Wandering

Marty's Inception

Entry #6

1st of July

Okay, a question. Have you ever seen a changeling swarm, all gathered up?

Yeah, well, no, of course you haven't. A parallel: have you ever seen a herd of reindeer, wild horse, or some other type of large animal?

It's not like a pack of lions or wolves, who mostly just laze about in a spread-out, leisurely manner, yet retain that impression of being ready to pounce at a moment's notice. Nor is it like a school of fish or a flock of birds in flight, who instinctively assume advanced formations and patterns, moving in precise maneuvers with impressive coordination.

A herd of reindeer is like a giant, quadruped class of 5th-graders on a field trip. Their numbers are immense, and while some of them constantly mill about to some extent they always follow their leader like a comet's tail. When someone finds something interesting or stumbles upon a possible threat, the herd stops up, and a massive barking frenzy ensues. The herd gathers up, and action is taken.

A changeling swarm is much similar, except that they move much faster, look generally more intimidating and can fly. Overall this tends to give you the impression that you're about to get assaulted by an army of angry mutated bees. When lidded, their eyes aren't terribly expressive, which tends to give them a fairly angry look – much like myself, actually, but as I've stated before I blame that on my eyebrows...

As I followed Chrysalis back from my little breakfast alcove, Elytra evidently made good on her word – the camp went from silent to a buzzing mass of activity in very short order. We had a ways to walk, though, so I decided to make use of my time.

“So, Chrysalis. These ponies you keep talking about.” Chrysalis snorted in disapproval, and gave me an irritated look. “Hey, don't give me that. Know thy enemy, and all that, you know? I'm just trying to get my bearings, and given how much you reference them I need to know what I'm dealing with.”

She did not relent in her disapproval, but she did tell me about the ponies. With a heavy touch of disdain in her voice, and at several points going into that split-tone that sent shivers up my back, but she was efficient. The ponies lived to the south in their realm of Equestria, and they were a herbivorous species with a nation somewhere in the middle of its earliest trod into industrialization. The different races were divided into a clear caste structure, a remnant of ancient pony culture Chrysalis could not date her knowledge of, but she guessed it at somewhat short of two thousand years. When I voiced a comment about her species' historians being so detailed, she gave me a strange look.

“The ruler of a Hive passes on the sum of her knowledge – and her predecessors' – to their successor. Even if she has been felled in battle, the memories can be recovered. That does tend to jumble them a bit, though, which is why we don't always have all the details in the right order when it comes to the ancient world. There has always been a fair bit of conflict between us and the ponies.”

This revelation impressed me to quite some degree, but Chrysalis appeared eager to be done with her little talk, so she hushed me down and kept on talking. Pegasi composed most of the military caste, and the civilians used their natural magic at keeping the weather in check. They'd even built a city out of clouds.

The unicorns had magic – of course, nowhere close to what Changelings had, Chrysalis scoffed in contempt – and had originally been a caste of nobles and knights. Over the course of two millennia this had of course changed a fair bit, but there were a few noble houses remaining, and by far the majority of all bureaucrats and craftsmen were unicorns.

The workers' caste was, to my surprise, not yet another kind of variant on a mythical being, but rather quite humble beings called “earth ponies”. They apparently had some sort of magic in them that made them sturdier and stronger – and far more fertile – than the other races. Other than that, and their strange ability to grow crops far better than any other being on the planet, they seemed to me to be fairly like the horses I was used to. Colorfulness aside, of course. The image of a typical earth pony that Chrysalis conjured up for me almost had me gagging at its garish pink coating.

Chrysalis had an obvious distaste for unicorns, for stealing their secrets and banishing them among other things and she had far too many memories of being impaled by a pegasus' spear to have anything but grudging respect for their skill in battle. That was a point which I could quite understand, although I found it quite morbid that she had the first-hand memories of her ancestors' deaths in her head.

Her hive had shared a border with the lands of the earth ponies for a long time, however, and while trust had been scarce, they'd always been willing to do business. The whole Quicksilver Pact business had come about when a bunch of confused unicorn officials started inquiring about how the earth ponies had discovered fertilizer, and soon realized their estranged neighbors might be a bit more knowledgeable than themselves.

