Counting Noses

Chapters

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4

Chapter 1

Cherry Berry, still wearing her helmet, scarf and flight jacket, walked into the throne room of the Badlands Hive just in time for a wadded-up piece of expensive paper to hit her in the muzzle. “Hey!”

From her throne, Chrysalis glared down at her. “Read that,” she said.

“Good morning, Cherry!” the pink pony said sarcastically as she bent down and began uncrumpling the paper. “Did you have a nice flight from Horseton? Why, yes I did! Is construction of the space laboratory coming along? Very nicely, thank you! And how has your day been?”

“Read that and find out,” Chrysalis grumbled.

Cherry Berry sighed, then began reading the crumpled letter. Her eyes went wide when she figured out who had written it. “What’s this about other hives?” she asked. “And why is Princess Celestia concerned about them?”

“Because she knows it’ll annoy me,” Chrysalis snapped. “Yes, there are other hives, but they’re still in the hide-and-survive school of thinking. I don’t think any of them even operate in Equestria. More likely the changelings she’s got in her jails are just afraid of what I’ll do to them when they’re turned back over to me.”

“Says here she’s not turning any changeling prisoners over until you can prove they’re yours,” Cherry said. "Once you have some sort of uniform identification system, she'll start turning them back over to you again."

“Proof? Bah!” Chrysalis snapped. “We’ve been issuing birth certificates every time Celestia’s paper-pushers ask for one. Isn’t that enough?” She waved her hooves above her head in frustration. “And anyway, carrying around a paper that says who you really are? Isn’t that self-incrimination? I thought you ponies had laws against that!”

"To be honest," Cherry Berry said, slipping her flight scarf off her neck, "I'm surprised you got by this long. At least she was nice enough to wait until we were done with the moon landing, and then the holidays."

Chrysalis got up off her throne and walked over to Cherry. "Are you telling me all you ponies carry pieces of paper around telling other people you are who you say you are?"

"Not all the time, no," Cherry said. "For day to day stuff we have our cutie marks. Those can't be faked."

"Except by shapeshifters," Chrysalis pointed out.

"Well, of course."

"And they go away if an evil necromancer sucks your magic dry."

"Well, yes," Cherry admitted, getting a little annoyed.

"And there was that time Starlight Glimmer-"

"My point is," Cherry Berry interrupted, which Chrysalis would tolerate from nobody else in the world, "they're good enough for identification for ordinary ponies. But ponies in certain professions do have to have licenses showing that they have been properly trained and tested to do the things they're supposed to do. I take my pilot's license with me everywhere I fly." She reached a hoof under her flight helmet and pulled out a little card with a littler photo of Cherry smiling gormlessly at the viewer. "And every member of Celestia's guard and the E.U.P., from the Wonderbolts down to the greenest Manehattan traffic cop, has one to go with the badge."

Chrysalis took a moment to consider this information. It might go a long way to explain why all her attempts to slip an infiltrator into the Royal Guard had failed. (There had been one who'd got in literally by the front door, but he was an exile and didn't count.) "All right," she said reluctantly, "I can see a purpose in that. But why do I have to give one of these to every ling in my hive?"

Cherry tucked the card back into her helmet. "Refresh my memory," she said in a sing-song tone Chrysalis just knew she did only to be annoying, "but is the Badlands Hive not technically still at a state of war with the Kingdom of Equestria?"

"No," Chrysalis snapped. "We are in a state of undeclared hostilities currently in a condition of informal cease-fire. And I've gone to some trouble to keep it that way."

"What's the difference?"

"War has more rules."

"Riiiiiight," Cherry drawled. "So, mostly-war, then. And did you not also say, on multiple occasions, that every member of the hive is a warrior?"

Oh. In an instance Chrysalis saw how this was going to end. She decided she would go down fighting anyway. "I might have said that, but that doesn't mean-"

"And I'm quite sure, because I've had to put it on the forms for Cherry's Odd Jobs," the pink pony interrupted again, "that the entire justification behind you bailing whatever changelings you want out of any jail in Equestria is that, technically, they're all soldiers in your service. Right?"

"That only applies to the useful ones."

"Oh. Well, that makes it simple," Cherry said. "Just tell Princess Celestia that only the useful changelings are your warriors. You don't have to give any of the useless drones licenses- just the ones you want."

"I don't keep useless drones in my hive!" Chrysalis snapped.

"You don't? Could have fooled me," Cherry smirked. "But that means you'll have to give a license to all of them." The smirk grew a little broader. "Do you even know all of them?"

"Of course not!" Chrysalis roared. "I have something like thirty thousand of them! They're scattered across the continent! Some I don't see for years at a time! It's not a queen's job to know every single subject!"

Cherry's smirk went away. "Well, it's somepony's job to know," she said. "I mean, how do you even know that thirty thousand number is accurate?"

"Because I-" Chrysalis paused. She'd got that number because Pharynx, in the preparation for the invasion of Canterlot, had told her they needed thirty thousand sets of armor if they were going to send every single changeling into combat. In the end only about half went, partly due to lack of time to finish the armor, partly because a lot of her subjects, if you put them into battle, would be more help to the other side.

But that was an estimate. She didn't really know, did she?

And how many changelings did she actually know, anyway? She could name every changeling she'd given any position of authority, even the ones she'd put in place so they'd stay out of the way of more important things. She could name every changeling she'd exiled, every changeling who had self-exiled before she could order it, and every changeling whose exile/not-exile status could be summed up as, "It's Complicated."

But, and this occured to her with a slight jolt, she didn't even know the names of all the changelings working in the space program, and that was only a few hundred. There were quite definitely over ten thousand changelings resident in the hive itself, and thousands more out in the world gathering love (some openly these days, but many still in secret). Even now, even when she'd spent years debriefing infiltrators when they returned, she couldn't name a tenth of them.

And why should she? She'd never cared before.

But she cared NOW, because she'd just realized she actually had no idea who, or even WHAT, she had in her hive.

This realization took a bit of time to run from beginning to end, and part of her noted that Cherry Berry, far from interrupting or mocking her, sat watching and waiting, most politely, for Chrysalis to close her gaping mouth.

"Pony," she finally said, after shutting her mouth again, "do you people have something that, well, writes down a list of who everyone is and what they do?"

"Yes," Cherry Berry said cautiously. "It's called the census. How have you not heard of it?"

Chrysalis waved around the two of them, at the throne room carved out of the desert sandstone. "I don't know," she said sarcastically, "maybe because I literally live under a rock?"

"Fair enough," Cherry shrugged. "We do it about once every ten years, so the princesses can make sure every pony gets the services they need and that nopony gets taxed too much or too little. They also provide raw information to companies like the railroads and the airship services so they know where to build-"

"I get the picture," Chrysalis said. "How is it actually done?"

"Well," Cherry said, "they hire a bunch of ponies to go door to door and get everyone to fill out a form. I signed up for it the last time." She frowned a little at this. "Three months of nonstop walking to every farm, hut, and hole within fifty miles of Ponyville, and there were twenty of us doing it. Next time I think I'll pass."

"Isn't Canterlot within fifty miles of Ponyville?"

"Oh, so it is," Cherry sneered, "and I'm sure you never exaggerated anything in your life either, Your Majesty."

"Of course not," Chrysalis said. "And also I have never lied once in my life."

"Of course," Cherry echoed. "It was a lot more than once."

Despite herself, Chrysalis couldn't quite control the smirk of amusement at Cherry's comeback. "So, get everyone to fill out a form," she said. "Then what?"

"Get someone to add up the forms," Cherry said. "How many ponies are farmers? How many are farriers? How many sell quills and sofas?"

