The Perks of Changing into a Wallflower
The Perks of Changing into a Wallflower
My name is Wallflower Blush. And I am the most dangerous changeling in Equestria that you’ll never meet.
You would never know who I am, if you ever saw me. I look exactly the same as all the other drones. Ink black, with a horned head, blue glassy eyes, exoskeletion, and hollow legs. Sure, I may be about three feet ahead of the main line of offense, leading the invasion of your town. But when a swarm of ravenous changelings are charging toward your front door, ready to suck away your entire livelihood in the span of seconds, do you bother to notice those three feet?
So there’s not much point in trying to spot me. You’re doomed anyway. You and all your friends shall fall. Decades of love, memories will be sucked away and you will lie drained and exhausted on your doorstep, the same kind of six-inch doorstep repeated twenty-thousand times over on suburban streets. And no one will blink. The world will not miss you.
That’s one thing I notice. After our Hive completes an invasion, even a large scale one like the one at Canterlot, everything feels…eerily the same.
Sure, the ponies lie limp and unconscious, scattered all over the street (why some ponies have the urge to run outside when disaster is approaching, I shall never understand). But the brick walls on the houses do not age. Dirt accumulates in the mortar at the exact same rate. The sky stays the same blue it always was. The plants, even with a few clipped branches and scythed leaves, quickly return to normal growth. The weather is the same as before we came: partly clear skies, winds out the southwest, watch for wake turbulence over the mountains.
The world does not miss us.
Not that I mind, though.
In this line of work, it pays to be invisible.
Our Queen tells us that the exemplary changeling drone is one who is invisible.
One who quickly pounces on their prey, harvests love from them, wraps the body up in a cocoon for leftovers, then leaves like they never came. Like they’re invisible.
That makes me the perfect exemplary changeling drone.
To date, I have harvested love out of 586 ponies whilst in combat. The most of any drone in the Hive, and twice the number the Queen has. How do I know this? We’re all supposed to keep tally of each others’ harvests during combat, and if one changeling falls behind the quota, we must report them to the Queen. The only changeling who doesn’t have to care about numbers is the Queen—she just keeps tally with the fullness of her stomach from the tributes of harvested love we each give to her.
Like other changelings in the Hive, I keep a tally on my own small rock. Each tally mark represents one pony. Some are mares, some are stallions, some are fighters, some are flyers, some are yellow, some are blue. Each one a four-inch tally mark.
Numbers are the ultimate anonymizer.
Although most of us drones choose names for ourselves, officially we are just nameless numbers. Distinguished by the number of ponies we have harvested from or offered as tribute to the Queen—excuse me, our Queen. I am 586, so I get to lead the troops during invasions and get first pick at whatever love there is to harvest. Whereas 153, or 115, or lower, would be behind me. The Queen is 277, but she sits well behind the front lines, directing the invasion. Can this number represent everything about us? Of course not. It represents the only one thing that we are valued for.
(I am better than the Queen—Our Queen. Why am I not Queen?)
When we come to your village and it’s more than a courtesy call, you become a number to us. Every aspect of your life: the house we razed, the love for your marefriend we stole, the bite marks we made to your flank when you tried to fight back, all condensed into a single number: 342.
Does it make you feel better that it was nothing personal? As the memories of your perfect family living the middle-class Equestrian Dream all slowly slip away from your mind, and you feel the pressure of green goop as we wrap you in our cocoon…?
You are 342.
And it’s impossible to condense so much information about each pony into a three-digit number. The Queen tells us if we were to remember all the details about every single pony we harvested from, our hollow heads would explode.
I think that’s a lie though. I’ve never heard of a changeling’s head actually exploding. Except for that one time two weeks ago when a brave farmpony stabbed straight through a drone’s skull with a pitchfork, breaking the “core energy” inside. Once that “core” is broken, consciousness and changeling magic quickly fades away, and no amount of shapeshifting can save from death by impalement. (Similarly, if I am butchered or eaten while I am shapeshifted, my drone form will be injured as well.)
I saw the changeling’s skull get cracked, right in front of me. I was in the form of a sugar beet, growing amongst the crops. And no, I was not upset. The changeling was not my friend. We weren’t even hatched from the same egg clutch.
