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The Pretender
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The Pretender

One of the more alien sensations one can experience is a complete lack of sensation at all: sensory deprivation. It’s a state not unlike dreaming. The mind is left to wander while the body is at rest, deprived of any and all signs of the world around it. By its nature, it is a calming state. Paradoxically, the very concept should be quite alarming. Without senses, how would anyone interact with anyone else, or even the world around them?

These are not the things one would think about in this state, however. As mentioned, the experience is inherently calming. Without sensory stimuli, there is little to do but sleep and wait, wait through the nothing for anything, any feeling whatsoever to return.

And so, as a chilled wave passed over her for the first time in hours, this is the state Rainbow Dash found herself in. The very concept of hot and cold was at first strange for her to try and process. Her eyes stayed shut, her ears were muffled, and her mouth and nose were forced shut. Yet her skin could feel. It felt cold, moist. There was even a bit of stiffness, and patches of numbness, but mostly it was just cold.

Simple things were hard for her to even understand. In her head, there was no ‘where am I?’, only ‘what is ‘where’?’. Slowly, one by one, she began to re-learn what the different pieces of her were and meant: one, two... four legs, but in two pairs, and another pair of limbs— wings, actually, and her head and tail. Yes, now it started to make sense again.

She felt the coolness across her skin, though mostly on the outside. She understood now how she must’ve been positioned; she was suspended, somehow, in something that felt like a thick jelly, with her limbs tucked in tight around the rest of her in a ball. That gel around her wouldn’t let her move, but it seemed to almost move on its own. The coolness around her, the rush of sensation, grew around until it neared her face.

It wasn’t until it passed over her snout that she realized she hadn’t been breathing for the last ten minutes. In a panic, she gasped, only to find something was lodged in her throat. Her eyes shot open and she pulled and strained against the gel around her. Whatever was in her throat, it wasn’t coming out on its own; it felt like some massive glob of paste the size of her hoof.

Eventually she did rip herself loose from her sticky prison, only to collapse on the hard, rocky ground before her. She caught some glimpse of a cave ceiling and something glowing green on the way down, but she thought nothing of it at the time. All she was focused on was staying alive.

It only took a few more coughs, as well as somepony’s sharp smack on her back, but she finally and disgustingly hacked up the blockage like a cat with a slimey hairball. A slimey, green hairball that glowed faintly in the dark of the cave.

Rainbow Dash collapsed on the spot, not caring that her chin fell square on the new pile of rancid mush. The effort it took to save her own life left her drained and delirious, or so it seemed. She barely could feel the cool air anymore, at least on the outside; a fresh breath, even from that musty cave air, was a sweet relief from everything else about the situation.

Yet as she lay, sprawled out on the floor and head cocked to the side, a new horror began to dawn on her. One entire side of the cave was covered in glowing green. That green, which she now realized was a little too familiar, came from pods upon the wall. More pods, she realized, besides the one she had just escaped. Each one shone the same sickly color against the black walls of the cave, and each one contained the same sort of dark core: a single changeling in each bubble of slime.

“Oh no...” Rainbow mumbled. Yet as she tried to stand, she winced and promptly collapsed back down, gripping her head in her forehooves and rolling over onto her other side. A flood of images came to the forefront of her mind at once, yet none were so coherent as the words she now remembered, just as they were shouted before:

“The sky is falling!”

“We’re under attack!”

“Save yourselves!”

“What’s going on?!” Rainbow shouted. She was barely able to see straight with all these memories rushing in at once. Flashes of fire, bug wings, ponies galloping around in terror...

As she squirmed on the cave floor she felt herself picked up one leg at a time by smooth-coated yet knobbly legs. She knew before she looked: more changelings.

Rainbow struggled, but none of her limbs had any strength to speak of. “Lemme go!” she yelled, or at least she did as much as her weakened body would let her. Just trying to focus on getting herself free again was enough to drive the pain in her head down. Still, as the changelings carried her onward, she could do nothing to release herself from their grip. Tug, pull, twist... all she seemed to accomplish was straining herself. With a sigh, she stopped fighting and let her head hang back. It was from this position that she could take a better look at her surroundings. Or rather, as her eyes came into focus, she began to see what had become of herself.

At first she thought it was a trick of the light, that her eyes just needed to adjust to the darkness or something. But now, quite clearly, she could see that the hooves in the changelings’ grasp were the same color as the changelings themselves.

Rainbow swore she felt her heart start to race, even though she wasn’t quite sure if she still had a heart. Actually, she knew she did once she took a panicked look at the rest of herself. For, belly-up as she was, she could see quite clearly into the translucent blue-green carapace on her underside. That close, anypony could’ve seen the moving bits inside.

She wanted to scream. She, Rainbow Dash, wanted to cry. But she couldn’t. She was too weak, trapped against her will.

“What’s going on?” she mumbled feebly. “Why am I here? Why am I... this?”

The changelings just flitted on through the cave in silence.