"One," Chrysalis pointed out. "And let me add that your Ponyville routinely defies all the known laws of economics."

Cherry snorted. "Whatever. The point is, somepony turns all those forms into information ponies can use."

"Well, don't look at me," Chrysalis said. "I've got better things to do than spend all day doing sums."

"Of course," Cherry said. "Princess Celestia doesn't do it either. Get someone else to do it."

"Fine. How-"

"Not it!"

"Shoot!!"

"I have decided, for the good of the hive," Chrysalis declared to the two fearsome warriors kneeling before her, "that there shall be a census of all my changelings. And you two, being the commanders of the largest portion of my hive, shall organize it."

She paused to allow Elytron and Pharynx, the heads of the hive's offensive and defensive forces, to respond. In an ideal world she wouldn't have brought either of them into this. Yes, they each fit the roles she had for them, but they both gave her headaches.

Elytron would never actually be allowed to command in the field- that was Chrysalis's job- but his utter lack of imagination meant that he would do what he was ordered to do and not much else, and his shouty, bullying nature meant he enjoyed getting the warriors underneath him to do it too. The problem arose when he encountered any situation where he didn't already have explicit orders. His solutions, which he always thought were utter genius, invariably cost Chrysalis a lot of time and effort to undo.

Pharynx, on the other hand, was as intelligent and imaginative as Elytron was stupid. That was the problem. Pharynx could be counted upon, in Chrysalis's absence, to keep the hive protected from all known threats… and all unknown threats, including quite a lot that not only didn't exist but could never exist. She would have exiled him to join his brother Thorax long ago but for two things: first, Pharynx kept the warriors in good shape and well armed, something Elytron usually overlooked; and second, Pharynx's fever dream contingency plans sometimes saved the hive from things even Chrysalis hadn't expected.

So, in summary: both took care of things Chrysalis didn’t want to deal with, but both were also themselves things Chrysalis didn’t want to deal with.

Neither commander made a move or sound, so she continued, "Take this form and have fifty thousand copies of it made." She tossed down a piece of paper, on which she'd sketched out a fill-in-the-blank form listing the main things the pony had said went into a census: name, address, age, employment, and so forth.

She hadn't bothered with "marital status" because, although even though the vast majority of her changelings had no long-term relationships to speak of, once you set those aside the rest of them required rather a lot more categories than "single", "married," "divorced," and "widowed." She'd also left off "income" because, if she'd brought up her subjects correctly, not a single one of them would give a truthful answer.

She'd been about to leave off "gender" as well, because shapeshifting, until Cherry Berry pointedly asked her if she should start addressing her as King Chrysalis. Onto the form it went with a snarl, wondering to herself for the umtpy thousandth time how the pony was still alive after so long.

"Once you have the copies, give one to each warrior on your rolls," she continued. "Have them fill it out, then return each to the hive clerk's office. Also, Pharynx, I want you to give me a list of most trustworthy infiltrators for each major population center we currently operate in. Two each for Canterlot and Manehattan. They will be tasked with getting the other infiltrators to fill out the forms. Occupant and Cherry Berry will do the same for Horseton and Appleoosa."

"Understood, my queen," Elytron said.

"Your pardon, my queen," Pharynx put in, "but I must question this entire enterprise on two grounds. First, would it not be most convenient for the enemy if they were to stumble upon all this information? They would know all our deployments, all our agents, everything! Assembling this data into one place is simply asking for an information security disaster! I beg you not do it!"

Chrysalis raised one eyebrow. (At least once per week she practiced this for ten minutes at the bathroom mirror for maximum effect.) "I will grant your request upon one condition, my most loyal subject," she said, dripping sarcasm like venom from her fangs, "that condition being, that you tell me why you want your rightful queen to not have that information."

Pharynx, being one of the smartest changelings in the hive, knew when to retreat. "I humbly withdraw my request, my queen," he said. "I have no such reason."

"Then that is settled-"

"Your pardon, my queen, but the other reason-"

Chrysalis let her cool facade slip a bit. Pharynx was intelligent, but he was also one of the most stubborn changelings in the hive, which made him all the more annoying. "Have you priced a train ticket to the Crystal Empire recently?" she hissed. "Because if you want to visit your brother, I can arrange that!"

"My queen, my brother who we do not name-" because Chrysalis had forbidden the use of the name Thorax by the hive- "and others like him are the whole point of my second objection! Who shall count those who have been exiled, or who have left the hive voluntarily? How will they even be found? I wouldn't know where Th- my brother is if not for his greeting cards!" Under his breath he added, "I've told him and told him about operational security, but..."

Elytron, not half as soft-voiced as Pharynx, put in, "You still keep the stupid cards, though."

"Those exiled by my order," Chrysalis said, putting a firm stop to other voices of any volume, "are no longer of this hive. There is no point in counting them. If the Crystal Empire likes your brother so much, they may keep him. The others I shall approach personally, as, unlike you, I have been very careful to keep track of them." She leaned forward on her throne, glaring at the two warriors. "Are there any more impediments to promptly obeying your queen's command?"

"No, ma'am," two voices said at once.

"Well, there must be," Chrysalis growled. "Possibly your hooves are glued to the floor? Temporarily paralysis?"

Two faces looked up in obvious confusion.

"What I mean is," and then Chrysalis took it from a soft growl to a regal roar, "WHY ARE YOU IMBECILES STILL HERE? GO DO WHAT I SAID!"

A moment later Chrysalis gave herself a mental pat on the back. As ego-gratifying as it would have been to adopt the custom of forcing departing courtiers not to turn their back on royalty, not having it sped up their departures so very much.

Chapter 2

There have always been stories, since time immemorial, of rulers who disguised themselves as commoners so they could see and hear what their subjects were thinking. Most of them, Chrysalis knew, were claptrap, but for a changeling ruler it was dirt easy- so long as none of your subjects looked directly at you, that is.

Transforming into a stalagmite in the grand cavern of the hive was simplicity itself. She placed herself near the wall, but not right up against it, and watched and listened with growing fury as the first group of changeling warriors, presented with the census forms and a box of newfangled "ball-point" pens ("No Clipboard Should Be Without One!"), proceeded to take a simple straightforward, common sense list of questions and screw up each and every one of them.

"Hey, what should I put down for Question One?"

"Your name."

“Okay. Y-O-U-R-E, N-A-“

“No, stupid, the name people call you!”

"Yeah, but which one? I have seven or eight."

"I dunno. Put them all down, maybe? Now shut up, I'm trying to figure out the answer for number four."

"Um, 'employment'? Yeah, that's a toughie. Hey, Formice, what does 'employment' mean?"

"It means job. What do you work at?"

"Work? Are you kidding? I'm a changeling warrior! I'm too busy to work!"

"What are you putting down for education?"

"I dunno. We got taught a lot of stuff in the larva school. I don't think I can make it all fit in that little bitty blank."

"I'm done!"

"You're done? Let us see! Let us see!"

"No way, you just want to copy my answer- HEY!"

"I got it. Question one: 'Name - yes.' Question two: 'Address - no.' Question three: 'Age - maybe.' Question four: 'Employment - sometimes.' Question five: 'Education - false.' Question six: 'Gender - true.'"

"Yeah, I don't wanna copy your answers anymore."

Chrysalis sighed. Her subjects were thinking exactly what they were thinking the last time she had spied on them. They weren't thinking. As a certain pudgy white unicorn might say, quelle surprise.