The changeling was “78”. I snitched on 78 once, which got 78 a scolding from the Queen.
Only harvested love from 78 ponies? Incompetent fool! You better shape up to Our standards, puny little drone! Lest you be left out in the cold to die like 83, 21, and 56!
Invisibility is only possible when you choose to forget.
I remember.
I remember once, I shapeshifted into a small flower growing in a sidewalk crack.
A simple daisy. Yellow in the center, with white petals, a green stem, and two green leaves slightly wrinkled at the edges.
Just like the one next to me. And the one in the next crack in the sidewalk.
A unicorn mare stopped along the path to smell my plain, vegetal scent. Even if my current form lacked the sense of sight or hearing, my changeling magic could sense her love close by. The classic candy-sweet signature of a female unicorn.
And I waited.
It took me a lot of effort to recreate the exact scent of this species of flower. Sure, was it likely that anypony would stop to smell a little flower like me? No. But flowers are meant to have a scent. If somepony were to smell me, they would notice I don’t have a smell like all the other flowers. Which would make me unique. Which would make me not invisible.
Becoming invisible is a respectable art, you see. It takes a lot of dedication and hard work.
The unicorn mare had probably smelled the same type of Equestrian daisy a million times over. So I'm not sure why she even bothered to smell me. And then there were strange residual love signals coming from her that I’d never sensed before. Feelings of clumsiness, alienation—like she’d just come from a different world.
Few ponies have an eye for the invisible. Few ponies respect the invisible. Like she did.
And so, I waited.
Then came another pony. An old, grumpy earth pony stallion, judging by the acrid signature of his love. Plants are living things too, so they emit faint traces of love: I sensed a dense signal of small, desiccating plants on the verge of dying. A bag of tiny weeds, most likely, carried by the earth pony. The larger weeds—ragweeds, were still growing. They were intact. The stallion only killed the tiny weeds that he had the strength to pull out, leaving the giant thorny ragweeds to grow.
Never mind my changeling senses though. I suddenly felt a primal sensation in my plant form. The fibers in my stem being crushed. The earth pony was grabbing me. He grabbed my tiny stem with his teeth, and with too little effort yanked me out of my place in the sidewalk crack—
—severing the arterial tap root.
I felt myself being moved. The dense signal became stronger: I became closer and closer to the sack filled with the corpses of my assumed species.
That was when I acted.
With his teeth pressing into my stem, I reverted myself back to my inky black drone form. Finally, I could see with my own eyes. The midsection of my drone body was scratched from being bitten as a plant, but I still had enough strength to fight. My legs pressed up against the stallion’s upper and lower jaws, dislocating the bone. I stuck my forked tongue out, and hissed in his mouth.
He still did not see me. His eyes rolled back from the shock that overcame him.
No respect for the invisible.
By this time, the village had been completely cleared out once I had revealed myself. The ponies in the street had run up to the top floors of their houses and pulled their shutters closed, but their eyes peeked through the slivers in the wooden slats, and they stared at me. As if they had some sick obsession with my drone form.
The unicorn mare from earlier—she had a golden coat and a red/yellow variegated mane, I could now see—stood on her hind legs and poked her head out from the unshuttered second floor window of her home. She stared not at my drone form, but at the crack in the sidewalk where I was once firmly planted.
And although she was silent, the signature of the love emanating from her almost directly translated into words: “Where did the flower go? Where did the flower go?”
With that, I flew off, carrying away the stallion wrapped in a green cocoon, leaving the burlap sack of dying weeds lying in some dirt. Burlap is biodegradable—with any luck they'll all grow back.
And looking back at that golden unicorn, staring at the sidewalk crack, for a moment I wondered if there ever needed to be a war to begin with.
Every changeling drone, alike as we are, have a special range of forms that we are particularly good at shapeshifting into.
For example, all drones, including me, can take on the form of a pony. But some are better at unicorns, while some are better at emulating the smooth, slow wingbeat of pegasi.