— — — — — —

Within a few minutes of traversing the network of rock and stone, passing numerous other drones along the way, Rainbow groaned. “Alright,” she whispered to herself. “That first bit was a little freaky, but now I’m just bored. Are we there yet?”

The changelings swooped to the right just then, landing on something of a crude balcony and setting Rainbow on the ground. Immediately, Rainbow scrambled over onto her hooves. Before she could get any further, however, her vision began to narrow and her knees began to quiver. Two of the drones that had grabbed her before now leaned against her from either side, supporting her until the blood— well, whatever giant bug-ponies have in its place— rushed back to her brain. By then, the other two were just cackling tantalizingly before her.

Her one chance to escape, gone just like that. Rainbow Dash realized how much she had to rely on the others to stand; she simply hung her head and followed suit towards a massive wall of greenish membrane. “You know,” she told herself upon noting how clearly she could see her surroundings, “I never realized just how used to hair I was until now...”

As they reached the membrane, it reflexively stretched open for them to pass. Inside was a creepy reinterpretation of a banquet hall: stools and chairs were made of different sizes and colors of mushrooms around a roughly-carved stone table. ‘Roughly-carved’ in this case means it was eaten away at by the changelings, somehow, as there were still strands of green goop stuck between the tabletop and the floor. A chandelier fashioned around the roots of a luminescent fungus hung at an odd angle over the table, while the same kind of mushroom grew around the edges of the ceiling. None of it was so bright as to feel like actual sunlight or anything, but it was better than the dark of the cave. To Rainbow Dash, it all looked like a strange attempt at hominess that would probably do more harm than good.

And, of course, who else would be awaiting in this mockery of the Equestrian high life than the same changeling queen Rainbow had already come to know.

“You’re sure this is the one?” Chrysalis demanded of her drones.

The other changelings immediately brought Rainbow Dash to the far end of the table, then bowed before the queen. “Yes, my queen,” said one of them. “We watched her pod for hours. The one with the rainbow hair, yes?”

Rainbow gratefully plopped down on the mushroom and put her back hooves up, trying to ignore the small cloud of dust-and-or-spores that popped up as she did so.

Queen Chrysalis nodded, then waved her hoof. “Yes, good. Now return and help move the others.” With that, the drones bowed once more and flitted their way back out the membrane door. Once they were gone, Chrysalis turned her attention and glare to Rainbow Dash, only to find the ex-pony fiddling with her jagged horn. “Ahem,” Chrysalis said.

Rainbow cocked an eyebrow, or again the closest equivalent, at her. “Hey, you wanted me for some reason. I ain’t the one who needs to ask nicely for anything.”

Chrysalis blinked once, then sighed. “Oh, Rainbow Dash,” she said. “I don’t think you realize what’s truly going on here. We’ve already won. We—”

“You know, you’re right,” said Rainbow. She leaned forward and slammed her hoof on the stone table. “I don’t know what’s going on around here. And I don’t care what you want out of me, you’re definitely not getting it until I get some answers first. What happened to Ponyville? Where’s everypony else? What was wrong with the sky?”

“Oh? You really don’t know?” Chrysalis asked. “Perhaps you were left to simmer too long... do you not remember the rain of fire? How we took the opportunity to strike, to establish a hoofhold right beneath the home of our greatest foe? And how you foolishly stayed behind rather than saving yourself?”

After a second, Rainbow shook her head. “Uhh, okay I remember something about fire, annnd maybe something about running...” She clenched her eyes shut and tapped her head a few times. “It’s... fuzzy. Maybe if you just give me a little time to—”

Suddenly Chrysalis leaped into the air and swooped right up to Rainbow’s face. “I don’t have time for games, you incompetent!” The smell of the queen’s breath reminded Rainbow Dash of dirt and spiderwebs, as did the feel of her hair. “Tell me where the others are!” Chrysalis demanded. “The other five, the Bearers!”

“Bearers?” asked Rainbow. “Wait, do you mean for the Elements—”

“Yes, the Elements of Harmony!” Chrysalis snarled at Rainbow, fangs-first. “I will not have some upstarts turn this victory against me. You will tell me where they went, and now!” She landed and stomped on the table to accentuate her point.

Rainbow Dash quickly backed away, lying on her back on the floor. “I-I don’t know! I can’t remember, I swear!” She winced as Chrysalis raised a threatening hoof again, but the blow never came.

Instead, the queen stomped once more on the table, then began to pace back down its length. “Useless, incompetent drones!” she growled. “They were supposed to stop the conversion process just short of a mental wipe, not in the middle!”

“Huh?” asked Rainbow as she slowly worked her way back onto her hooves. “Conversion?”

Chrysalis smirked at the corner of her mouth. “It’s one of the ways we can... reproduce,” she said. “Conversion of ponies into loyal, obedient, if sometimes useless changeling drones.”

Rainbow looked at her front hoof and frowned. “G-go on.”

