A Nurse in Disguise

3 days had passed till all the Changeling warriors finally left her ruined and desecrated hive, leaving Nephila alone to wander the broken halls of her once great home. For an entire day she absent mindedly wandered around the hives countless tunnels and chambers. After countless hours her wandering turned to searching, searching for survivors. She knew it was a useless endeavor when she began as the hivemind was deathly still, however she still tried to find someone, praying to herself she'd find a survivor so she could prove to herself that the hivemind was wrong and that she truly wasn't alone.

Her searching however was for nought, finding nothing but corpses and husks of her former brethren. After a while she had decided it was time to leave her home, she needed to find somewhere safe to reside that wasn't this graveyard. She decided that before she'd find somewhere, she'd need to gather food, so she went down to the food stores of the hive and gathered what she could. The once great food stores were pillaged by the invaders leaving nothing but scraps for her. She could barely even scrape up anything more than a loaf of bread! She was lucky enough however to find a few ration crystals which could probably last her a few weeks if she used a minimum amount of magic, however that loaf of bread would only last her a month with the preservation magic applied meaning she'd have to thoroughly ration her food.

Now that Nephila had gathered what food she could, she had a moment to stop and think of where to go next, with no queen and with the knowledge her queen had given her hive about the loss of contact with their allies, she could only assume said allies met the same fate. So she was left rather stumped on where she should attempt to go till the one place her hivemates and herself were informed to never go came into her head. Equestria, a land where food was practically everywhere! Ponies lived all over Equestria where they were constantly radiating their love for eachother! It was perfect!

However she knew this idea would be filled with trouble from the start, it was a good 3 weeks travel on hoof or 2 weeks by flight that alone she could have handled with the rations and supplies at her disposal, however the biggest problem would be the countless amounts of hostile predators that would be roaming about! The infiltrators that went to Equestria to collect love specifically went in groups no smaller than 5 because of how dangerous the trip was! She knew the enemy Changelings wouldn't dare patrol the way to Equestria as they knew it was a deathtrap for both ponies and lings.

Nephila sat down upon her haunches for a moment and began a small breathing exercise to calm herself before she began speaking to herself out loud, "Alright… I'm going to go to Equestria, but I'll need a disguise… That will certainly be a problem, I'll need to personally make one since I have nothing to refer to…" Nephila looked around a bit trying to see if she could gather some inspiration for a disguise before a light bulb went off in her head. "Wait, what if I just disguised myself as a Pony version of myself! I can easily make such a disguise! All I'd have to do is remove my wings, fix my horn and my eyes, then I'd fit right in!" She said to herself almost giddy at the prospect of finding a disguise that would work for herself.

Nephila then stood back up on all four hooves and took a deep breath before casting her illusion spell, this spell often drained Changelings who weren't trained specifically for the task, which she definitely was not trained for. As the spell began to be cast a red flickering flame slowly inched its way from the bottom of her hooves to the very tip of her curved horn. As the flame trailed across her body, her body changed with it. As the crimson flame went across her chitin, her chitin turned to an ashy gray coat with her wings vanishing under the illusion of her new form, her eyes which once consisted of a slitted pupil and crimson irises, shifted to that of a Pony's eye. Her mane and tail shifted slightly to become more maintained and proper; however keeping the beautiful red it contained, her flank was now properly marked with a cutie mark of her own design. The cutie mark in question consisted of the pink hollowed out cross with symbols consisting of both hearts and foal toys which she designed to show that her specialty pertained to pediatrics, essentially the medical care of foals. She had hoped that if she managed to make it to Equestria she could take up a life not so dissimilar from her last, however now caring not for the future of her hive, but for the future of the ponies she'd live amongst. It was what her instincts required her to do after all, care for the young as they made up the countless future generations of both her hive and the world around her.

Nephila took one last look behind her at her former home, it was a husk of its former self, once bustling with the activity of thousands of drones was left with an eerie stillness and silence. After she got her final look at her former home, she made sure that her disguise was donned and the sword and belt she had acquired from a corpse was tied firmly to her barrel, she also made sure the saddlebags filled with both a map and her rations was fastened tightly as well. After all her preparations were thoroughly checked, she began her march across what felt like an endless sea of trees. She marched on now to her new life and future, a future she hoped would be better than her last.