Author's Note
A/N: Blame hitting the sweet spot of sleep deprivation and still building my head meds back up in my system after a few weeks without them. For those of you who haven’t seen the minisode this all hinges on….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XW2Qe5-GYY
History Lesson
“I can’t believe she was scared of ladybugs,” Starlight chuckled, poking a leaf on Phyllis where one of the little red beetles was currently relaxing.
“Who is?” Ocellus asked, poking her head into the office.
“Erm, I can’t say.” Starlight sat up straight with a sheepish grin. “Professional confidentiality, just a very specific phobia. So, Ocellus! Did you need anything?”
“Oh, no, I was just walking by and heard you mention ladybugs. But phobias are irrational fears, aren’t they?”
“Well, yes. Ladybugs fit the definition pretty perfectly. They’re harmless, even helpful really. The patient just has a hangup from when they were a foal and somepony convinced them that their spots were extra eyes.”
Ocellus tilted her head to the side.
“But… they are.”
“They are… harmless, right.”
“No, they are extra eyes. Well, not eyes for the ladybug, but you know what I mean. Like scrying sensors!”
Ocellus eeped as she was scooped up in Starlight’s magic and deposited unceremoniously onto her couch, the door to the office slamming shut behind her.
Starlight’s eyes pivoted towards the ladybug on Phyllis’ leaf. The little beetle spread its shell, unfolded its wings, and flew over towards the office window as though it somehow knew it was being watched, and wanted to escape the attention of a possible predator.
Or as if it was looking for a better angle on the room.
Starlight opened the window with her magic, shooing the bug outside before she closed it again. Then she turned her attention back towards the other bug in her office.
“If you decided that now’s the time to start practicing pranking, it’s really bad timing. What do you mean, they are extra eyes?”
Ocellus shrank back into the couch nervously.
“Well… this is stuff that all grubs learn when we’re growing up, Changeling history. I don’t think it’s really a secret or anything, but it’s something that… well… if I explain it can you maybe try being a little less scary?”
Starlight paused, realizing what she must look like from Ocellus’ perspective right now. She took a deep breath and leaned back in her seat, letting the breath out slowly.
“I’m sorry, Ocellus. I overreacted. It’s just… a little awkward to spend my morning telling a patient that they’ve got no reason to be afraid of ladybugs, and then finding out that their foalhood fears were apparently absolutely right.”
“Well, it’s not necessarily something to be afraid of,” Ocellus explained, relaxing a little herself. “I actually just finished writing a paper about it, or I probably would’ve forgotten about it myself. See, there used to be other changeling hives, and other queens, back before ponies took over Equestria when there was a bit more space to spread out a hive’s territory. Most hives favored different types of insects as livestock. Chrysalis preferred moths, but Queen Co’cochinelle used beetles, Queen Tymbal used cicadas, like that.”
“So this Queen Cochinelle created ladybugs?” Starlight guessed.
“Yeah, each hive bred species of their preferred insects for specific uses. Ladybugs were spy species! Pretty, helpful for crops, and they fed on the livestock that their rivals in the Aphidoidea Hive bred to supply trade goods that they used to buy protection from Formica Hive. And the hive seers had the power to see through the spots on their shells. Nobuggy figured it out for quite a while, realy. Because they were such good predators, the other hives actually imported them by the millions to prevent Aphidoidea hives from being established to feed supply lines for Formica Hive.
“After Formica Hive was defeated, and the overall alliances between the other hives started to break down, Queen Chrysalis found out what the ladybugs could actually do. She started feeding bad intelligence to Queen Cochinnelle; then, when the alliance collapsed and the Hive Wars started, Chrysalis went after her hive first.”
“The ‘Hive Wars’?” Starlight interrupted.
“Yeah… after Formica Hive went down, the rest of the Hives turned on each other. Obviously, Chrysalis came out on top of all that. She tried to maintain a ‘changeling empire’ for a while, but… well, the official line is that she realized our Hive was superior and she abandoned the weakest, but we think it’s more that she couldn’t manage the food supply. I mean, just the one hive created the Badlands, so that many? It wasn’t going to work out. But during the Wars? That’s when we all learned to be scared of ladybugs.”
“Yeah, if they were being used for intelligence gathering like that, I imagine it’d be a pretty nasty discovery,” Starlight admitted.
“Oh, it wasn’t that,” Ocellus shrugged. “Like I said, once our Hive found out, we started using those ladybugs to our advantage. Chrysalis even said that she stole the power to see through their spots, but we’re figuring out that she said a lot of things. But it was a lot harder dealing with the big ones. The War Beetles were big enough to be used in fights, and they treated changelings from other hives like aphids. They were big enough to do it, too. The ones that couldn’t eat a changeling whole would just stab them and suck them dry. The biggest ones even had parts of their shells cut out so they could be used as mobile siege engines. Imagine a ladybug big enough to mount a ballista and crew on its back. Lucky that Chrysalis didn’t keep breeding them after the Hive Wars, or things could’ve been really bad during the Battle of Canterlot!”
“Yeah… really bad,” Starlight murmured. “So, you said you’d written a paper about this?”
“Mhm! Since Professor Fluttershy has us taking care of the little guys, I thought I should write a paper on what changelings know about them, for extra credit!”
“So have you turned the paper in to Fluttershy yet?”
“Mhm! I was just coming back from doing it, actually. I didn’t turn it in to Professor Fluttershy though. It was more of a history paper, so I gave it to Professor-”
Starlight’s stomach twisted as a deafening, Canterlot-voice-enhanced scream of absolute, existential terror ripped through the school.
Oh, she was going to need so much more than a ladybug kite to fix this one.