With a scoff, Chrysalis shot a malicious glare at Rainbow. “We just take a normal pony, trap her for a bit, and let our magic work out the rest,” she said, putting obvious emphasis on the word ‘her’. “You’re only about halfway done, but I assure you, once you’ve helped us, you won’t remember anything. Nothing except who your real loyalties belong to, I assure you, after a little ‘indoctrination’ of course.”

“A little what?” Rainbow scratched her head, then recoiled and hung her head. The sound of carapace on carapace was not only grating, like that nails-on-a-chalkboard sound, but it was also a bitter reminder of her state.

“Teaching? Encouragement?” Chrysalis tried again. “Oh, what’s the word... well, ‘brainwashing’ sounds a bit ugly, but it should suffice...”

A chill ran down Rainbow’s ‘spine’ as the pieces began to come together. “So... all of Ponyville, then?” Chrysalis nodded. “A-and they’re here. And like me, just... not... skipping a step?’

Again the queen nodded, this time with a chuckle. “All except your certain friends,” she said. “But don’t worry. They, too, will join the hive.”

Rainbow gulped again; she felt like she was going to be sick. Slowly, she paced away from the table, towards some of the excess goopy membrane along the walls, between the fungi. “And we’ll stay that way. Forever...” she mumbled. Once she was close enough, she could see a faint reflection of herself in the goop; she looked like all the other bug-drones before, save for perhaps a slightly more petite figure. Embarrassingly enough, she thought.

But as she replayed the conversation so far over and over in her head, a thought occurred to her. “But I’m different,” she said, just loud enough for the queen to hear the tail end. “I’m like you, one of you, but... I’m still me.”

“What’s that?” asked Chrysalis. “Are you ready to talk?”

Rainbow just smirked. With but half a thought, she had become enveloped in a green light. The changes passed quickly over every inch of her, the light of her magic burning through like a flare of green flame. Once it passed, what was left of her was a figure of a rainbow-haired blue pegasus pony.

She tested her wings once: good as new, if a bit stiff. The motion did, however, catch Chrysalis’ eye. Quickly, the queen whipped around, but not before Rainbow had already started to take off.

“Come back here!” shouted the queen.

Rainbow was already flying for the exit; as before, the membrane peeled open at the first sign of motion in its general direction. It wasn’t quite as fast as Rainbow would have liked, evidently, as it was still stretching out by the time Rainbow got there. She reached in and tried to squeeze through, but in those split seconds she had, all her struggling only seemed to tighten the membrane’s grip.

Over her shoulder, Rainbow saw Chrysalis galloping after her on her freakishly long legs. The queen only made it about halfway across the room before Rainbow finally forced through to the far side. Once she had landed and gotten back to her feet, she looked back and smirked, raising her wings.

“Catch me if ya can, Honeysuckle!” she shouted, her taunt echoing throughout the hive. Instantly she took off, zooming through the open caverns like they were the forests back home, but with more space and the occasional flying obstacle out of a startled drone.

This left the queen on the balcony exit, dumbstruck as she tried in vain to track Rainbow’s course. Chrysalis stood there for a moment with her jaw dropped, then shook it off.

“You!” she shouted. The nearest drones, passing by for no real reason at that moment, dropped what they were doing and landed before her with a bow. Chrysalis barely looked at them. Her eyes were fixed on the location she last saw Rainbow Dash.

“After her!” the queen barked through clenched teeth. “Now!”

— — — — — —

“Okay, we made a left... two rights... ugh, where is it?!” Rainbow thought aloud as she flew. More and more, changelings were starting to take note of her and swarm after her, but between the limited space in the caverns and the sheer speed she kept up, they were soon lost in the distance.

Eventually she found something that seemed a bit familiar: green glowing pods on the walls. Rainbow slowed down to take a better look at them. A few here and there were occupied, but they were few and far between. The arrangement was nothing like that she’d seen upon waking, however; too many were on the floor and ceiling, or otherwise angled so no pony could’ve stayed upright and still in them.

Yet above the pods, she noticed a few shapes moving. A larger cluster of drones than any she’d seen yet was passing over, in groups of five, with four supporting the fifth’s limbs.

“There,” Rainbow mumbled. “Now where are they taking them?”

She checked behind herself; none of the drones were still after her. Looking back down, most of the cluster was already out of sight through a small tunnel, but a few still lingered behind. Rainbow thought for just a second, took a deep breath, then swooped in after them. Halfway down, a green flare of magic flashed across her body, returning her to changeling form.

Rainbow followed the other changelings down, around, up, and through the twisting tunnel until it dumped out in another, largely sealed-off cavern. Frankly, the exits weren’t what mattered most to Rainbow as she first saw the inside of the chamber. Most of the cave was covered and dripping in green goop, with thick tendrils of it reaching down from a massive, brightly-glowing blob on the ceiling. Attached to most of these tendrils by their heads were changelings, with their eyes open in wide but blank stares as some inky black fluid pumped through the tendrils and to and from their ears. Even as Rainbow watched, the two that were carried in were forcibly attached to the grotesque device, black-carapace-horn-first.