Unlike other drones, I have a particular talent for shapeshifting into objects that blend in with the background, especially small plants. See, most changelings can try to transform into small nondescript objects, but they lack the concentration to get it right. The tree sapling’s roots are unusually shaped for the local environment. The stem doesn’t lean subtly towards the sun. The fern leaves don’t twitch the right way when filtered breezes reach the forest floor.
Imagine this. You are a flower growing in the sidewalk crack. A short yellow dandelion, about three inches tall. You can’t just have thin yellow petals, a long green stem with little hairs on the surface, two green leaves, and expect to blend in. Imagine how your roots must meander through the joints in the concrete, searching for the moist dirt at the bottom of the four-inch concrete panel. How your stem stretches out towards the sun.
Did you ever stop to think about these things? You probably haven’t. Don’t lie to me. You probably thought a dandelion wasn’t worth your attention. Every plant is important. Every plant has value. Even the wildflowers in the sidewalk crack.
I can immediately tell a real flower from a badly-disguised changeling. Because other drones will get the little details wrong, not fully understanding the plant’s behavior. They never stop to look at the flowers like I do.
Invisibility is about going beyond yourself, and understanding the world around you.
Some changelings claim to boast a similar ability to mine. They’re able to contort their bodies into sizes barely visible to the naked eye: a grain of sand, a speck of dust, or even a microscopic amoeba. But these forms are difficult to control. The smaller you go (or if you go very large), the more energy you consume shapeshifting. And is it even worth the energy? Are you really that invisible? Put yourself on a microscope slide in a lab, and you’re still front and center, no matter how small you are.
It’s not being unseen that makes you invisible. It’s being so overlooked that everypony filters you out of their mind.
It’s the world around you that decides if you are invisible or not.
Once, I harvested love from an entire platoon of slash-and-burn loggers by simply disguising myself as a tree sapling they would likely burn. Protected by my exoskeleton, I charged at them, by entire changeling body aflame.
They don’t look at the trees. Sure, they look at them to point their chainsaws and lighters at them, but do they really look at the tree? Do they see how it reaches towards the sunlight? How its trunk slowly expands, stubbornly trying to shed its thick layer of old, cracked bark?
All they care about is their goal for this job: to clear the forest. And I know this. I know how selfish they are.
Invisibility is about understanding how others think.
The sick foals were not supposed to be there.
It had been months since any drone in the Hive had a decent meal. We were pushed out of Canterlot for seven failed invasions. The ponies were on especially high guard. Most of our love reserves (captured creatures wrapped in cocoons) had been used up for tributes to keep the Queen alive. At the same time, our hive population multiplied by a factor of 3.7 in just a year, meaning we needed even more love to sustain ourselves. All this only made us more desperate.
Hungrier.
I woke up every morning and I could think of only hunger. There is no pain in our stomachs—we have no stomachs—we feel a gaping void inside and out, like a black hole punched through our entire body. And the void sucks away all other thoughts. Nothing of flowers, nothing of dandelions, nothing of the golden mare who stared at the sidewalk crack.
I, as a being, did not exist. I was not Wallflower Blush. I was not even a drone. I was Hunger. Pure, raging, primal hunger.
The time came for one final invasion attempt, to stop our hive from resorting to cannibalism. The Queen directed us to a military warehouse on the edge of Canterlot where our insiders think the dome forcefield around the city is being controlled.
I led my troop of fourteen other drones to the outskirts, turning off the dirt road. We reached a large white concrete building at the end of a densely-forested driveway. We disguised ourselves as mail parcels, and waited to be taken in from the doorstep.
And so I waited. I waited for hours.
But I was Hunger. And my hunger could not wait another minute.
At last, the door opened. I was the first parcel to be picked up. The first smell of the love of a fresh, living pony, and I snapped back into drone form. Even before my sight could return, my hunger began to inhale to harvest the love of the pony in front of me—
“No,” I whispered to myself.
The foal was crying. Her eye was bandaged, and her mane tired and grey from years of sickness.
This was no military warehouse. This was a children’s hospital.
I stopped inhaling within half a second, but that was already a lot—I harvest love faster than you can blink, it’s one cursed reason why I’m such a dangerous changeling.
After 3 seconds, the foal stopped crying.