Still, she'd anticipated a lot of this sort of thing happening, which is why she'd had fifty thousand copies of the form printed. Still, obviously census workers would have to do more than just give the subject the form and a pen. They'd have to instruct the subjects on how to fill the form out and then correct any mistakes like, "Gender: true."

Time to go summon Elytron and Pharynx for follow-up instructions, as soon as no one would notice a stalagmite heading for the door. Not that she needed to hide from her own subjects, but she didn't want them examining every stone or cave-salamander the next time she did this...

This time, when they entered the throne room, Elytron and Pharynx didn't kneel or bow their heads- bad sign number one. Both were carrying papers which didn't look like census forms- bad sign number two. Chrysalis was already preparing herself for bad news when bad sign number three- Pharynx speaking without waiting for permission- gave it to her.

"My queen, we have a spy somewhere in the hive."

Of course, nothing could have prepared her for that. "Explain," Chrysalis said, letting all thoughts of proper protocol drop.

Pharynx held forward the papers he had tucked in his right fetlock. "In order to ensure no duplicate forms, Elytron and I went through the rolls of our standing warrior forces to make a checklist. Rather than separate it by service and squadron, as we had done, we decided to make a single list in alphabetical order."

"It took us hours," Elytron muttered resentfully. Obviously it hadn't been his idea.

"In the process we discovered a repeated name," Pharynx said, waving the papers a little harder. "One name which appears in the roster of every single unit. Attack squadron. Hive garrison. Scout patrol. Combat engineers. Military intelligence. Internal security. All of them, my queen. And somehow neither of us noticed." Now Pharynx did indeed bow his head, prostrating himself before her. "Do with me as you will, my queen. I have failed the hive."

Chrysalis snorted. "Oh, get up," she said. "And put your paranoia aside for once. How, exactly, would a non-changeling even manage to infiltrate the hive unnoticed? Let alone get into even one military position, never mind all of them?"

Pharynx, as ordered, had stood up again, and he looked right in her eyes as he answered, "It is most likely a spy from a rival hive, my queen."

That made Chrysalis snort again. Other hives again, pfui. While one of them sending a spy wasn't absolutely impossible, a much more likely explanation lay close to hoof.

"It is most likely," she said aloud, "a clerical error of some sort. Or possibly some harebrained scheme for gain, collecting a dozen rations instead of one or something of the sort." After all, none of the hive workers got any salary; instead Chrysalis gave out the occasional stipend to favored subjects or those with legitimate (or more normally illegitimate) business among the ponies. "In any case, I shall investigate it myself, since it slipped through your holes. Tell me, what is the name of this criminal mastermind and international super-spy?"

Pharynx looked at the paperwork again. "Paussus, ma'am. I vaguely remember seeing a drone by that name once, but I can't recall when or where."

"Nor I, my queen," Elytron put in. "Normally I put that down to good behavior. When a drone calls itself to my attention, it means they've screwed up or slacked off."

In Chrysalis's opinion Elytron was an expert in both categories, but she let it pass without comment. "Paussus. I don't recognize the name either, but I shall see to it that inquiries are made." With a twitch of the hoof she waved the matter aside. "Now for the reason I summoned you two..."

As much as Chrysalis hated paperwork, she wasn’t a stranger to it. The hive had had paperwork for as long as the ponies had had paper that could be stolen. The hive even had a chief clerk, Beancounter, who was possibly the one changeling in the universe who enjoyed filling out forms more than Occupant did. And, unlike Occupant, Beancounter didn’t expect packages in the mail four to six weeks after filling out a form.

But, ever since the space race had forced Chrysalis to operate on a semi-legal basis, she’d needed bureaucratic expertise no hive-bound changeling could supply, and that meant hiring ponies. It also meant allowing ponies to walk and work in a place where a few short years ago no pony would have been allowed outside of a cocoon.

Beancounter’s chief pony assistant, at this time, was a pegasus by the name of Paper Plane, formerly a secretary at the weather factory in Cloudsdale. Her six predecessors had been roughly evenly split, some unable to handle daily life in a sunless cave in close proximity to thousands of changelings, others who found themselves drawn into some other hive task. After three months on the job Paper obviously wasn't going to be in the first category, so now Chrysalis, when she thought of her at all, mostly wondered when she would get headhunted, and by what part of the hive.

"As of today," Paper Plane said, after a ruffle through the middle drawer of the rightmost of a series of file cabinets, "there are six thousand, two hundred and twenty-four birth certificates on file." She frowned and added, "None of them is in the name of Paussus. Therefore he either has not sought employment in Equestria, or else he filed for a birth certificate under a false name."

"Most likely the first one,” Chrysalis said. After all, why would a shapeshifting changeling want to pose as another changeling?? Who, exactly, were they hiding from?

In her head a little voice that sounded like Pharynx’s said, That would be you, my queen.

“In any case, even if we had a record of Paussus, we couldn’t give you his current location,” Paper Plane continued. “We’ve never taken records of the addresses from which we received birth certificate requests. The vast majority of them come through Cherry’s Odd Jobs and Rocket Parts in Appleoosa, so you might begin with them.”

“Or you might try Clickbug’s post office,” Beancounter put in. “Any ling who received mail here at the hive would have had to file a forwarding address. You might get lucky.”

“I already asked, thank you.” She’d stopped by the post office first to order them to cooperate with Elytron and Pharynx in sending out census forms to every changeling for whom they could find an address. Clickbug hadn’t known anything about Paussus either.

But still, the pony clerk had at least given her someplace to go next. “Appleoosa, eh? Carry on, then."

"Er, as it happens," Paper Plane muttered, showing a hint of emotion for the first time, "I suppose this is as good a time as any... I'm giving my two weeks' notice."

That was another of the many things about ponies Chrysalis didn't understand. If you no longer wanted to be around certain other people, why stay for another two weeks when you could leave immediately? It's not like they were going to be any less annoying in that time. "Two weeks' notice of what?"

"I've been accepted as a junior clerk in the Commissary Division at CSP," Paper Plane said. "It's my dream job, Your Majesty. In fact, it's the reason I accepted this position at all."

"Your dream job?" Chrysalis blinked. "Your dream job is spending all day doing sums in a kitchen??"

Paper Plane spread her wings, which admittedly looked a little small and scraggly. "I've always been a weak flyer, Your Majesty," she said. "My reflexes are poor. I failed all my practical exams in flight school. But I am quite passionate about space flight."

“And I told her,” Beancounter said, “that it doesn’t matter how you infiltrate, so long as you get in. Doesn’t have to be by the front door. And if it means auditing the food budget for launches-“

Paper stood tall and said, quiet pride radiating from her, "If the only way I could play a part in space exploration was to be the mare who counted all the beans for every bean burrito that goes onto a flight, then come Tartarus or high tide, I would be that mare."

“That’s my girl!” Beancounter said cheerfully.

“Sir,” Paper said primly, “I’m three years and seven months older than you.”

Chrysalis, unable to even respond, nodded and left the room, convinced yet again of the absolute insanity of the entire pony species.

The Friendship Express pulled in to the station at Appleoosa with a loud whistle and a gush of steam. The conductor descended from the first passenger car to assist those passengers getting off, while a pair of porters from the station rushed to offload luggage and to swap out the incoming mail bag for the outgoing mail bag.

Seven passengers in total disembarked, the last of whom, a small teal earth pony, staggered onto the platform with a face looking closer to chartreuse. "Oh, dear," she said in a thick lower-class Manehattan accent, "I think I spent too long on the rails. I feel just terrible." She wobbled over to the ticket counter, where an elderly bewhiskered pony looked indifferently over his glasses at her. "'Scuse me, friend," she said, "you mind telling me where the town doctor is? 'Cause I can't see this place having more than one."