A few from the cluster left over patted their hooves together as if to say ‘job well done’, then they all flittered out through a tunnel on the far side. Rainbow Dash stayed behind, frozen yet shivering on the ground as she looked up at the slimy monstrosity before her.

“Please, please, please tell me I’m not too late...” Rainbow told herself. She gulped, then gagged; a changeling’s innards were far from arranged like that of a pony, not that it was normal for somepony to see their own internal organs pulsating and moving inside themself. With a short growl, Rainbow cast herself back to her ‘normal’ form, then swooped up to the tendrils.

She gave the first one she could reach a tentative poke. It was squishy, and swayed easily beneath her hoof. She gave it another jab, then smiled. “Okay, I think I get it,” she told herself.

Rainbow fluttered back to the cave wall and braced herself against the rock, reverting for the moment to changeling form. She wasn’t sure if it was all due to finding a good hoofing, or if she really was feeling some sickening sensation in the base of her hooves from being changeling, but it was a pretty sure grip. Regardless, she focused ahead, at a line of slime tendrils on the edge of the bunch. Then she kicked off, sweeping through with one hoof stiff and outstretched.

The changeling goop snapped off like gooey twigs.

After the first sweep, she clung tight to the far wall. Sound of the thud and splat from the changelings and slime smacking against the cave floor still echoed throughout the chamber. Rainbow held her breath, listening intently; the only other sounds that came were from her own occasionally-twitching wings.

So she went in for another strike, this time swifter and surer. It started to make more sense with each slice; after the second, she began lining up the slime tendrils with one of the holes on her leg. Each impact practically made her heave from the feel of it, but the cuts were cleaner and quicker. By the time she was down to the last one, however, she simply shut her eyes during the squelch of the hit.

The floor of the cavern was now full of slowly waking new changelings, each groaning and rubbing their heads like they’d been asleep for a week. And, soon enough, they each started to panic as they began to see themselves and each other.

Rainbow Dash swooped down and landed with a four-hoof stomp on the rock before them, seemingly dropping through a ring of green fire as she reassumed pony form. The changelings in the cluster were immediately silenced.

“Listen up!” said Rainbow. “We’re all gonna be fine, got it? We’ll just high-tail it outta here, then find a spell to change us back. Everything’s gonna be just fine.”

“Fine? Fine?!” asked what was assumedly a mare in front. “I’m some kinda bug-freak-thing! I can barely remember how I got here! How is this fine?!” The others in the crowd began spouting similar complaints.

After a half minute or so of this, Rainbow rolled her eyes. “Hey!” she shouted. “Everypony just settle down!” Her voice echoed through the chamber.

The others quieted once more.

“Look,” Rainbow began again, strutting back and forth like in a military march atop something of a ledge before them. “I know this is weird. We’re all going through it, you know. But we’re all going to get through it together.” She slammed one forehoof into the other. “I want you all to repeat after me: ‘I’m not a changeling, I’m me.’ I caught you just in time to save you from some brainwashing whatchamacallit— no thanks necessary, by the way— but you still need to focus. I mean, I don’t know exactly how it works, but... well let’s just hope I got you all free in time, alright?”

Some in the group began to nod.

“Hey!” Rainbow shouted. “I don’t hear any of you!” She stomped her hoof at them and repeated, “‘I’m not a changeling, I’m me.’ Say it!”

It began as a feeble chime from somepony in the back, but soon the others joined in. “I’m not a changeling, I’m me!” they each shouted back, one by one, working around the crowd. Soon, they were all chanting the saying back, like unified protesters embittered with themselves.

“Good,” Rainbow said. “Now think it. Hold onto it, and don’t forget it!” She stood in a regal pose. “Remember it. Use it to remember who you are, what you look like. And you can change back, just like that!” She thought again on that last statement, then added at a bit of a mumble, “Okay, it’s temporary, but it’s sure better than nothing. And it’s easy, trust me. Just as natural as flying, for me. Er, well, walking, for ponies who don’t have wings.”

Some of the others looked to each other with tilted heads and shrugs. At first, it was almost like none of them heard Rainbow Dash’s orders. But then one of them, what would turn out to be a yellow-coated orange-haired earth pony mare, simply flashed with a green magical fire, and ‘reverted’ successfully. Rainbow Dash recognized her from the streets of Ponyville: Junebug, or something like that.

Soon the others joined in in a strangely comforting storm of green magical flashes, until every one of them was a pony once more. At least, as Rainbow noted, for the moment.

She also noted that there were none of her better friends amongst them, but that only confirmed what Chrysalis had said. Nothing new there.

“Alright, everypony,” Rainbow continued. “I know one way isn’t the way out, so let’s try the other. And remember to keep telling yourself who you really are. At least I’m pretty sure that’s what you’re supposed to do here. Sounds about right, anyway.”

One pony raised his hoof and asked, “But won’t we be seen by the other changelings?”

“Yeah,” said another, “what if we get caught?”

“What if we can’t find a way out?!”

