gotta believe me!”
“Why should we? You’ve proven nothing.”
“Well, let’s see.” Max scanned the crowd, then slipped on a smile when she found the changeling she was looking for. “Calyx! You know me. We had a short mission in Ponyville together.”
“Yeah. You tried to date my coltfriend and get him to cheat on me,” Calyx deadpanned.
Max tilted her head. “Why the heck was that a problem? We all end up sharing the love anyway.”
When her sister’s scowl deepened, Max decided to drop the issue and find someone else to stand up for her. Upon spotting a rather scrawny changeling farther back, she waved at him and buzzed her wings to get his attention. It had been a while since she’d last spoken to Femur, one of her brood mates. Though they’d been separated since their assignment to different roles in the hive, they had always been pretty close in the hatchery.
“Femur, you remember all the good times we had together, right?” she called out with a smile.
“Good times for you, I guess,” he muttered, pawing forlornly at the ground.
Her smile faltered. “Eh?”
“I mean, it must’ve been pretty nice eating up half of my portions of love,” Femur growled. “Just because I was smaller than you, you fat grub.”
Max’s jaw dropped. “Wait, really? But I… I don’t remember doing that.”
She then clapped a hoof over her mouth when nearly all of her siblings hissed and snarled at her. Oops.
“Wait, wait, wait!” she cried, throwing both forelegs up protectively as they advanced on her like a rockslide. They stopped, but only just. Acutely aware of the seconds she had left to avert disaster, she schooled her voice into the most soothing tone she could muster and said, “Just a little slip-up; nopony has a perfect memory. Gimme another chance.”
“You also had a habit of stuffing Thorax’s head into discarded cocoons,” Femur added.
“Now, that I do remember. That was funny, eh?” Max sniggered at the memory of him bumbling around like a like a potato with legs. She then glanced around and hollered, “Hey Thorax, where are you? You remember that, right? Tell ‘em!”
“Thorax isn’t here. He left the hive ages ago.”
Max felt an eye twitch. “You’re kidding. You’re kidding, right?”
Scrape somehow managed to widen his grin even further, and he made a shovelling motion with his hoof and whispered, “That’s right, keep digging…”
She ignored him and bellowed into the crowd, “Thorax! Quit hiding and get your scrawny flank out here. This isn’t a joke!”
No one answered. Or rather, everyone else answered. With bared fangs and snarls.
I’m done. I am so done.
Turning this way and that, unable to find any friendly or even neutral faces, Max chuckled and grinned sheepishly. “Look, I know this looks bad, but I honestly must’ve forgotten about what I did when I was younger. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry, 'kay? I might’ve been a colossal tail vent of a—”
Femur coughed.
“Okay, I was a colossal—”
“Ahem.” Calyx sniffed.
Max ground her teeth and opened her mouth to fire off a cutting remark, but faltered at the simmering anger and suspicion radiating from her siblings. She then sighed and dragged her sheepish smile back into place. “Fine, I am still a colossal tail vent of a changeling, but the important part is that I’m a changeling, right?”
“Lies. The real Maxilla is probably stuck in some dungeon in Vanhoover. Your magic tricks and pathetic appeals to emotion won’t work on us, pony!” Scrape cried. “Seize it!”
Max shrieked as dozens of her siblings lunged at her like rabid timber wolves. She ducked under the guard and zigzagged between a few others, but then someone tackled her from behind and pinned her to the ground. Too many. Too many charging together. Once down, they simply piled up on her and clamped down on every limb until she could hardly even wriggle.
Never thought I would be on the receiving end of a swarm rush. It sucks big time.
“What are we going to do with it?”
“Wrap it up and we can start feeding on it!”
A chorus of buzzing wings and hungry hisses reverberated around her.
“You guys are going to feel really dumb once you realise that – ouch, stop squashing my wings, Chitin! – I don’t actually have any love in me,” Max growled. She then locked eyes with Scrape and hissed at him. “When this is over, I’m going to—”
“Wait. What if that’s its plan all along?” someone said.
Max blinked and raised an eye ridge as the mob’s enthusiastic cacophony died down to a contemplative hum.
“Yeah. Maybe… maybe it’s trying to trick us into eating its love. Poisoned love. I’ve seen ponies use a trick like that for killing fire ants. Feed some poor slob poisoned sugar and let it go home, and bam, the whole colony’s dead!”