Good upbringing won out inside the ticket pony, but only after an obvious and prolonged struggle. "You'll be wantin' ol' Sawbones McColt," he said. "His place is two blocks west of the clock tower. Got a big pill bottle for a sign. Can't miss it."

"Thanks, pal, you're a- oh dear." With a hiccup and a brief bulging of the cheeks the Manehattan mare staggered away, moving unsteadily but remarkably fast towards the clock tower and then the two-story house with the pill bottle sign hanging next to the front door.

"Doctor?" she called out as she entered the door. "Hello, doctor?"

"Just a minute!" a cheerful voice called out from a back room. "I was just about to step out to lunch!" An old sky-blue earth pony with an impressive set of side whiskers stepped into the reception area. "Is this an emergency?"

"Well, I'd rather not talk about it out in the open. I mean, any pony could just walk in here." An evil little smirk appeared on the formerly demure teal mare's face. "Isn't that right, Keratin?"

The impressive whiskers suddenly framed an even more impressive frown. "Come on back," he muttered, all cheer evaporated.

The instant the office door closed behind the two of them, Dr. McColt barked, "What do you want, Chrysalis? It can't be anything good if you're not doing it in the open."

"No 'Your Majesty'?" Chrysalis asked, staying in her pony disguise except for eyes switched from golden to viper-green. "No 'my queen'? Not even a simple 'ma'am' for your rightful ruler?"

"I've got a swat on the fanny for the misbehaving little grub I had to dose with cough syrup," Dr. McColt, aka the changeling Keratin, replied. "My queen was your mother. You're just someone who can give me trouble if I don't do as you ask."

"Believe me, Keratin," Chrysalis said quietly, "I am just as happy to see as little of you as possible, as you are of me. But you may actually end up thanking me for this." She pulled out half a dozen copies of the census form. "Celestia wants all changelings to have some kind of identification. Toward that end I'm having a census made of the hive. So, on the off chance something happens and the people of this bucolic, blinkered burg in the boondocks find out who's really been stuffing pills into them, you may actually want the protection of the hive."

McColt sighed. "I'm getting old," he said. "One of these days I'll be too old to care about your threats."

"Not this time, old timer," Chrysalis smirked. "Even with half my hive exposed to these wretched ponies, you're still more useful to me disguised than revealed. And be reasonable- would I really throw away an asset as valuable as yourself just because you wouldn't put some marks on a piece of paper?" She dropped the census forms on the desk.

McColt sighed. "Fine," he muttered. "One piece of paper." He gestured to the stack. "What are all the rest for?"

Chrysalis's smirk vanished. "I know you know where some runaways are hiding," she said. "I already know where two of them are, or at any rate were as of a year ago last summer. But why would I chase a runaway just to exile them? My time is too important to waste."

"Which is why you're jawing to me about this now," McColt said pointedly.

"Because you get to be the one to offer them the amnesty," Chrysalis said. "If they want the hive's protection again, they can have it just like you will have it." She tapped the stack with a teal hoof. "But the offer stands for a limited time. When I come to you a second time, it will be to collect the forms. After that they will have to come direct to the hive. When I come to you the third time to bring the identification, it will be too late even for that. Communicate this to them, would you?"

McColt opened a drawer and slid the stack into it, shutting it firmly afterwards. "I've admitted nothing to you," he said.

"I didn't ask you to," Chrysalis said. "Right now I don't care about them. I just want this whole census and identification thing done so I can get back to important things. Things like... Paussus." She looked directly at the disguised old changeling and said, "What do you know about him? Or her?"

McColt tapped his chin, setting his side-whiskers rustling. "If he had hatched while I was the hive’s chief healer, I'd know," he said. "So he was after my time... and yet..." He turned to one wall, where a row of file cabinets rather nicer-looking than the ones in the hive's records department sat in a state of mild disarray. He closed a couple drawers, opened another in between them, and ran a hoof along the folder tabs. "Paussus... Paussus... yes, here it is." He slid a very thin folder out and flipped it open. "He worked at the rocket factory for a while. Miss Berry thought he was down and might be sick, so he brought him to me to look him over. I couldn't find anything wrong with him." Another flip shut it. "Never saw him again."

Chrysalis frowned. On the one hoof, Paussus did actually exist. On the other, the fact that he existed actually made Pharynx's paranoid theories plausible. And, although she'd look through the factory records to verify it, she already knew what she'd find: a drone vanished without anyone even noticing.

"Doctor," she said quietly, "it appears I need your services after all. What do you have for nausea and a headache?"

"Nausea and a headache?" The doctor's face, which had been carefully chosen to be at home to warm friendly smiles, chose to put on a cruel and unpleasant smile instead. "I have a pill for that, yes. A nice, BIG pill." With a little extra glare he added, "For the even bigger pill still standing in my office."

"Yes, doctor," Chrysalis sighed, "I got the point the first time."

Chapter 3

"Yes, he was here. Didn't you know?"

Chrysalis held on to her patience with her teeth, as she had to do oh so often with Occupant. Yes, he'd turned out to be far more useful than she'd ever dreamed, and he was doing a good job as the new official head of Changeling Space Program, but a useful idiot is an idiot still. "No, I didn't," she said in a tone of high-quality counterfeit sweetness. "That is, in fact, why I asked you."

"Well, he was here not long after we opened this space center," Occupant said. "He came over not long before Mission Six. He worked the VAB and launchpad for CSP-06, 07 and 08. After that he transferred to the gift shop, then the kitchen, then as bottle washer for Marked Knee. He was a tool-runner for one of the construction contractors for about a week. Then he became a gate guard and tour guide. And then he left." Occupant spent a moment counting the holes in his right leg, then nodded. "Yep, he was here about three months in total."

"And then he just vanished without a trace, right?"

"Um... no, and that's what confused me," Occupant said. "He put in for a transfer to the hive royal guard. The last time I saw him he was standing next to you on the chariot as you flew out."

"...... oh." Chrysalis attempted not to look embarrassed, and mostly succeeded. After all, a good guard was beneath a queen's notice, right? So not knowing one guard from another was nothing to be concerned about, right? "You have his file, right? Where's his photograph?"

Occupant shrugged. "I don't know if we got one of him," he said. "We didn't start making photo badges of people working here until after that thing with Flim and Flam. He left about a month after that, I think. Somewhere right after CSP-09. We didn’t have everyone badged up until CSP-11."

"Well, don't you remember him? You know what he looked like?"

"He looked like a drone," Occupant said. "You know we all look alike." He brought a hoof up to his prominent, squared-off buck fangs and sighed, "Well, almost all alike."

"There must have been some little something."

"No, there really wasn't," Occupant said. "He looked like every drone. Like any drone. Most lings forget him the instant they stop talking to him. The only reason I kept track of him is, I read all the paperwork on everything that goes on here. And the stuff about duty rosters, that's the part I actually read and understand."

"Really now?" Chrysalis asked. "And why was Paussus not a full-time infiltrator, with a talent like that?"

Occupant shrugged. "Maybe he just wanted to be a guard? I never asked. I don't know if I ever even spoke to him."

"Well, somebody must have," Chrysalis said. "And I'll find out who."

"Fossorius."

The changeling at the CSP Visitor Center gift shop counter, eyes totally focused on his book, didn't even twitch a fin.

"Fossorius!"

A hoof rose, slowly turned the page, and then returned to propping up its owner.

"POINTY!!"

