There were few nightclubs in Equestria as fine as Banana Cream's, not that she had much competition; even in Las Pegasus-Equestria's seediest of cities-there were only a handful to choose from. But between them, Banana Cream's was by far the best-known and best-liked. It had everything a pony might need, from drinks to dances. A good few of Equestria's big names in jazz had started humble careers playing some instrument or another on Banana Cream's Jazz Band, from Legstrong to Ellingdun. The bar's drinks were exactly what a pony (and, in one odd case, a draconequus and a baby dragon) needed when he wanted a little something to soothe the throat.
And drinks Rustic Rumor needed. After a long day of work as a showstallion at Film-Flam Bros. Luxury Resort and Hotel, where he dazzled and amazed crowds with his ventriloquist comedy act, his throat was sore from the strain of it all.
He, his back loaded with saddlebags, entered the club as the last rays of the sun turned their harshest and most vibrant of golds, lighting his own vibrant red coat. Leaving his saddlebags at the door where they would be picked up later, Rustic sighed hoarsely in relief, the weight suddenly gone from his withers. He then made his way towards the bar and sat down on one of the stools.
"Uh, another day, another bit," he groaned in a tired, dry voice as his sore hooves were spared from carrying his weight any further. A pony with a yellow coat and a healthy brown mustache drew near to him.
"Hi, Rustic! Another rough day, huh?"
Sam was the bartender at Banana Cream's and had been for as long as the mare herself had owned the place and was a familiar sight to Rustic.
"Yeah," smiled Rustic, "but a rough day for my voice means an easy day for my wallet!"
The exchange was one they'd had with each other many nights since Rustic moved to Las Pegasus over eight months ago and it was one that Rustic enjoyed. It meant that his day was over and his night had begun. With a flick of his horn, Rustic reached into his saddlebags and pulled three bits out.
"One chocolate milkshake, straight," he ordered, placing the bits on the bar. Sam nodded with a smile and turned around, reaching for the cups to begin making it. Rustic turned around and leaned his back against the bar with a sigh. His shoulders, like most of him, ached from standing up all day and it felt nice to flex his muscles in different positions after such a while. Having nothing to do while waiting for his drink, Rustic turned his green eyes to the dance floor.
This early in the evening, it was a lonely place, with Celestia's dying sun shining a harsh evening beam on the empty stage through the window and only a small spattering of ponies in booths here and there. Later, however, the lights would come on and brighten the stage, onto which Banana Cream herself would step, with her yellow-orange coat and fur collar drawing attention to her orchid-hued eyes. From there, she'd sing a song or two with her lovely voice and then turn the stage over to her jazz band while she mingled with her guests.
Seeing as his skill in ventriloquy stemmed from his childhood interest in the spoken word, Rustic had an appreciation for voices. Banana Cream's, in his mind, was the loveliest he'd ever heard in all his life. It was a deep and soulful but unmistakably that of a young mare, uttering such perfect lows as to rumble in his chest and such lovely highs as to sooth his brain. He sighed at the thought of her. Ever since his first night, Banana Cream (and the milkshakes) were the highlight of his day.
Rustic's daydreaming was broken by a purple hoof waving in the air from a booth nearest the stage. Looking in that direction, Rustic recognized Grapevine, his friend of about three years who had connected him with Flim and Flam. He had met Grapevine at the house of a 'mutual friend' who had introduced the two to each other. Ever since then, Grapevine regularly stopped over in Las Pegasus for visits.
Perking up, Rustic turned to Sam. "Hey, Sam, bring my milkshake to that booth when you're done," he requested, pointing at the booth. The yellow bartender, who was halfway finished with the shake, nodded.
"Grapevine! It's been forever since I've seen you buddy!" Once at the booth, Rustic stretched his hoof out in greeting, to which Grapevine's own purple hoof bumped.
"How've ya been, Grape? Did ya finally ask that mare out?" he asked as he took a seat opposite his green-maned friend, his rump sinking gently into the soft leather. Grapevine's ears flopped and his eyes lowered sadly. Rustic's mood soured instantly.
"What's wrong?" he asked in a lower voice.
"Well..." the purple pegasus pony paused for a moment to think, gently clapping his hooves together. "I got fired from my job in Manehattan." Rustic gasped but said nothing. "Once I couldn't pay the rent, I came here to see if I could get a job here."
Rustic's response was cut off by Sam coming with his drink. "One chocolate milkshake, straight," Sam announced professionally as the beverage was freed from his magical grip onto the table. Taking a moment to thank Sam, Rustic turned back to Grapevine.
"Do you have a place to stay?" he asked tentatively, hoping quietly that he said no. If he said yes, that meant....
"No."
Rustic's heart leapt in his chest and he breathed sharply in, taking an excited sip of his milkshake. The taste and texture of his milkshake were for once lost on the red pony.
"Alright. Let's get back to my apartment."