The shock of the love harvesting spell must have been too much for the foal, because her legs turned to paper and she fell to the floor, and her eyes and mouth would not close. There was no pulse. That happens a lot to the younger prey. The intensity of our harvesting spell is optimized for the higher weight of an adult pony. Strictly speaking, we avoid attacking young foals for this reason. Prey that dies after one harvest, after all, cannot be cocooned to be saved for reserves and the Queen’s tribute.
The foal stopped crying.
Hunger killed the foal, not I. I do not exist. I am invisible, like a good drone should be.
The remainder of the huddle of foals, plus a nurse—twenty ponies at least—shuddered in fear. It was dark inside the hospital, but I could see a trembling blob of ponies hiding in the shadows, the colors desaturated from them such that every single one of them looked alike from each other. It’s a familiar sight during our Equestrian invasions.
“Get out,” I hissed at them, because the only sound a drone can make is hiss. “Get out.”
The rest of the sick foals ran off to somewhere else. I instructed my troop not to follow them. The foal who stopped crying was carried away on the nurse’s back.
How did the young filly’s love taste like?
Despite how sickly she looked, it was…sweet. Cloyingly sweet. Enough love in one pony to take away four months of hunger. How much love must that have been? How can one small, sickly creature possibly store so much love inside them, if the Queen keeps telling us is never enough love to go around?
Isn’t love finite?
Our troop began to realize we’d gone to the wrong place, so we began to leave for the main dirt road. The Queen was waiting for us at the junction.
Fools! I told you to turn left, not right! Did you not heed my directions?
It takes a lot of thinking to visualize a map of Equestria in your head. A lot of energy.
Hunger has a bad sense of direction.
I only harvested love from one little foal during that invasion. She was the 587th pony on my running tally.
586 + 1 = 587
That’s not a big increase, just one more, or a 0.17% increase. 587. Looks almost as big as 586.
But I can make the number look like a very big number.
587.000000000
There, I have a big number. I am good at remembering numbers. Which is why I remember number 587 so well.
There are a lot of numbers to remember in this line of work. Numbers about quantity of love harvested per pony, interquartile age range of ponies harvested from, percentage of ponies cocooned as tributes, percentage of ponies who died in harvesting.
Numbers like 587.
I am hollow. Like a good, invisibly obedient drone should be. Filled with nothing but numbers.
(And I think my head’s about to explode.)
Back at the Hive, there was loud hissing in celebration.
Overall, the invasion was a success. One of the other troops reached the correct military warehouse and destroyed the magic dome shield, allowing the other ten troops to invade Canterlot and harvest enough love for the whole Hive. The Queen licked her lips at the long lines of cocoons offered to her as tribute.
All that was mentioned of my 587th pony was a brief record of a pony foal that died before it could be offered as a tribute, or a “non-tributeable harvest.” And one isolated troop taking a wrong turn during the heat of the invasion was a common mistake.
A forgivable blunder in an otherwise exemplary combat record, the Queen said to me. Go, now. Return to your normal duties.
In other words, everything was like normal.
With enough love reserves to not need to invade for at least the next six months, the Queen let us return to our stations in the Hive. I stood on guard duty at one of our hive entrances, half of the time shapeshifted as a flower, but the other half in my drone form, because I really like to see with my eyes the very few hardy wildflowers that manage to grow in the otherwise barren landscape around our Hive.
No drone ever seems to notice the wildflowers, unless their wings clip one of the tall ones and they curse at it. It really is quite interesting, though: why are there so few plants around the changeling hive? It’s not a question of soil quality. Plenty of plants grow in the poor mountain soils of Canterlot, for example.
I want to study the soil and weather around our Hive further, then go on a journey across Equestria to find plants well-suited to our environment. The Queen would never allow the trip, but I’ll go anyway.
(The Queen has no hold over me. How can she, when she can’t even pick me out from the crowd of drones? I have twice her harvest count. I could drain all the love out of the Queen in one fell swoop. She’s just lucky that I don’t want to be Queen of her stupid hive.)