Big glowing blue eyes, a little rounder than normal for a changeling, blinked and looked up. The drone smiled. "Chryssy!" he said cheerfully. "I didn't hear you come in! Would you like a seat?"

"Don't call me Chryssy. We're both long out of the hatchery." Where Keratin, aka McColt, had been of her mother's generation, Fossorius was of her own. The young generation of drones called him Uncle Pointy, and some of them might have called him Papa Pointy if the bug had had as much romantic sense as a lettuce leaf. His native curiosity, obliviousness, and thoughtlessness had avoided an early mass grave because, so far as Chrysalis could tell, ponies found him too adorable to be a threat- and she had tried, repeatedly, to use that for any sort of advantage, to little effect. "I'm in a hurry. What-"

"By the way, I finished reading all those books under your bed in the admin building," Pointy continued.

Chrysalis froze for a moment, then said in a distinct drop-this-right-now-or-else tone, "Fossorius, you are mistaken. I definitely do not keep books under my bed."

"Well, not anymore you don't," Pointy agreed, utterly missing the implied threat in her voice. "I had a nice bookcase knocked together by R&D's fabrication shop. Now they're all nice and neat on a shelf, alphabetized by author as they should be." He smiled a bit wider and added, "Did you bring any new ones with you? There's still space left on the shelves."

Five different responses struggled for control of Chrysalis's vocal cords at that moment, with the result that all she got out was a single strangled, "No."

"That's a shame." Pointy's ear fins drooped momentarily, then rose again. "You know, Merry Mare, the main character from Manehattan Nights? I think Tarnished Badge is no good for her. She'd be a much better match with Revolving Door from Hot Stables, don't you think?"

The traffic jam in Chrysalis's throat parted to allow one reaction to escape in a volcanic eruption of ranting. "This is not the TIME for this!!" she shouted. "And it will NEVER be the time for this! I don't know where those books came from, but they are not mine, and if you ever touch the books which are definitely not mine under my bed again you will never see another book again for the brief period of time I will allow you to live!! Do I make myself clear?"

"No need to shout," Pointy said, only slightly cowed. "You always were so sensitive."

"Don't try me any further. Now," Chrysalis said, regaining a bit of her composure, "what do you know about Paussus?"

"Paussus? Nice kid," Uncle Pointy said. "Not a big book reader, though. Such a shame."

"Can you tell me anything about him?"

"Sure. He didn't talk much, except to customers. Never said anything about himself. The first couple of days, he was all excited, wanted to see everything. But he never wanted to do anything twice. By the fourth day he was pretty much silent. He transferred out after a week."

"Was he lazy or something?" Chrysalis asked. It was a common condition among changelings, herself included, not that she'd say so out loud.

"I don't think so," Pointy said. "Anything I asked him to do, he'd do it instantly. It's just... the first time he did something, he really liked it. But after that, his eyes were always elsewhere. By the end, I think he finished his tasks quicker just to get them over with. Didn't make for good customer service, I thought."

That went beyond merely strange. On the one hoof, it was just barely possible that a spy wanting to investigate every function of Horseton Space Center would include at least a quick glance at something as insignificant as the gift shop. But why would a spy spend a whole week in one? And why would a spy risk calling attention to themselves by being obviously eccentric? Made no sense. And yet, this behavior from an ordinary changeling was... was... unfathomable.

"While you're here," Pointy went on, "I just finished this book right here. It was really fascinating. Would you like to borrow it?" A thick, academic-looking tome floated up in a cloud of green changeling magic.

Chrysalis glanced at the title: An Overview of the Descent of the Pre-Gustav Kings of the Griffons, Alphabetically Listed From G to G. She forced her eyes not to glaze over. "I'll read it on the train to Manehattan," she lied.

Trottingham wasn't a particularly large town, and its jail, from the outside, looked to Chrysalis more or less like a dozen other small pony town jails she'd seen both inside and out...

... except for the one cell which had curtains on the barred windows and the nameplate PARASOL bolted to the cell door. That was unusual, as was the fact that the prisoner occupying that cell pulled a key out of one of the holes in her leg, unlocked her own cell door, and let herself out to greet the queen on arrival. "Good morning, my queen," she said, giving a proper kow-tow to her. "What brings you here today?"

"You know I can't let her out right now," the town sheriff, who contrary to Chrysalis's hopes appeared to be a disgustingly decent and honest earth pony. "Politics from Canterlot, and all that rot. But the deputy's keeping up her apartment, keeping the flowers watered and so forth."

"I'm not here about that," Chrysalis said. Parasol was possibly the hive's most eccentric infiltrator, which was saying quite a lot indeed. Although her contributions were sometimes late, they were always above quota, despite the two major handicaps of (a) having been revealed as a changeling to the town for almost three years now and (b) being a clinical unconscious kleptomaniac who spent as many days in jail as out. "The hive is doing a census, and I'm collecting the data from the problem cases personally." She looked down and said, "You may rise, problem case."

"Thank you, my queen." Parasol stood up, smiling pleasantly. "How may I be of service?"

Chrysalis gave Parasol a form and a ball-point and said, "Fill this out. If you have any confusion about these very simple questions, ask before you write."

"Yes, my queen!"

The sheriff cleared his throat a little awkwardly. "Really, you don't have to treat her like that. Parasol is a very intelligent person for a changeling. No offense meant, of course."

"I would have to take your word for it," Chrysalis said, choosing to ignore those last few words. "Intelligent changelings might get outed, but they don't remain afterwards."

"Oh, but Parasol is a pillar of the community," the sheriff protested.

Chrysalis silently gestured to the nicer-than-regulation jail cell.

"Oh, I mean besides that tosh," the sheriff said. "She's quite useful, you know. Takes messages when I'm out. Keeps the other prisoners in line. She does community service and then locks herself back in, all right and proper. Why, she even solved that rash of burglaries last month without even leaving her cell. "

"Of course I did," Parasol said, not looking up from her writing. "It's bad to steal things."

Chysalis looked at Parasol, then at the sheriff. "Pillar of the community, is she?"

"Well, there's always some little idiosyncrasy in any pony," the sheriff said. "But apart from that one thing... and being a monstrous bug-pony creature, of course... apart from that, she's perfectly normal."

"Not from my side of things," Chrysalis said, then turned to Parasol, who was mostly done filling out the form. "By the way, you wouldn't happen to have heard of another drone named Paussus, would you?"

"No, I don't think so," Parasol said. "Name doesn't ring a bell. Here you go, my queen." The form levitated back to Chrysalis, who tucked it away under a wing.

"Very good," she said. "And the pen too, please. It's not like ball-points are disposable."

"What pen?" Parasol looked blankly back at her. The pen was nowhere in sight.

Chrysalis sighed. She'd been warned, she admitted in the privacy of her head, but... "The one I just loaned to you to fill out that form."

"Oh, did you? I hadn't noticed." Parasol began rummaging around in her holes. "You know, the strangest things just fall into my holes for some reason."

"Yes," the sheriff agreed with the lightest touch of long-suffering endurance, "we know."

With a yank Parasol pulled out a cluster of about thirty different writing implements. "Maybe it ended up in here," she said. "Is it one of these?"

The sheriff gasped, then looked at the writing stand on his desk, where a pen holder lay conspicuously empty. "My fountain pen!" he shouted. "That was a gift from the township for twenty years' faithful service! I signed the expenditures docket with it just this morning! How did you get hold of it?"

"Really?" Parasol looked as purely innocent as any changeling ever can. "Which one is it?"

Chrysalis snatched away her ball-point (and a couple of other nice-looking quills, with deliberate malice) and eased towards the door. "I'll leave you and your pillar of the community to work this out," she said. "I've got the train to Manehattan to catch."