“Come to think of it, maybe that’s why it was so careless that even Scrape caught it ‘off guard’. It wasn’t even trying to hide properly!”
“Hey!” Scrape scowled indignantly at someone Max couldn’t see.
Max didn’t know whether she wanted to laugh or cry.
Honestly, it’s a wonder we’ve even survived this long as a species.
She sighed and went limp. “Look, just try feeding on me right now and settle the issue once and for all. We’ve wasted enough time on this already, and Mother is going to have our heads if we don’t get back to work soon.”
Silence. No one moved.
Max groaned and would’ve repeatedly and very enthusiastically introduced her face to the ground if she still had the range of motion to do so. Clearly, no one wanted to be the guinea pig, but every second of indecision on their part was another second she had to spend squashed underneath their collective flanks. Heavy flanks. If they didn’t get off of her soon, she might actually require the assistance of an air pump to get back into her original shape.
She could still talk, but the results of opening her mouth so far had been somewhat disappointing. And she didn’t want to use magic unless she absolutely had to, as her reserves were already low enough without thaumic fatigue. So, she waited.
The silence dragged on. Her breaths came out in wheezes and the pressure was making her head spin.
Oh, what the hay. I’ve got nothing to lose.
“Guys, here’s a thought: I look like you, I sound like you, and for all intents and purposes, I apparently work exactly like you. Just let me live here and we can all pretend that we didn’t act like complete morons today.” She winced and squirmed to a slightly less painful position, then grinned hopefully. “I mean, would it matter if I was a pony?”
“I’ve got a better idea,” the guard suddenly said. He disentangled himself from the pile and stood with his hindquarters facing her.
The last thing she saw were the undersides of his hind hooves just before they struck her in the head. The world spun out of focus, and she gurgled out something that might’ve been a quip about each and every one of her siblings swallowing a cactus before the darkness took her.
* * * * *
“My queen, the pony disguising itself as Maxilla has been dealt with accordingly,” said Scrape as he sidled into the royal chamber, dragging along a bulging sack.
Pony?
Chrysalis raised an eye ridge as he recounted the tale of how he’d cleverly outed Maxilla as a spy and had her disposed of. Upon completion, she believed that she had found a new champion in the Department of Making Chrysalis Want to Facehoof. She resisted the urge. Barely.
“This is an… unexpected development. I told you to search the tunnels and bring me what you found.”
Scrape bowed low. “I’m sorry, Your Highness. It’s just that I saw an insidious plot against the hive, and I knew I had to act before it was too late.”
Idiot. I’m surrounded by idiots.
“Well, no matter. I suppose you did well enough, under the circumstances,” Chrysalis huffed, waving a hoof dismissively.
She then grabbed the sack with magic and poured out its contents onto the floor. One by one, she appraised each item and tossed it back onto the pile, until she had gone through the entire collection. All the while, Scrape stood before her like a puppy waiting for a treat.
Where did I go wrong?
Still, she smiled at him and said, “Well done. I shall make arrangements to have your rations increased. If you find any similar contraband, notify me immediately and I will deal with the culprits. Now leave me be whilst I destroy this pony filth.”
So saying, she shot a crackling beam of green energy at the pile, engulfing it in flames.
“Thank you, my queen!” Scrape cried as he exited her chambers. “Thank y—”
Chrysalis slammed a panel of hardened resin up against the entrance, effectively cutting off his voice. With a few well-placed spells, she sealed and reinforced the barrier until nothing short of another Canterlot blast would breach it, and then extinguished the illusory flames over Maxilla’s collection.
First, she sifted out the worthless scraps of Max’s personal writing and crushed the lot into a ball that she tossed into the refuse pit in the far corner of her chamber. The books and comics she carefully levitated over to the massive chest sitting next to several other pieces of antique furniture she’d pilfered from Canterlot. Once she had them all arranged nicely in chronological order, she turned her attention to the two posters of Shining Armour, standing tall and noble before a palace made entirely of crystal.
We’re going to have Round Two. And this time, little stallion, I will win.
She briefly toyed with the idea of using them as bedding in the hatchery, but paused just before shredding them and hummed to herself. If nothing else, Shining had introduced her to a whole new world of fiction that made her life just a little less torturous. So they went into the chest with the rest of her collectibles.