Perhaps I’ll go to the kirin lands? The plants there must have unique adaptions to the ground being periodically scorched. I know I can make a lush garden in our Hive. With enough care and dedication, you can make a beautiful garden in any climate or terrain. It will be a gathering place where our young hatchlings can play—
—those foals in the hospital. And the one foal who will never play again because of me.
I kept wanting to say the number 587 out loud. 587. “587.”
587 was a mistake. Not my mistake. A mistake.
Stare at my glassy blue eyes, my ink-black body, exactly the same as every other single drone in the Hive, and you won’t see any mistake. You’ll never see me, Wallflower Blush.
All you’ll see is your own fear of The Wrath of the Changelings as you back away. (How selfish of you, did you even read anything I said about understanding the world around you?! You never look at the dandelions. You sever their taproots like everypony else.)
Our mistakes are supposed to diffuse to everyone in the Hive. Our mistakes are supposed to belong to everyone. In reality, that just means our mistakes belong to no one.
Atrocities become “orders.”
But I don’t think they ever become totally invisible.
I want to shout 587. I don’t even know that foal’s name. I don’t remember her cutie mark, if she even had one at all. You do not remember things easily when you become Hunger. All I remember is 587.
No other drone remembers 587. Ask my troop about the hospital with the sick foals and it’s like they all have amnesia. They must have been Hunger too.
If I forget 587, 587 will cease to exist. If I cease to exist, 587 will be forgotten.
I do not want to forget. Even if the world will not miss any of us.
Let it be. Let it exist.
Let me be. Let me exist.
Just recently, I stood camouflaged in a field of sunflowers.
As a sunflower, I sensed a unicorn mare approach me. I had met this pony before. Her love had the exact same signature as the golden unicorn from before, the one who stopped to smell the daisy in the sidewalk crack.
She took me (as the sunflower) back to her home and planted me in a pot, carefully extracting my roots from the ground and rearranging them in the same positions. She tried her best to pot me with her hooves, but she didn’t get the soil snugly wrapped around all my roots. She dumped a whole watering can over me, and fed me a whole bottle of potted-palm plant food.
As a plant, I do not experience pain. But the primal feeling within my tissues, exploding with water and oversaturated with electrolytes...probably the closest thing to pain that a plant can experience.
Five more days of this, and any sunflower would die.
But as I settled into the pot, I swore I could have felt some love percolating from the pony, satiating my changeling hunger. Which is funny, because I didn’t harvest anything. I did not even feel the urge to hiss or bite.
Late at night, when the golden unicorn was fast asleep, I shifted back into my drone form, opened the window, and flew back to the sunflower field. I carefully removed a sunflower from a congested patch—the void I left quickly filled itself. I returned to plant this new sunflower into the pot. From all the years of shaping myself into plants, I knew exactly the correct N-P-K balance for the soil, how to hug the soil around its roots, and the best angle to orient it on the east-facing windowsill.
I was a gardener, just like that pony. And the faint love coming from the sunflower told me that I did a good job.
I think, on the day the Queen falls—not that I’m planning an uprising anytime soon—and the Hive collapses, I will retire as a gardener. I’ll open a community garden in a small pony village (assuming the form of a pony, perhaps, to blend in), and ponies like the golden unicorn mare will join me to care for the plants together. That’s something both of us can do equally. How many plants will we plant in the garden? We’ll never know, because we shall never keep tally. It could be 587, 5870, 58, or 5.
No plant is a number because no plant is invisible.
I carefully closed and latched the window shut, leaving the well-potted sunflower, and made my way back to the Hive, less hungry than I was when I came. What would the golden unicorn see the next morning? She’ll wake up, and she won’t even see any change. To her, it’ll be the exact same sunflower. She’ll never know my name, she’ll never know what I really look like—probably for the best, since she’d probably freak out at the sight of a changeling in her bedroom.
She’ll just see a healthy, perfectly potted sunflower at her window. And only I’ll know that I made it just for her.
To help when no one commends you, to sing when no one is listening, to write when no one is reading, to dance when no one is watching.
To do right, even when no one cares.
That’s what it means to exist.
My name is Wallflower Blush.
Author's Note
I'm not sure how to feel about this story I've written. I fear I've created a monster. ~~I may take this down.~~