She was looking forward to that, and to the book she'd left on her assigned seat. Whoever researched that book about ancient griffon kings had skipped the begats and gone straight to the spicy and scandalous stuff, and he hadn't been afraid to name names. She could think of some romance novelists who could take pointers from that historian, whoever he was...

It wasn't a penthouse apartment, but it was a lot higher, in a somewhat better class of Manehattan neighborhood, than Chrysalis would have expected from a construction worker's pay.

The door opened to reveal a matronly earth pony of middle years. "Er... may I help you?" she asked, looking obviously confused.

Chrysalis, back in her working-class Manehattan mare guise, pretended to be nervous and awkward. "I beg your pardon," she said, "but is this the Gandy Dancer residence? I, um, my business sent me to talk to him about some, er, paperwork."

The mare brightened immediately. "Oh, you must be Queen Chrysalis!" she said. "Come in, come in! I’m Rollerskate! Make yourself at home! How was the moon?"

Chrysalis's jaw waggled uselessly for a moment before she managed, "Er... big. And gray. And dusty." Rallying, she added, "And how did you know?"

"Oh, Gandy said you might come by one day," Rollerskate said, leading Chrysalis into the apartment, which managed to be both roomy and cozy at the same time. "He said if some strange mare who obviously had no business in the neighborhood came asking for him, it would be you in disguise, because he didn't talk to any other mares but me and Bobbie Sox."

Closing the door behind her, Chrysalis released her disguise in a wave of green fire. "When did he tell you?" she asked.

"Oh, we figured it out last year," Rollerskate said. "We were watching TV- we really love The Neighbors Upstairs, y'know?- and there was this episode where Cleptin tries to score some love by posing as a pony who just got killed in a traffic accident, but he feels all guilty about it and ends up confessing to the family."

Chrysalis made a mental note: her very next stop would be Honeybee Studios, where she would lay down some laws about vetting scripts for classified information.

"And Bobbie, she's such a bright filly, she said, 'Hey, that's exactly how Daddy acted when he came back from his accident.' And, well, I'd always thought the accident had made a different stallion out of him, but I hadn't realized just how true that was. I've got tea up, would you like some cookies?"

"Thank you, no," Chrysalis said. "But that was last year."

"What was?" the mare called from the apartment's kitchen. Ceramic clattered.

"You've known your husband was dead and replaced by a bug for months!" Chrysalis shouted. "And you're still here! And he's still here! And he still meets his love quotas every month!"

Rollerskate returned with a loaded tea-tray in her teeth. She set it down carefully on the apartment's coffee table, then said, "Gandy was a different stallion after the accident. I didn't say he was a worse one." She began pouring tea into the two cups, saying, "Before the accident Gandy lived for his work. After Bobbie was born his life- our life- was him coming home in the evening, eating dinner, going to bed, getting up before dawn, taking his lunch pail and going to work. He didn't have the smile, the energy, he had when we married.

"But after the accident, when he... when your Gandy pretended he’d lost his memory, that smile and energy came back like it had been saved up all those gray years. He started taking time off between jobs. He took an interest in Bobbie's schooling for the first time. He helped me with dishes." The mare, now seated in a comfy chair with a teacup held between her hooves, took a sip and said, "I should have suspected something was wrong when he started cooking dinner once in a while. The pony I married didn't know one end of a pan from another."

"But... he still wasn't really your Gandy Dancer," Chrysalis said.

"We've had six fairly happy years together," Rollerskate said firmly. "The happiest years we've ever had. About the only thing that would make it happier..."

Chrysalis interpreted the mare's longing look. "I don't want to know," she said, putting a stop to that. "I only came here to give him this," and she pulled out a copy of the census form, "and to ask if he met a drone named Paussus while he was working construction in Horseton."

"Oh, yes, we know Paussus," Rollerskate said blithely. "We'll miss him. It's almost a shame we're moving to Horseton permanently once Bobbie finishes her current grade of school. We were waiting for the new school to be built there, you know, and now that the population's grown-"

"Wait." Even speaking softly, Chrysalis knew how to put authority in her words that would make ponies stop talking. "You know Paussus? He's here? Where is he?"

Chapter 4

The fact was, Honeybee Studios was a dump.

Oh, there were attempts to keep it clean, especially the seats where the live audience sat during the taping of comedies and special events. And practically any moment when a camera wasn't rolling, hammers and saws drowned out the actors’ rehearsals. But in the end the ponies running the place just kept the lights low every place except the stages so that people wouldn't see the exposed insulation, the cracked brickwork, the uneven and sometimes splintered floorboards, and all the other flaws in a gutted, near-abandoned old office building that had been further gutted and stripped to make room for a facility capable of filming four different things at once.

Chrysalis, who this time hadn't bothered with a disguise, noted all this as she stood in the back of a studio and watched the filming of a guardhouse scene for Macula PC. She also noticed that, at least in her opinion, the product being filmed matched the barely concealed surroundings. The sets were sparse except for things right next to the main characters. The acting was ropey, with quite a lot of flubs. She personally thought Macula (who she knew from the hive as a third-tier infiltrator named Cenchrus) had all the emotional and personality depth of the stallions on the covers of the books that she quite definitely did not read.

And yet she could taste the desperation, the haste and pressure and, yes, the love in the air. As she understood it, Macula PC had an intense ten-week shooting schedule to get all the internal shots for thirteen hour-long stories, followed by four weeks of slightly less stressful location shooting in Haywaii for the exteriors. Little fluffs got left in, and subtle acting left out, because as with everything else going on in Honeybee Studios, the perfect was the enemy of the schedule. And although each and every creature in the room wanted the product to be good, they also knew that, good, bad or indifferent, it all had to be in the can and ready for the cutting room by eight PM that evening... and it was already getting close to six.

Then the director called a break while the set crews switched everything for a quiet scene in the Red Robin estate. Chrysalis, after the cheek she'd taken from certain changelings over the last couple of days, felt quite gratified when Cenchrus and two other changelings (a security guard and a lighting technician) came straight over to her and showed proper respect, with the kneeling and the "at your service, my queen" and the averted eyes and everything.

Then a tan unicorn with a masquerade-mask cutie mark trotted over and spoiled it by saying, "Well, I'm done for the day, my queen. The producer said you wanted to talk to me?"

The three changeling drones- the other three changeling drones, for this was obviously Paussus at last- looked embarrassed. "Hey, Short Pause," Cenchrus hissed, "maybe you forgot, but this is the queen. The actual, genuine, disembowels-her-enemies queen. Sound familiar?"

"I know it's the queen," Paussus said without an ounce of trepidation. "I said so, didn't I?"

"Make with the bowing and the groveling, you idiot," the lighting tech hissed. "You want to get us all killed?"

"Do I have to?" Paussus asked with only a hint of whine. "It's so samey, so boring, and it wastes time, you know. Besides, she knows I respect her."

"You wanna look at her face," the lighting tech said, "and tell me that's the face of someone who feels respected?"

Actually Chrysalis was keeping her face perfectly blank. On the one hoof, she was pretty angry with Paussus's casual greeting after the proper welcome the others had given her. On the other hoof, morbid curiosity drove her to see just how much rope Paussus would use to hang himself...

Sadly, the little show ended before it got any farther. Cenchrus sighed, gave Chrysalis another little bow, and said, "My queen, I beg you not to do anything permanent to him. He's got two commercials to shoot tomorrow." With that the three undisguised drones withdrew, leaving Paussus in his unicorn guise and Chrysalis in a little space on their own near the studio door.

