Twilight blinked as she looked around, Spike had chosen to build the arena in the Everfree Forest. Looks like not every place in this world had a completely different name than back home, and this Everfree was far more wild and vicious than the one she knew. The paths that she and friends had used in the past were nonexistent, the presence of the Castle of the Two Sisters was nowhere within the forest. In place of the castle stood a keep that Spike had made a few passing mentions of being his old seat of power. With how dangerous the Everfree here genuinely was, the worker teams had been nearly assaulted by dozens of timberwolf packs and a variety of other creatures that called the sprawling and ancient woodland their home. Thankfully, the guards Spike provided for the project were more than capable of dealing with problems as they arose.

After her odd, and quite shameful, time with this universe’s Celestia and Luna Twilight told Spike about the circumstances surrounding the marriage of Cadance and Shining Armor. She also speculated to him her thoughts regarding Queen Chrysalis and the Changelings; chances were they would only make a go at established dragon territories if they were desperate. Spike seemed thoughtful about it all, but didn’t offer any input on the matter. She had an odd feeling about things. There were still two whole months until the big match, and it would be three months until the device based on the one used to get a connection with this reality would be in a state where it could be ready for a full systems test. This was mostly to do with the fact several of the components had to be invented in this world, as opposed to merely modified from Twilight’s homeworld.

After her quick check of how the construction was coming, which seemed to be surprisingly fast, Twilight made her return to Dragon Crow; she still was having trouble with it being called that, and back to her residence. On her way, she encountered an unfamiliar dragoness. This was Dark indigo in color with electric blue spines; she was also dressed in a lavender business suit with a dark pink shirt. The dragoness introduced herself as a “collar specialist” but did not give her actual name.

Something Twilight had learned over her time here was that ponies were not allowed to mess with the collars, only dragons were permitted to do so; ponies were allowed to mess with the horn rings, she had even been permitted to adjust a few things during her last calibrating of her horn ring. But ponies were not permitted to do any work relating to the collars, only a very short list of select dragons, a record that had its names kept completely hidden from the populous were permitted to do any and all work on the collars.

Twilight was concerned but was not permitted, no pony was, to learn any more than the basics regarding the collars. Over the course of her research on the collars, she had learned that Dragonlord Torch had commissioned the creation of the collars but the name of the dragon or dragons responsible for the actual act of creating the artifacts placed upon all ponies of legal age was not recorded.

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Twilight was called into the castle the following morning and properly introduced to the specialist, with the omission of the name and only a general title given during the exchange. “What can I do for you this day?” Twilight inquired, she decided to play things as safe as possible, she didn’t know how much about herself Spike had shared with this dragoness.

“What can you tell me about changelings? I would very much like to know as much as possible,” said the specialist dragoness in her surprisingly melodic voice.

“They’re shapeshifters; they can mimic the appearance of almost any creatures and object. They’ve managed to mimic quite a few young and adolescent dragons, chances are anything too large or with too much mass might prove difficult for them to imitate,” Twilight stated, noticing the dragoness taking notes, “their magic typically appears some shade or tone of green, I’ve found references to their magic being any other color. Also, they’re ruled over by a queen, at least last time I checked. The queen is the largest and most powerful among the lot, possibly on par with an alicorn in terms of power, if we’re using ponies as a comparison. If one were to hinder the queen, it could potentially cripple the hive, assuming one of the drones didn’t step up to fill in the power void. What is all this about?”

“You’re mentioning of a changeling invasion in the other world resulted in me deciding to consult an expert on the collars. There are references to encounters with changelings going back a few decades before my ascension to my current position,” so Spike had informed this dragoness, “to my knowledge, no dragons have claimed to have collared a changeling. That said, I would very much like to keep a contingency in play for dealing with changelings should they prove hostile. But claiming their leader and territories would be better,” Twilight felt a chill run down her spine.

“We will not make any goes at making claims for other realities,” said the dragoness, “the subtleties regarding the rules of magic would make things far more of a hassle than we want to deal with, although some Dragonlords past and possibly future can and will have a history of being just reckless enough to try something so foolhardy. I surmise the reason you and Pinkie merely swapped minds with the ones we know, instead of a full position swap, has something to do with the safeguards in place for the collars. Do you have any knowledge of what those are?”

“I didn’t encounter any mention of those during my research,” replied Twilight.

“I see, that is fine. Problematic, but acceptable for the time being. The collars have safeguards that are meant to cancel out any magics that forcibly change a pony’s location beyond a set limit; this prevents ponies from being potentially stolen by dragons that are less abiding by certain rules. They also lockdown a pony’s reproductive abilities and can be released at the permission of the dragon responsible for the pony. In addition to those two things, the collars protect against mind-affecting magics, which means illusion and memory spells have less stability than usual,” Twilight realized that it probably wasn’t the problem she thought when she used the memory sharing spell with her other self, “and outright disables any mind controlling effects targeted at a collar user. However, the collars are only calibrated for ponies, griffins, Diamond Dogs, Buffalo, and Minotaurs. We have yet to properly encounter any changelings; we need to analyze their magical properties and design collars accordingly.”

Twilight was starting to feel ill, they were talking about potentially enslaving changelings and she had inadvertently contributed to that cause. “I get that Spike has done a lot of things that no prior Dragonlord has done,” said Twilight respectfully, “but why go through all this trouble of preparing for the ‘claiming’ of changelings?”

“They’re a potential threat,” said Spike flatly, his attire was closer to military formal than regular formal, “I’ve been getting reports that sound like they might be a changeling tactic. But the queen tends to hide in positions of power, as per your reports, and since they are supposedly in my territory, then the queen must be somewhere in this city. I want to capture her before things have a chance to escalate to a point that can’t be mitigated.”

Twilight was apprehensive, but not as much as she thought she should be, a bit before saying, “she’s probably masquerading as someone that is typically unnoticed but has a high degree of freedom around a place of power. Maybe she’s playing the part of a maid, or even the head maid if she’s growing tired of not calling the shots.”

“Now that you mention it,” said Spike, “I haven’t had a proper meeting with my head maid in months, that’s an oversight I probably should have noticed before now.”

“You should also check on behaviors, changelings can have behavior that seems a bit off from who they’re trying imitate, but not everyone will catch it.”

“Good to know,” said Spike, “this could be more problematic than anticipated.” Twilight bid the two a good day and returned to her residence, the less she had to think about changelings like that the better, it probably for the best she didn’t mention how things were regarding the events after Flurry Heart was born.

Author's Note

I think you can guess what I’m trying to set up for here

Jumping back to the alternate Pinkie and Twilight next chapter