“Up-up-up!” said Rainbow, scowling at that last one. “I don’t wanna hear any of that downer-talk. From any of you!” She turned and started to trot towards the exit tunnel. “As a last resort, and I mean last, we can change back for a quick disguise. Otherwise, everypony stick together, and we’ll try to hide in the shadows or something. But do not give up, do not split up, and definitely don’t stop reminding yourself you’re a pony. Got it? Good. Now let’s get goin’!”

— — — — — —

Through many a treacherous twist and turn the ponies ventured through the caves. Most were surprisingly devoid of changelings or even their signature slime, but there was always something to keep the ponies on-edge: an echoing scuttling here, buzzing and chittering there. Several times, a few of them panicked and reverted to changeling form as they cowered in the dirt. Even if they did get a stern look out of Rainbow just short of actually yelling, the incidents only helped unsettle the rest of them. Even if they were shaking in their hooves the entire way, Rainbow kept pushing the group on like a watchful shepherd. She even led them through orders, such as “Everypony stay close. I think they’re actually coming this time!” and “Let’s check out that fork up ahead!”. Most leads towards some kind of light or what they assumed was the smell of fresh air seemed to be futile at best; everypony agreed that mushrooms were borne of Tartarus by the end of the journey.

But then, there it was: a massive tunnel leading diagonally up towards the surface. The sky, a very bright and pale blue with a few dark clouds amidst, lay unfairly just out of reach of the ponies, past a steep, rugged incline of black stone.

At least they made it about halfway before the swarm caught up. But when they came, headed by the queen herself, the sound of giant bug wingbeats echoed in the caverns was deafening.

Rainbow fluttered just above the head of the group, looking back with wide, quivering eyes. “It’s just like Canterlot all over again...” she mumbled. “Pick it up, ponies! Go, go go!”

A few dared glance back at their impending doom, but most seemed to get what that approaching stampede of flitters meant. The ponies struggled and stumbled forward on the rock at as grueling a pace as they could, but at the rate the changelings approached, there was simply no way.

One earth pony mare in the back grabbed onto a rock that was just a little too loose, and toppled back down a good few yards. She winced at the sharp stone, but when she tried to get back up, she could barely move.

Rainbow Dash swooped down quickly to help her to her hooves. “Come on,” she said, “Nopony gets left behind!”

“Come on, nopony gets left behind!” echoed her own voice in her head. Flashes came back to her again; something of a burning building, Fluttershy, and shoving a heavy beam off of her...

“Rainbow Dash? Rainbow Dash!”

When Rainbow came back to, she was being shaken by Junebug, the earth pony mare she’d saved. To their side, the changelings closed in like a massive black cloud. They’d be on them in seconds, easily. Rainbow shuddered, a desperate tear rolling down her cheek, then gave in: “Everypony change back! We’ll fly out, it’s the only way!”

Seeing the swarm for themselves, the others didn’t even hesitate. Rainbow of course made it quickly to the front of the pack, back in her element as they swooped up and towards the mouth of the cave...

Then she felt her tail snag on an invisible force, just before she got free. The next thing she knew, a large mass tackled on top of her and slammed her into the rock at the top edge of the cave. On the outside, it was a bit of a cliff that her head was almost hanging over: at least an eighty foot drop.

Chrysalis rolled Rainbow Dash over and snarled in her face. “You insolent little worm!”

“What’re ya gonna do, huh?” Rainbow shouted back. “You ain’t getting your answers without me around!”

“I’m beginning to think the answers aren’t worth it!” Chrysalis bared her fangs at Rainbow Dash. “You... fool! Did you really think you’d get away with my changelings? And, pray tell, what did you possibly expect you’d do? Live normal lives? And starve without knowing how to feed, no less. Like the little helpless grubs that you all are. So weak. So naive.” She scoffed. “I bet you couldn’t even hold your form if you wanted to...”

With that, Chrysalis’ horn began to glow, and Rainbow felt a searing, splitting pain through her head. The sensation washed over her, and she cried out in agony. Slowly, green magical light carved a schism right up her middle, then suddenly split outwards, burning up her pony disguise with it.

Then Chrysalis’ eyes widened. “No,’ she said, shaking her head and backing off from Rainbow Dash. “No, that’s not— how?!”

Seizing the opportunity, Rainbow fought through the pain and stood up. Strangely enough, she saw hair flop down in her face. Her hair, more or less. Only it was shifting in color, from red to orange all the way to purple and back again, cycling through every few seconds. In the vague reflection Rainbow could see on Chrysalis’ carapace in the light of day, Rainbow saw her eyes, too, were discolored and slit-pupiled, yet still appeared about the same purple they would be should she be a pony. Yet besides her belly-plate and tail, which were shifting colors to match her mane, the rest of her seemed just like a changeling again. Even when she felt her hair, it felt... wrong. Like that dirt-and-spiderwebs feel she had since she woke up.

“What’s going on?” Rainbow asked. “Don’t tell me you screwed up, ‘your highness’.”