This time, she allowed herself a tiny cackle of delight as she picked out the latest volume of Daring Do and flitted up to her hammock suspended high above the floor. The preparations for the next invasion could wait. For now, it was just her and another rip-roaring adventure, and she could forget about how much it sucked being queen of a bunch of imbeciles for a while.
* * * * *
“Ugh…”
Max moaned when her head throbbed like mad, sending pulses of agony through her nerves right down to her tail.
A moth fluttered overhead, drawing her eyes to the full moon hovering in a purple, starry, cloudless sky. Groaning, she rolled onto her side and swept her gaze across the horizon. Aside from a few scraggly trees and miserable bushes, only rocky tors and barren hills in the distance gave shape to the utter flatness of the Badlands.
They kicked me out. Those jerks kicked me out!
She simply lay there for a while, listening to the insects singing to one another. Eventually, the pain subsided enough that she could get back onto all fours and take stock of her surroundings. It didn’t take her long to realise that the landscape didn’t match anything in her memory of the hive’s geographical location.
In other words, she was lost. Temporarily. The ones who had dumped her there must’ve flown just to avoid leaving tracks that could lead her home. Not that she really needed it; with a bit of wandering, she’d eventually find a few recognisable landmarks and use those to triangulate the hive’s position. Almost everyone who’d gone outside for extended periods knew how to do that.
That just left the question of whether she even wanted to go back.
Gee, what a tough one.
Facing what she hoped was the direction of the hive, she raised a hoof and shook it at them as she roared, “Fine, be that way! Since you exiled me for being a pony, of all things, I’m going to be the poniest pony there ever was and harvest more love than any of you could ever dream of. And I ain’t sharing!”
A chilly wind carried her words into the night.
Max shivered and took to the air, buzzing her wings extra hard to generate heat. She had enough reserves of energy to make it to the nearest town, and from then on, she’d just have to play it smart and do what changelings do best.
Six months later…
“I mean, wow, I can’t believe you’re the author of Daring Do and the Dawn Strider. That’s top-shelf material in my fanfiction library!” gushed the somewhat chubby stallion. He practically had stars in his eyes as he offered a hoof to Max. “I’m Quibble Pants, by the way. Big fan.”
I’ll bet.
Max grinned and shook his hoof, savouring the spicy-orange deluge of passionate enthusiasm radiating from him. The Manehattan Convention Centre already had a latent field of adoration permeating its spacious interior, filled with a couple of thousand Daring Do fans, but nothing beat the reactions of those realising that they were speaking to one of their fandom idols.
A little hint here, a couple of title drops there, and they’d suddenly wonder how she knew so much about her own stories. They’d ask if she’d read them too, and then she would do one better and reveal that she, Sunny Spring, actually wrote them. Quibble Pants was just her latest victi—no, donor. A huge portion of his enthusiasm was directed right at her, and she could almost imagine herself physically swelling from his unmitigated love for her written work.
“Glad you liked it,” she said, allowing her cheeks to redden slightly, just enough to contrast her teal coat and golden mane. “You have no idea how much this means to me, Mister Pants.”
“Oh, just call me Quibble,” he said, waving a hoof. He then inclined his head towards one of the vendors. “Say, Sunny, can I buy you a drink?”
Max smiled coyly at him. “Well, since you asked so nicely, sure!”
As they navigated the crowded hall by trotting at a leisurely pace, Quibble Pants launched into a lengthy discourse on the qualities of her work, ranging from story structure to characterisation and philosophy, with plenty of personal commentary on what she could improve on, of course. With a few not so subtle hints that she could totally use his original characters if she wanted to. Max didn’t mind that she could barely get a word in edgewise; she simply soaked in his adulation, filling her reserves to the brim.
“I’ve got to say, I just love the characters you introduced in your latest publication,” he said when they’d gotten their drinks and seated themselves at a table. “Scrape, Thorax, Femur and gang are all wildly entertaining henchponies. Just the right blend of traits – stupid enough to be funny, yet competent enough to be credible threats. Their names are a little odd, if you ask me, but that’s not a huge issue. Was there any particular inspiration behind them?”
“I have a very… interesting family.”
Quibble blinked. “Really? That’s some family you must have.”
Max rolled her eyes and chuckled. “Oh, you have no idea.”