Rustic's apartment, while far from the finest penthouse, was decently-sized. Placed on the fourth floor of his complex on the corner, Rustic had a decent view of the city center, shining brightly even in though nightswathed. His salary from Flim and Flam had been well-spent, furnishing him with comfy leather chairs, a coffee table, and a stove. However, decently-sized as it was, Rustic started to feel a little cramped now that Grapevine stood in his living room, looking the city in the distance over.
Casting a spell of silence on the walls of his apartment and lowering the shades with his magic, Rustic approached Grapevine, whose worried face had since hardened.
"What brings you to Los Pegasus, Trochanter?" 'Grapevine' turned to face 'Rustic,' upon which heatless green flames rose from his hooves, his body fur burning off and being replaced with sleek black carapace. His dark pink eyes became pupilless light blue and sharp fangs and a horn grew from where they once were not.
'Rustic' did the same and soon the two changelings stood, their disguises shed.
"You said that you 'needed a place to stay.' That could only mean that the Queen herself sent you!" What Coxa said was true; such a phrase, when said by one changeling in disguise to another, meant that a mission of utmost importance needed to be discussed elsewhere, preferably in private. Such missions could only come from the Queen.
"I haven't seen an envoy in four months! I thought you guys were supposed check on us infiltrators every two weeks on the nose!" Coxa rebuked the elder changeling frustratedly. "What happened?" Trochanter's eyes narrowed.
"The traitor Thorax and those pesky ponies happened, that's what!" Trochanter hissed harshly. Coxa's eyes widened.
He remembered Thorax, the weakling from Brood 7. Coxa and a few of his broodmates used to pick on him for playing with dolls instead of learning how to fight like everyone else. He knew Thorax was yellow-bellied and spineless, yes, but Coxa had never thought that he'd betray the hive!
"What?!" Coxa said in shock. Trochanter nodded fiercely.
"After the Queen captured the pony Princesses and their lackeys, Thorax lead the God of Chaos and Princess Twilight Sparkle's student straight to the hive and overthrew her."
"What?!" Coxa said again, slightly louder this time. His rage was building. Thorax had actually grown a spine and what had he done with it? He had turned all of the time and attention the Queen had put into him and had thrown it right back in her face.
"Worse, most of the hive turned on her right with him!" Trochanter continued
"WHAT?!" Coxa yelled. Coxa was truly stunned by this news. The hive, every one of them, had been raised by the Queen from birth. Aside from the hunger, she had been the one constant in their lives, their one shining light in the darkness in a life of starvation and misery. And for them to just turn on her...It was unthinkable.
Trochanter nodded sagely. "I can't believe it either, but the Queen told me herself when I met her. And if she said it, it must be true."
Coxa gasped in shock. Their Queen was not one to admit defeat lightly. "What do we do, Trochanter?"
At that, the elder changeling gained a sinister smirk and his featureless blue eyes narrowed.
"That's why I'm here." Taking a seat in one of Coxa's chairs, Trochanter began to explain.
"The Queen wants Thorax taken down so that she can retake her rightful place as Queen. To do that, however, she's ordered us to infiltrate the hive and sabotage it from within." He pounded one hoof into another to punctuate his sentence.
Coxa spent a moment to take this in. His fury at Thorax abided a little, replaced with thought. "How are we going to do that?" The hive didn't have many machines to break and no changeling in it would forget to recognize the work of a saboteur on the gears of their society. He and Trochanter would be noticed rather quickly.
Trochanter did not seem to share Coxa's concern, for he rose from his chair, his sinister smirk spreading into a toothy grin.
"Captain Pharynx is how."
Author's Note
It's just a story that I'll update when I feel like it. I hope you guys like it! Any criticism is welcome.
"Are you clear on the plan, Coxa?" asked Trochanter as he resumed his guise as a purple pegasus with a flash of magical green flame. Coxa nodded surely as he lowered the silencing spell on the room and opened the windows of his apartment to the well-lit nightly city. 'Grapevine' immediately cheered up, the seriousness of his voice and his visage lifted.
"Thanks, Rustic," he said in a well-practiced voice of relief and thanks. "I'll see you later. I'm going to go hit the club, if you'd like to join me." Any other night and 'Rustic' would have happily gone with him to sip the cool, sweet milkshakes and bask in Banana Cream's lovely voice, but tonight was no other night.
"No, thank you, Grapevine," he answered, his voice light enough to be encouraging and apologetic yet firm enough to make his position clear.
"Your loss. See ya later and thanks again buddy," said 'Grapevine' as he left and closed the door behind him, his voice growing softer towards the end. With Trochanter out of the room, Coxa now had time to process the events of the evening.
Never in his life had Coxa ever thought about betraying the Hive. The Hive was all he knew. It provided for him, gave him a home, gave him his very life. And the idea that Thorax of all changelings would be the one courageous enough to do such a deed.... Courageous was the last word Coxa would have used to describe Thorax. He was easily-frightened, never fought back when other changelings picked on him, was submissive to a fault as a result of it all, and wasn't even aggressive enough to be a harvester like he had been intended to be. By every measure of a changeling's worth, Thorax was worthless. And somehow he now ruled in the Queen's place. The idea was inconceivable!