The group of ponies-made-changelings all flittered over and stood fiercely before Rainbow Dash, growling at Chrysalis and the confused swarm behind her. “Back off!” shouted one of the mares. The group backed up around Rainbow Dash, snarling and pacing their hooves on the ground. Rainbow could barely see past them, they were so tightly-knit.

“If you want to get to our queen, you’ll have to go through us!” said another.

Rainbow blinked once, then looked herself over again. “‘Queen’? What?!” She shuddered, looking between Chrysalis and herself. Then she began to smile. “Oh. Oh, I get it,” she said, smirking at the old queen. “Yeah, ‘queen’. I like the sound o’ that.”

“I suppose it may be time to start a new hive,” Chrysalis growled through grit fangs. “Ironic, I suppose.” She turned away in a huff. “Fine, forget the ‘answers’. For the good of our kind, you may leave. Go, seek out a new hive. As far as that will get you...”

And so, Queen Chrysalis turned to fly back inside without so much as lifting another hoof in their direction. The pony-changelings turned back to Rainbow Dash and began to amass around her with looks and questions of concern, practically lifting her up on their hooves as they did so. Rainbow had to flutter back just to get some breathing room.

“Whoa, whoa,” she said. “Come on, everypony, cut it out! Remember, we gotta get this fixed, right?”

“As far as that will get you.” In that very moment, before anypony had a chance to respond, Rainbow realized just what Chrysalis meant. A deep, thundering boom sounded behind her, and she turned just in time to see a building-sized smoking black boulder sail above them and crash somewhere back in the hive complex, shaking the ground and the air violently on impact. Rainbow’s eyes were transfixed on the horizon, where the rock had come from; if she was correct, there was the mountain of Canterlot. Half of it was gone, and a pillar of black smoke rose from the crater.

From the crater itself grew a massive, writhing, gray-black... something that made the once-mountain look like a hoofstool. Its roots sprawled out and enveloped the mountains and the city, as well as what appeared to be part of the countryside immediately around. Orange fire and glowing liquid oozed forth from the tendrils of this monstrosity, much like a light now coming from the inside of the cavern.

Worse still, Rainbow heard more distant booms from the sky, as a rain of black and orange meteors pierced through the black clouds all across visible Equestria.

As she stared, a few changelings zoomed out of the caverns overhead, desperately looking over their shoulders in a panic. Rainbow spun around to see what the fuss was about. Just barely, she could see something moving down at the base of the cave; the creature looked almost like the stone around it, if not for the faint signs of color around its front and back. Its rocky exterior surrounded a grotesque, misshapen body. It had one too many legs on its right side, with a larger, upward-curving appendage not unlike a scorpion’s tail with a fire poker as a stinger growing out of its left. Otherwise, it was as if it had the face and body shape of a pony burn victim with its mouth mostly melted over. Mostly.

It moved unnaturally quickly, easily leaping up thirty feet to snatch a fleeing changeling out of the air by skewering it on the orange spearhead. It slammed the bug back down onto the rock, skewering it firmly. Then it let out a victory roar, something along the lines of a wolf screaming “Yeeeirrsscchh!!” into a tin pot.

The other pony-changelings immediately flittered up and started to push Rainbow back away from the beast. “My queen!” said one. “We have to get you out of here!”

Rainbow stammered in a stupor for a moment, eyes locked on the creature as soon more joined it, each more deformed and more vicious and efficient than the last. “Y-you don’t have to tell me twice!” Rainbow shouted, turning tail herself. “Let’s go, let’s go! Anywhere but where the rocks are landing!”

They formed together as a swarm, with the others trying to surround Rainbow Dash but only really succeeding in slowing her down. She groaned and tried to push through them, despite them maintaining a decent speed directly away from the doomed hive.

One mare-by-voice asked, “Shall we look for a place to start our new hive, my queen?”

Rainbow rolled her eyes. “Okay, first, stop that. Second, let’s just find someplace safe.”

The mare-changeling saluted. “Yes, my liege,” she said.

Another of those alien howls echoed out from the changeling hive behind them; Rainbow Dash was too worn and too dumbstruck to criticize her ‘subjects’ any further.

— — — — — —

Hours of flying later, long after the sun had set and the group lost sight of the black clouds, they found themselves at a mesa in the middle of a large desert. There was no water, no civilization, no life anywhere to be seen besides from each other.

The changelings let Rainbow Dash take the lead, finally, as they circled in to the first cave they saw. Inside, Rainbow Dash promptly collapsed, rubbing one of her insectoid wings with a hoof. “I’ve never flown so hard in all my life,” she said. “I... I need to rest.”

“Perfect,” said what must’ve been Junebug. Her and a few others hefted Rainbow Dash onto their backs and carried her further inside. There wasn’t much to see through the short tunnel. At least at the end a hole in the roof gave way to moonlight, but that was about the only distinguishing feature.

The pony-changelings set Rainbow Dash down against a wall. A few of the others started to go around to the other walls, spreading goo through some motions of their hooves and mouths.

“Eugh,” said Rainbow, sticking her tongue out in disgust. “Okay, everypony, you really oughta stop that now.”