Chrysalis looked her wayward subject up and down. "Why are you still in that form?" she asked. "I want a good look at you."

"Oh, this? This is the form I use when I'm just a background extra," Paussus said. "I also use it for commercial shoots if I'm speaking to the camera." A wave of green fire ran over him, revealing...

... an ordinary drone, short but not abnormally so. And aside from that... well, even knowing what to expect, Chrysalis found herself shocked at how her glance tried to slide off the exposed drone. He was just so perfectly, absolutely average looking. "You're eating well," she noted, managing to focus on the few, shallow holes in his legs. His wings had not a single tatter, and they glittered in ways that gave her horrifying flashbacks to a certain nightmare. She'd been seeing that too often lately...

"Well, yeah!" Paussus said. "Ponies on the street keep giving me little snacks, saying, 'Hey, didn't I see you on TV?' and asking for photos and stuff. And the boss here says we don't have a love quota, you know, so we can keep any love we get."

Chrysalis nodded. She hadn't really expected the drones involved in Honeybee Studios to have time to collect love, and their use as a semi-legitimate revenue source and propaganda mill more than made up for a lack of contribution to feeding the rest of the hive. "That's fine," she said. "Now, I have just one little question for you-"

"Hey, that's a great line!" Paussus said, rummaging under a wing-cover for a notepad. "Maybe I should give that to the scriptwriters for Macula- no, no, it's not his kind of line, you know, it's too indirect. Maybe a new character, a detective that rambles a lot, gets the baddies to lower their guard. Yeah, and we'd have him look kind of messy, like he's this total screwup, maybe with a rumpled trenchcoat-"

With a flicker of magic Chrysalis plucked the notepad away from Paussus and swatted him in the face with it. "Do I have your attention now GOOD!!" she shouted, patience at an end. "As I was saying, and do not interrupt me again if you value your life, I have one question." She took a deep breath and shouted so loudly that it knocked over the library flat being rolled in from storage, "WHERE THE TARTARUS HAVE YOU BEEN?!"

Paussus hardly even blinked. "That's pretty good," he said. "Of course, when they got me to play the femme fatale Queen Naiad for the Macula pilot, I went the other way, with the quiet, sensual, menacing tone."

Chrysalis almost let herself get distracted. She hadn't had much time for watching the idiot box the previous fall, what with the race to the moon and all, but she had made time to watch the Macula PC movie-length debut, and she'd filled a notebook with ways she could apply and improve on Queen Naiad's performance. It had been, for her, the only reason to watch the thing. But anger won out over curiosity. "I asked a question," she snarled. "I demand an answer."

"Oh, sorry," Paussus said, ducking his head a fraction of a degree. "What was it- oh, wait, I remember. You asked where I've been, right?"

This idiot posed as a changeling queen so successfully that I have believed they actually got a rival queen to be in the show?? He honestly almost forgot what I asked him ten seconds ago! "Yes!" she snapped. "Get on with it!"

"Well, I've been here," Paussus said, gesturing. "Ever since you brought us to Manehattan and bought the building. You ordered us to guard the place, remember?"

No, she didn't remember, because she'd probably said it without thinking so she could ditch the escort and switch to her disguise as fashionable socialite Cool Drink. But she would sooner take the role of that brain-dead pegasus mare whose one line in the scene just filmed had been, "Oh, duck, Macula, duck!" than admit it.

(And she wouldn't have needed thirteen takes to get the line right, either.)

"I mean before that!" she shouted. "You bounced around every single job in the hive and the space program and I don't know what else! You're AWOL fourteen times over! What did you think you were doing, taking a job and then leaving after a week without telling anybody?"

Paussus shrugged. "Dunno," he said. "I just got bored and moved on. Everything gets so boring the second time, you know?"

"Explain it to me." The growl in Chrysalis's voice would have told any normal changeling that dire consequences awaited if the explanation wasn't really good.

"Well, everything gets boring the second time, you know?" Paussus said, throwing up his hooves. "Classes in the hive school were so boring. Why all the repetition if you get the A+ the first time? And infiltrator school was worse. Why should I copy a pony when the pony's already doing the same thing? Dull, dull, dull."

Chrysalis hadn't thought to ask the teachers if they'd known a Paussus. But then, she noted, neither had Pharynx, and he ought to have gone to them first thing. Black mark for him. "I went through it, dull as it was," she said. "So don't try to tell me you're too good for it."

"It's not that I'm too good for it," Paussus protested. "It's that I'm no good for it. I'm no good at repeating things. I just really can't stand doing things twice, you know? So I kept looking for something new to do. I tried all the warrior squadrons, but they were all the same. The engineers were interesting until I figured out they were just math and shovels. And did you ever notice how same-samey intelligence reports are when you read them? They put a bug to sleep, don't they?"

The queen who more than once had destroyed vital intelligence documents with her drool while she slept changed the subject. "Why didn't you put in a request for a transfer? Or even tell anyone you were moving?"

"Who was I going to tell?" Paussus said, shrugging again. "You know, I watched your eyes when I dropped the disguise. You do it too. Everyling does it." He smiled a little sadly. "People forget me. They forget Paussus. I was in my last molt before I understood why we disguise ourselves, because I never had to be disguised to not be seen. Occupant was the first changeling to even notice when I changed jobs. With everyone else I just showed up and said I'd been transferred, and that was all I needed."

Chrysalis sighed and rubbed a temple with one hoof. If the previous two years of her life had taught her anything, it was the concept of "idiot genius". Paussus had a talent that every other infiltrator in the hive would have merrily killed him for if it meant taking it for themselves. But it was hitched to mental flaws which made that talent utterly useless not just to the hive, but to the bug himself.

And even in this conversation Chrysalis could see it. Maybe other changelings couldn't focus on Paussus, but Paussus had difficulty focusing on anything. His brain wandered, and his body followed, and with his utterly forgettable nature, he'd disappeared almost without a trace, except for a name on a few pieces of paperwork.

Except... "And yet you've been doing the same thing here, over and over, for at least a year and a half," she said aloud, not really intending to.

Paussus grinned, and with a flash of fire he was the tan unicorn again. "But it's not the same thing!" he shouted. "It's never the same thing! I play two or three different characters a day! Or when I get tired of acting, they let me write scripts! I write half the commercials we produce now, you know? There's this one campaign I'm doing for a Manehattan restaurant that's opening locations in Canterlot and Applewood! They told me how five percent of Manehattan ponies have eaten there, and I thought, well, what about the other ninety-five percent? And-"

Chrysalis clapped her forehooves together. "FOCUS!"

"Oh, yeah, sorry," Paussus said. "I do that."

"I noticed."

"But it's different products, or scripts, or sometimes I build sets. Something different every day, you know?" Paussus said. "And then when it comes around to doing the same thing again, it feels new again, because I've been doing all this other stuff! So it doesn't feel painful at all! Queen Naiad's coming back in the season finale, we film that in about a month, and I've left the script in a drawer because I don't wanna spoil it for myself!"

Chrysalis made a mental note to clear her schedule for that air date.

"And you know the best part?" He gestured at his unicorn disguise. "Everybody forgets Paussus. Paussus is just a bug in the crowd. But people see Short Pause! People remember Short Pause! When I'm Short Pause, I EXIST!" He grinned one step short of manically- a disgustingly accurate pony expression, in Chrysalis's eyes- and said, "I never existed before, and you know, I really, really like it!"

Chrysalis stood silently, watching and thinking. As she watched, Paussus began to fidget. Even on things he felt strongly about, he obviously found staying focused very hard going. Some part of him was an eight-year-old pony foal on a sugar rush, and from all appearances would be so forever.