She was about to start telling me of theirruling caste – she spoke the very word with a big mouthful of contempt, and hurriedly clarified that amongchangelings there sure as night were no silly restrictions on who could bear a hivelord's crown – but she didn't come further than a brief visual description before she realized, from the buzzing din of the swarm gathered all around us, that we'd arrived at our destination. “I'll explain more later, hunter,” she offered over the noise, and I nodded absentmindedly as I started to file and process the enormous amount of information I'd just received.

Thus, I was not paying the greatest heed to what the changeling queen said in her loud, booming, two-tone voice, speaking to her subjects in a quite properly majestic manner that any king would've been proud of. I heard my name – or the term “hunter”, at least – and stood up straight and nodded, gesturing gracefully to the crowd they stomped their hooves and stars know what else to make that clattering noise, signaling approval. I was confused for a moment, but it didn't take me more than a few seconds to decipher that she was thanking me for rescuing them. Satisfied with knowing what was going on for the moment, I went back to filing my thoughts.

As one might expect after an experience like this, there were quite a lot of those. I'm not an overly absent-minded person per se, but I have over the years developed an extraordinary ability to ignore people. It does help me focus to some extent, of course, but the core purpose of it remains the same. Because of this, I was rather surprised when I found that the world had gone mostly silent around me, and I stood almost alone in the middle of the camp, tugging my beard. Almost alone, of course, meant that Chrysalis and a handful of hivelings were gathered around me in a loose semicircle, staring at me and whispering to each other.

Seeing me out of my reverie, or as I realized was more likely,feeling it – the fact that they fed on emotions, and the very distinct experience I'd had the day before, had made me fairly certain they could easily detect changes in a person's mind – the group closed on me swiftly. Chrysalis took the lead, of course, but I could now easily discern Elytra from the others, even with her eyes lidded. A bit too easily for my comfort, actually. It was almost as if...

I managed to snatch up a few of their murmurs as they were making their way towards me, confirming my hunch. These changelings were all males; unless deep voices and angular faces was the marking of something entirely different, of course, but that seemed far-fetched even to me. I hadn't been expecting sexual dimorphism in a species like this – come to think of it, I'm not sure I had been expecting them to have any sort of genders at all. Before I could follow that train of thought for very long, though, the ring of changelings closed on me, and Chrysalis stepped forward to face me.

“Hunter,” she began, and then paused, quite apparently not sure how to proceed. That did not bode well. “There are things we must...um. Speak of.” By now her eyes were shifting visibly, and that worried me just as much as the sheer fact that she had stayed behind at all.

“Things, you say,” I said with a raised eyebrow. “Stop dodging around the point you're trying to make, says I. It's quite apparent on your face that it's bad news. What is it,Chrysalis. Tell me.”

Oddly enough all of the males around her blushed faintly when I uttered her name, but the queen herself didn't even seem to notice for all her fidgeting. Finally she closed her eyes and blurted out. “It's about the matter of your, transportation.”

I blinked. Twice.

After a few seconds, I managed a reply. “My what?”

With most of the confusion having been pushed over on me, Chrysalis apparently felt quite a bit less pressured by the situation. “Well. You can't fly.”

I raised my other eyebrow (or really, lowered the first one seeing as I'd had them both up to my hairline in surprise previously) and gave her a deadpan look. “Oh, really? You managed to draw that conclusion?  And here I clearly thought the laws of physics were flexible enough for me to take off if I just flapped my arms a bit andbelieved, or something.” I spat at the word, and shook my head. “No, I can't fly. What exactly are you proposing to do to solve that problem?Carry me?”

She glanced around at the hivelings flanking her, as if she only now realized this might not have been a very viable idea. “Well, I– Yes! What did you think we'd do?Walk?” She sounded completely flabbergasted at the prospect of using her hooves for actual movement. Okay, maybe a bit harsh considering we'd just walked clean across the camp, but that's not really a fair comparison to make.

For one, I wasn't going to let this argument drop. It wasn't any stupid issue of pride, either. Though I suppose I wouldn't take much of it in being hauled around like a sack of grain in the air by a quartet of – stallions? Is that term even applicable here? – I was more concerned with the problem ofcrashing.

“I would exactly that, indeed. No, seriously, you don't seem to understand the problem here.Physics. As far as I can tell, no matter how badly wrenched the laws of nature have been in this place, I still weigh about the same. Either gravity hasn't changed, or the size of whatever planet we're on is bigger than mine by the same ratio it's been altered, so it doesn't matter.”