“But my queen,” said Junebug, “this is to be your new home, yes?”

“Well— well I guess, for the time being.” Rainbow Dash shook her head. “Okay, you know what? ‘Your Queen’ wants you to— okay, actually I kind of like the sound of that... b-but the point is, I’ve got a few rules to lay down!”

Junebug bowed. “As you wish, my queen.”

“Rule number one,” said Rainbow. “We’re ponies, not changelings. Start acting like it! And you can start that by looking the part!”

“As you wish,” Junebug repeated, flashing green as she changed back into the form of an earth pony.

Rainbow smirked as most of the rest of them bowed and changed back as well. “Alright, cool...” she said, rubbing her chin. “Rule number two: keep calling me ‘queen’. Or ‘Queen Rainbow Dash’... on second thought, how about just ‘Queen Rainbow’?”

“As you wish, Queen Rainbow,” said Junebug. A few others trotted up behind Rainbow Dash, but Junebug paid them no mind. “Now, please,” she said as a mother to her child, “rest. You deserve it.”

Rainbow felt a cool sensation, a welcome break from the desert’s nighttime heat, on her back and tail. She glanced around and saw the pony-changelings forming more of that slime-goop around her. “Uhh, what are you doing?”

Junebug turned Rainbow’s head back to face forward. “Oh, but this is your, well, ‘throne’, Queen Rainbow,” she said. “You need to rest, if you are going to be our true queen.”

“‘True queen’?” Rainbow asked, scowling. “Ugh, what do I have to do now?” By now, the slime was worked up to around her shoulders and lower ankles.

“Like I said, all you need to do is rest.” Junebug smiled warmly. “We’ll be your guardians, Queen Rainbow, while you sleep.”

“That’s it?” asked Rainbow. “Oh, good. I thought I was unqualified or something.” She tried to lift one of her lower hooves into a more comfortable pose, but it was stuck in the goop; the slime now enveloped all of her lower body. “Uhh, yeah, very funny. Come on, guys, let me out.”

Junebug looked aside and shuffled her forehooves. “Well... technically, you aren’t quite qualified yet.” The others began to layer the slime on thicker and thicker around Rainbow’s limbs, even her wings. “But, once your transformation is complete, then you’ll truly be our wonderful, absolute queen!”

Such a cheerful tone combined with such a horrific realization made Rainbow Dash even more nauseous than the slime had. “Wait, no!” she yelled. “Stop! Please!”

“Goodnight, Queen Rainbow!” said Junebug.

“Goodnight, Queen Rainbow!” said the rest.

Rainbow Dash felt them working around her head now, and she frantically flailed as best she could; it was no use. Just as they got around her ‘ears’, she began to cry. It was about the only thing she could do anymore, with the rest of her locked in place by slime.

“I take it back! I-I’m not a queen!” she pleaded. “I don’t wanna go back in!”

She had to shut her eyes as they were covered, and the last thing she saw was the smiling faces of half the ponies of Ponyville, eerily similar and lit sideways in the moonlight.

“I’m not a changeling!” Rainbow pleaded. “I’m—”

Her mouth was the last to be fully covered, mid-sentence.

“... me... “

The Ghost

Imagine, floating in an empty white void, patches of hints of a normal reality. As if the practiced sketches of scenes from someone’s home on the page in an artist’s book were brought to life, exactly as they were, arranged in a shifting and haphazard manner. Brief windows of some wall, or floor, or corner of a room all float around each other through the ether, as if unsure what to do with themselves.

In this strange world, a small filly, herself appearing as an unfinished and uncolored drawing, sits upon one of these patches. She smiles, working with a coloring book at her hooves. Yet in her mouth is a gray crayon, and with each stroke on the page, existing color is lifted from the page and assumed upon the wax.

As she finished with the blue, she simply ate the crayon, turning herself blue for but a moment. Then she quickly clapped her hooves together, and upon opening them found a new, gray crayon waiting for her. She opened her mouth once more as the crayon ‘fell’ up to her waiting teeth, then clamped down to begin again.

This continued for a while or so. Specific time wasn’t particularly relevant in this space. A clock on one of the free-floating walls spun backwards with the minute hand and forwards with the hour at a varying rate, seemingly based on how close the wall drifted to the filly. It almost seemed to act as a propeller, driving the wall away from unfortunate collision with the pony. Meanwhile, a different wall showed an open window, through which the sun rose and fell independent of the moon, and both in straight lines. Every so often there was an eclipse, but the light remained the same regardless of what celestial bodies could be seen.

“Hellooo?” asked an echoing masculine voice.

The filly perked up suddenly. Her ears dropped back, and she nearly dropped the crayon. Tilting her head, she scanned around, looking for any sign of the source of the voice.

“Down here, little one.”

When the filly tilted her head and looked back at her coloring page, she gasped. There, in place of the slowly-graying flower patch she was un-working on was one large flower with a face upon it. The face was something of a grisly sight, with one yellow eye, one red eye, and a toothy grin.