Coxa went over to his icebox and got a small carton of grape juice and then sat on one of his leather chairs, staring out the window, deep in thought.
Trochanter's plan made sense. Although Captain Pharynx was Thorax's brother, he had always been loyal to the Queen above all else. It was doubtful that he had gone along with Thorax's overtaking wholeheartedly; the Captain of Patrol was an aggressive and defense-minded individual, something Thorax was bound not to be. With the high amount of respect the Hive all had for Pharynx, if Coxa and Trochanter could persuade Pharynx of the folly of Thorax's reign, the whole of the Hive would support him. The Queen would be back in her rightful place within less than a month and all would be right with the world.
But Coxa still had his doubts.
Taking a sip from the carton, Coxa mulled over the situation. For Thorax to have been in power for even this long, there had to be something supporting him. None of the changelings had had any respect for Thorax in the past so if Thorax had led a coup and not been immediately ousted afterwards, something was amiss. Not to mention Thorax's complete lack of anything resembling leader qualities. Thorax had always been a follower, not a leader; he couldn't be skilled enough to reign as king for so long.
"Perhaps I'm just worrying to much," Coxa said to himself after a moment. "If Thorax has something helping him, than if we can take whatever that is out, it'll be that much easier." Seeming satisfied with his answer, Coxa sucked up the last of the juice from the carton and smacked his lips.
"Whelp, time for bed!" And to bed he went.
If Coxa had any idea that Trochanter had wanted him up so early in the morning to get going, he might have had a few reservations about the whole affair. One of the advantages to being an infiltrator like Coxa was that he had no regimented schedule. For most days out of the year, he was simply Rustic Rumor, the ventriloquist from just north of Canterlot. Only during the two-weekly visits from envoys when they checked on him and picked up his stored supply of love did he have to contribute to changeling society at all. Trochanter was an entirely different story.
As an envoy, his goal was to report the happenings of the infiltrators he was assigned to and take the love back to the Hive; his life was very regimented. And it was this regimentation that annoyed Coxa to no end.
"Can we stop for some donuts, Grape? I know that we need to get your stuff from your old house and all, but did we," Coxa paused to yawn, "have to head off so early in the morning?"
Trochanter gave an annoyed sigh, his ears flopping against his head as he rolled his eyes. "Rustic, we're on a train. Go to the food car and get something. And yes we needed to get started early! Manehattan's on the other side of the country!"
The two changelings currently sat in a passenger car on the early-morning train from Las Pegasus on the Southwestern Rail Line, heading north towards the White Tail Woods. Coxa, or rather 'Rustic Rumor,' was bored. The tired changeling-in-disguise turned his head to the chilly window. The cold nightly winds of the San Palomino Desert just south of Las Pegasus had blown north and chilled the window of the train as it had sat in the station, fogging it up minorly. Through the fog, Coxa's heavy eyes came to rest on the Applewood mountains standing tall and stoic some hundred miles in the distance, their snowy caps brightened by the eastern Sun. As he rested his sleepy head on the glass, Coxa remembered the day he had scaled them.
It had been a guided tour on a hot air balloon all the way to the top. Coxa recalled with some glee the awe of viewing the busy city of Las Pegasus from their snowy, chilled tops, the vast San Palomino Desert seeable far into the horizon. He had spoken up there, and how he had giggled like a filly when he heard his voice echo ever so gently through the mountains. Ever since then, Coxa had liked to imagine how Banana Cream's lovely voice would have sounded as it reverberated through the lonely frozen caps and possibly down onto the city below. Coxa huffed a faint huff of amusement before closing his heavy eyes and falling to sleep.
Trochanter looked across the isle at Coxa, who had fallen asleep against the window. He rolled his eyes and wordlessly cursed infiltrators and their easy lives.
Coxa had not been Trochanter's first choice. Infiltrators were known for their tendency to take to their guises too much to the point of forgetting that they are in Equestria to serve a purpose: feeding the Hive. While some took to it worse than others, every infiltration group had one who took it a little too far and Coxa was the one in the Las Pegasus infiltration group.
But, sadly, Coxa's willingness to enjoy his double life as a pony meant that he was also better at keeping himself uncaught than any of his groupmates, all of whom, Trochanter had found out to his dismay, had been captured since the Canterlot Invasion some years ago. Coxa was quite truly the only one he had left.
Trochanter sighed heavily and laid his head back against the booth he sat in. Retaking the Hive for the Queen was going to be a tough job, especially with Coxa's laid-back attitude, but Trochanter was willing to take it for his Queen and his Hive.
The purple pegasus-disguised changeling opted, to past the time, to look out the window and plan their strategy. They would arrive at the White Tail Way Station tomorrow, where he and Coxa would disappear and make their way in pegasus form towards the Hive in what the ponies called the Undiscovered West. Even in such forms, the roughly 800 miles between the Woods and the Hive would take a few days, during which time, Trochanter decided, he'd plan exactly how he would persuade Captain Pharynx.
With a plan for the next day in mind, Trochanter grabbed a magazine and settled to relax for the day-long voyage.
Author's Note
Longest chapter yet. Hope to be doing more!