I walked up to her now – I had my hunches, but I hadn't exactly done empirical research on this yet. There hadn't been much time. Hunches, however, have always been one of my strong points.

Taking a firm grip with one hand under both wings, I hoisted Chrysalis into the air like a three-year old kid, and held her there. It barely took any effort at all – she weighed almost nothing at all.

“Whatever screwed-up material your bodies are made out of to make them this light, it only emphasizes the fact that you need to be like this to fly. I'm imagining there's a pretty thin balance point, as well – you might be able to take wing with double, or perhaps even three times that weight, but that's it.”

I put her down gently, and gestured to myself once my hands were free. “I'm not the best at winging guesses like this, but I wager I am about twenty or thirty times your weight.” There was a small gasp throughout the small crowd, and Chrysalis' eyes widened considerably. “And that's just mass. You'd also have to worry about finding centers of gravity as a unit and flying closely together without blocking each others' wings, and so on. Split it evenly and you might be able to carry me with some twenty or thirty changelings, but how would you propose to do that? Inverse dogpile? There's not close to enough surface on my body to split up between thirty equal weight points, nevermind that you'd also have to have thirty pairs of wings coming out of that for things to make any sense. And if it comes to walking, my own boots work just fine for me – I don't need a sedan chair made out of two dozen hivelings. You're not carrying me, and that's final. It – is – physically – impossible.”

I was a bit surprised when Chrysalis turned to her minions with a look on her face that very much saidI told you so, but one could guess that a queen of her kind would need quite a bit of political savvy to survive. Either she had actually anticipated the outcome – quite possible seeing how reluctant she seemed at the start – or she'd just been smart enough to plan ahead for it. Or so I figured.

The males grumbled for a bit, but not before long they were joining the rest of the hive in what I guessed was their preparations for breaking camp. Whatever that might be – changelings don't exactly use a lot of equipment...

“I suppose we will be hoofing it, then,” Chrysalis said with a heavy sigh.

I nodded, not a little grateful that I'd be spared getting hoisted into the air without a single reliable engine under me. “I'm sorry for the trouble, I guess,” I said in a relieved tone. “I'm not sure if they'd even gotten off the ground, but I didn't want to take the risk. I may have exaggerated the figures a little, but the fact remains that you couldn't possibly lift me like that. I guess this means we won't be moving as fast as you'd planned, though. Just how far...”

I wasn't sure what I was going to ask. I probably didn't have much option but to go with them – I sure couldn't survive too long on this mountain, whatever equipment I had with me. Still, I'd be leaving behind the possibility of finding a way back to my own world where I'd found the entrance, and that didn't make me feel good at all. For all the fact that I was still reasonably safe and sound, with starvation and death not seeming too close at the moment, and that I'd found company, however odd, it didn't change the fact that there were seven of my closest friends and kinsmen back there – at least, I thought and hoped they were still there – with no clue where I was, and all of Sarek to search.

It would hardly have mattered had I even been there. Sarek is about the size of Stockholm County, except that instead of the largest city in Scandinavia and its suburbs, the civilization in Sarek amounts to two bridges and absolutely nothing else. Searching that for one man you don't know the location of is next to impossible on foot, and bloody difficult enough in a helicopter.

If I knew my companions well, they'd stay put for a while and try to look for me in the area, before moving out and reporting me as a missing person to the police. Being declared dead wouldn't sit well with me, but as it was I didn't exactly have much choice in the matter.

As I furrowed my eyebrows in brooding, Chrysalis answered my unfinished question. “We're not sure. The scouts I've sent haven't reported any landmarks I can place, and as you can imagine it's very difficult to make any decent estimate of distance when you're hurtling uncontrollably through the air. Our flight from Canterlot wasn't very...merciful. We may have lost a number to the landing alone – I'm not sure how I survived the impact myself.”

She frowned for a moment, her eyes going to the ground, but then shook her head and looked up to me again. “My guess would be four or five flights to Canterlot, and from there it's another four to Hive Orion at the border. Hive Hermaima-Allagion and the Basileo is less than a flight from there.” I raised a confused eyebrow at her – those measurements told me absolutely nothing – and she sighed. “I don't know how much that means to you. If it helps, a flight is what we normally cover in a day, or six hours of straight flying.”