It would give her some mild amusement to make Paussus her personal guard and keep him under her constant watch, to force him, to break him into focus. He'd be miserable. He'd be in pain- even just this waiting looked increasingly uncomfortable for him. It would be a fitting punishment for wasting her time tracking down the spy that wasn't.

It would also be a colossal waste of a hive resource which had stumbled into the place it could be most useful. And half the hive owed its breathing privileges to the fact that Chrysalis, whatever her other faults, detested wasting valuable resources.

That number now included Paussus.

"Congratulations on your existence," she said dryly. "In future make sure I don't have cause to revoke it."

Paussus' horn lit up, and the notepad floated back up to his face, along with a pencil. "Not bad, but a bit awkward, you know?" he muttered. "Maybe I'll improve it when I read the notes again."

Chrysalis sighed. No, this bug would never have made an infiltrator. He might have only taken a half share when they handed out attention spans, but he'd skipped the line entirely for survival instinct. "Don't tell people to their face that their witty lines could be improved," she said. "Especially not people who can rip off your head without a second thought."

Paussus blinked. "You've never been in a writer's conference, have you?"

Chrysalis yanked the pencil way, then levitated it back along with a census form. "Just fill this out, will you?" she asked. "And for the record, if you want to put down Short Pause as your real name and Paussus as an alias, I will permit it. On the condition that you, for the love of love, quit saying 'you know' every other sentence."

Time passed, and paperwork flowed, and eventually an official number was produced. Pharynx's estimate had actually been fairly close, if for the wrong reasons; the Badlands Hive of Queen Chrysalis had thirty-one thousand and ninety-seven subjects, plus one queen and never forget it.

And now, on this day, Chrysalis was present in the grand cavern of the hive to witness as the first official Changeling Kingdom photo identification cards were made and given out. She was there for three reasons. First, it was a historic day, which meant the queen had to be there. Second, there was certain to be some squabble over something unimportant, which meant the queen had to be there.

And third, she was determined to have License #1, and for everyone to see that she was #1, which she did before ordering three lines be formed in front of Beancounter and his two assistants as they began taking instant photos, clipping them to size, and sealing them in plastic on top of the cards themselves.

Most of the cards had been pre-prepared from the census forms, with name and address (which for two-thirds of those involved was Box 1, The Badlands) and, of course, the ID number. And, as Chrysalis had anticipated in a petty and selfish way, this caused trouble almost immediately.

"What number did you get?"

"6199."

"Hah! Mine's only 3621! I'm higher than you!"

"Hey look! Cricket got number 711!"

"Lucky Cricket strikes again!"

"Hey, who got number 10101? I'll trade ya!"

"I wanna trade! I don't like the number 2, and my number is 21221!"

"Hey, Beancounter, what number did I get? I wanna change it!"

"Yeah, Beancounter, gimme 12345!"

"12345? That's the stupidest number I ever heard in my life!"

"Oh YEAH?"

Sighing, Chrysalis prepared to get off her throne and begin beating changelings over the head with other changelings... only to stop as the rising volume of changeling voices cut off almost instantly.

The three lines, and the crowd of new ID owners mingled with them, parted at a point next to the main entrance to the great cavern. The gap slowly rippled through the crowd, and with it came whispers.

Whispers of one name.

Whispers of a forbidden name.

"Kevin."

"Kevin!"

"Kevin..."

As the opening got closer to the clerks, Chrysalis saw a little changeling with a little smug smile, carrying a piece of paper in its fangs.

Her vision went red.

It got even redder as the last couple of changelings moved aside to allow the latecomer access to the middle counter. The little changeling presented the paper to Beancounter, who looked at it, then looked at the person on the throne, who was not so much immobile with rage as vibrating hypersonically with pure demonic fury. Finding no help there, he shrugged, and he spent a minute or so pounding on a secondhand pony typewriter.

There was a flash.

There was a ratcheting noise, amplified by the tense silence of the room.

There was a brief rustling as Changeling Kingdom Certificate of Identification #31099 was assembled.

The smug little changeling accepted the card, gave a cheery wave to the throne, and then trotted out at the same slow, confident pace he'd come in.

The crowd of changelings, in unison, watched him leave.

Then, in unison, they turned to look at Chrysalis, and each one made a mental calculation as to when their sovereign, their liege, and for about half of them their mother would explode.

"How... dare... he..."

Then, coming to the correct answer with an acceptable margin of error, every single changeling- the drones, the clerks, the guards, even Elytron and Pharynx- bolted for any and all available exits with much less confidence and much more haste than Kevin.

Later, after their lives were no longer in imminent peril, they pretended they hadn't heard the order, the order which could be heard from Appleoosa some two hundred miles to the north.

"SEIZE HIM!!!"

The rest of the IDs did get issued... eventually.

Author's Note

I rushed this together in a week of actual writing, after thinking about it almost from the day I saw the announcement of the contest. People who pledge to my personal Patreon got to see the first draft as it got written, in advance. This is the final(ish) edited (barely) version. (Yes, I'm pushing this. My Patreon numbers are down, and I have no conventions in December and January. Hear me rattle the tin cup.)

This goes under Unorthodox because the story popped out as it is almost instantly, and it fits in none of the other categories. In all honestly, although I am entering it in the contest, I don't expect it to do much. I'm writing it because the contest forces me to get something done, which has been tremendously difficult lately.

Of course you'll have noticed that this is less a coherent plot than an excuse to string together some changeling shenanigans in the name of demonstrating what ordinary life is like for Chrysalis, bullying and bluffing her way through being leader of fractious, petty, childish subjects. In the process it gave me an excuse to give screen time to some characters who were only mentioned in footnotes in Changeling Space Program.

Although "Sawbones McColt" is indeed originally inspired in name by a certain space-traveling Southern doctor, Keratin's personality is more akin to the generic Wild West town doctor seen in far too many TV shows and movies that bored me to bits in reruns when I was a kid. I hadn't expected his reaction to Chrysalis to be quite that hostile, but I didn't materially change it from the first draft.

Parasol's main inspiration, even when she was just a footnote, was Otis, the town drunk from the Andy Griffith Show, whose running gag was that he had the first of Mayberry's two jail cells reserved for his private use, and he showed up and locked himself in as a matter of course after most of his binges, with no hard feelings on either side.

I originally intended Gandy Dancer to appear himself on screen as a large but wiry stallion in his pony disguise. However, his wife (who didn't even get a name until the final rushed edit) took care of the plot and character points so thoroughly that there really wasn't a hole in the story left to put him into.

Although I am nowhere near as far along the spectrum as Paussus/Short Pause, I share his intense distaste for repeating myself. I'd originally intended him to be Ocellus's older brother, but changed my mind when the scenes of Ocellus's family all showed her as the eldest child. Also wanted Ocellus to make an appearance, but I was getting close to word count and deadline, and anyway no idea gelled for me.

The season isn't mentioned in the story, but it's the Equestrian version of late February when the story begins, or roughly two and a half months after the conclusion of Changeling Space Program.

I have never worked for the Census, but I have a friend who worked in the 2000, 2010 and 2020 US Censuses. They're huge enterprises, and almost all the people who work in one, even as short-term labor, take it very seriously, as an important civic duty. And although modern technology and better bureaucracy have made it easier than it once was, workers do still have to go to homes when forms aren't turned in on time. The information gathered by those counts determines public policy, and a lot of private policy, for the next ten years, so always beware anybody who suggests that certain people shouldn't be counted, or that people who don't turn in their own forms should remain uncounted.