That did help indeed. It probably wasn't entirely accurate, but going from the estimate I had on Elytra, six hours straight flying at 60km/h summed up to 360 kilometers. It seemed like a reasonable distance, and I had no trouble seeing a changeling going at that speed for maybe twice as long.

What it also did, however, was make me feel rather disheartened. On a good day's hike I could perhaps manage 25 kilometers without pushing myself too much, assuming the terrain was reasonably flat. By sheer virtue of existing, I had made the changelings' journey home more than tenfold longer. I groaned and buried my face in my hands. “Fuck my life,” I muttered irritably to myself, but it was more an attempt to avoid thinking of just how much I was screwing up right now.

I was about to – well, I'm not sure actually, but I felt incredibly stupid and whatever I could've done then would've been so as well – when a third voice spoke up. Much to our surprise; both me and Chrysalis had managed to completely forget about Elytra, who'd been standing right behind her queen all along.

“Um. Martin. There is... another option.”

I lowered my hands a bit and gave her a look. Chrysalis looked absolutely spooked, for that part. “What do you mean, another option?”

Her tone was slightly accusing, and Elytra flinched slightly at her words. “I m-mean...m-m...”

She stood there for a moment stuttering, and hesitating, before she raised her eyelids and stared at us both wide-eyed. “Melding. I know how to do it. It would work.”

I had lowered my hands and settled them at my hips while she'd been speaking, but Chrysalis completely dropped her jaw at Elytra's words. “Melding? Are you insane, hiveling? How do you even know of such a thing? It has beencenturies since the last time we dared try that on anypony!”

To my great surprise, Elytra raised her head, confronting Chrysalis eye to eye. “Because of the political implications. I may not have my entire line's history. But I have some of it. Important parts. This certainly is one.” She shifted her eyes to me, and pointed at me with her hoof. “And Martin isn't any pony. He is Martin. So I will do it.”

Chrysalis was completely stunned – she just blinked when Elytra pushed her aside to make her way towards me. “Uh,” I said hesitantly, not sure what to say. Eventually, I managed to blurt out, “What exactly are you doing? Elytra?”

Not that it did much good. Elytra ignored me just as much as she had Chrysalis, and when she reached me she reared up on her hindlegs, her wings flapping slowly to keep her balanced. At this point, she apparently encountered a problem – I was too tall. Even on her hindlegs, she only reached up to my chest. So she fixated me with a stare, and suddenly her voice chimed in twain, like Chrysalis had earlier. “Kneel.”

This finally broke me out of my reverie, and I raised an annoyed eyebrow as I stared down at her. This seemed to break a bit of her crazy focus as well, because when she spoke again, her voice was back to normal. “Oh. Or, um, I guess you could lift me. Um.” I rolled my eyes, but hoisted her up into the air anyway. She squeaked a bit as I gripped her sides, but other than that didn't protest too much. I mean, she asked for it, so why should she – but you never know with women. Or mares, or whatever.

After hanging in the air for second or two, Elytra's horn flared up in a dazzling array of colors, and I thought I could see something through them as they danced before my eyes. Then, she flapped her wings once, and her horn touched my forehead – or so it should have. However, instead of the pain you get from being poked with a sharp object, all I felt was a slight tingling; a second after, the colors flared like a kaleidoscope of suns and blinded my eyes.

It felt like someone was pouring a glass of water into my skin. A cold, rippling sensation wove its way through my head and spread throughout my body, surrounding every nerve cell in a moment's embrace before moving on. When it reached my fingers and toes itturned, and all of a sudden it was a feeling of warmth instead. It reached my back, and it felt like someone was drawing on my skin with a burning coal for just a moment – then it was all but gone, and everything settled back into my head, with just a slight tingle behind my back to remind me that something was still there.

I was just about to try opening my eyes again, when–

Hello, Martin.

Elytra's voice rung through my head, and I tore my eyes open despite the pain – but all I could see was Chrysalis, staring at me with her eyes and mouth both open as wide as they could possibly go.

I'm in here.

It was all too apparent what she meant by “in here,” and it was only by sheer luck that I managed not to faint from shock when she said it.

Heavens know what would've happened if I had...