Yet the filly smiled at the sight. Her smile was so wide it barely fit across her sketchy cheeks. “Daddy!” she said, giggling and clapping her hooves together.

The face in the book smiled back. “Yes, young one. It’s me, come to see you again.”

“I see, I see,” said the filly, swaying her head back and forth. “Am I doing a good job coloring? Huh? Huh?”

“Hm?” The eyes on the face tilted towards the page before it. “Oh, yes, coloring. Very good, very good. It’s just that that’s not why I’m here, darling.”

The filly laid down and flipped upside-down; the book automatically hovered off the floor and rotated around to face her. “What’s up, Daddy?” asked the filly. “Is something wrong?”

“No, no,” the face replied. “At least not exactly. I just need you to run an errand for me, that’s all.”

“Oh, of course!” said the filly with a giggle. “What do I gotta do?”

“Could you perhaps come to me? I’d rather talk this over face-to-face... so to speak.”

Just like that, the filly blinked her eyes and the face was gone from the book. She gasped and looked around, but it was nowhere else to be found. “D-Daddy?” she whimpered.

“Don’t worry, little one,” the voice continued, somehow coming from all around her. “I will explain everything once you find me.”

The filly giggled excitedly. “Sure thing, Daddy!”

Her coloring book simply drifted up and into the void, winking out of existence after some time. She herself, however, was more focused on the circling walls and floor patches. The windowed wall came close, but she let it pass. Then came the wall with the clock, but she ‘shoo’-ed that away just as quickly. When a pair of black floor splotches came by, she looked them over carefully before leaping towards one. Then, after realizing just how hard and solid that blackness was and dusting herself off from the effort, she leaped head-first into the other, a hole.

On the other side, she entered a new realm of pastel colors and a smiling sky. She fell down through the hole, then backwards once she reached there, as the other end looked more like a squirrel’s nest entrance on a giant tree. Everything in this new world looked to be painted on an oil canvas by a rushed child. Colors refused to stay in the lines, even the still-sketched filly’s, and half of everything had a smiley face of two dots and a curved line on it. This included the sun, which now trekked across the sky overtop of crude and squiggly rainbow in steps. The moon was always two ‘clicks’ behind it, as if the two were in a race.

On the ground, green hills rolled out in all directions, but only one seemed to have any true depth to it. The rest were more like paper cutouts with a void between them. The filly fell slowly from the tree, like a feather on a breeze, towards a forest of yarn-like grass on that hill. She aimed herself so she’d land hooves-first on one of the bent stalks, then bounced off it like a diving board. “Whee!” she yelled with this and each subsequent jump as she bounded across the top of the forest. The occasional butter-fly, golden-yellow and dripping and at least as big as the filly, fluttered by as she went. She caught a drop or two in her mouth, savoring the taste, but never stopped moving.

Finally, she found a pink stalk amongst the green, and jumped for it. It was solid and unwavering, unlike the others, though soft. She easily managed to hug and slide down the length towards another hole on the ground.

Outside, she found herself not in a void, but in a sphere of sky. Dozens of floating masses of rock, with large roots beneath as if they’d been torn from the earth, swirled around one central platform with a lavish temple built upon it. Each rock had something of its own that made it unique; the one the filly now fell from was covered in a forest of lollipops on the top, while another below her had a pink storm cloud smothering it from above. Only the temple in the middle didn’t seem so whimsical, if one could ignore the statues of a serpentine dragon encircling every inch of it.

All of this existed in an orb of clouds and blue sky, only limited by something like a massive shimmery mirror. The way it looked in the light from some angles, it almost looked more like a soap bubble. But it didn’t at the moment, as the filly rocketed forward to the temple. To her, it was just the edge of the world.

Despite flying towards the temple at blinding speeds, the filly kept smiling. The marble floor got closer and closer, almost impossibly so. The temple seemed to grow around her until she was the size of but an ant in comparison. Only then did she make impact, and all that happened was that she scrunched up and bounced back, something like a wad of gum.

Inside, the temple was a stark change from the worlds she’d seen before. Specks of dirt, lines and curls on the marble... the detail was uncanny. Even the filly herself looked different just upon entry; she was no longer a sketch of a pony, but a full, fleshed-out living being. She might still not have had any color, but it was a massive change nonetheless.

Either side of the temple was lined with pillars at the edge of shadows, each wrapped in a statue of a serpentine dragon-like being in some different pose. Some were menacing, others were welcoming, and still others were just odd, such as the one in which the dragon curled upon itself and had begun to eat its own tail.

And at the head of the temple, in the shining light of an open skylight, was a throne with said dragon-like creature upon it. In all his mismatched glory, there sat the real, not-a-statue Discord.

“Daddy!” the filly called out as she galloped towards the throne. With each step, her view grew higher and higher, until by the time she reached him, she was life-size once more.

Discord smiled and caught the filly in his lap, patting her on the back. “I knew I could count on you, little one,” he said. “That’s why I picked you.”

“Picked me?” the filly repeated, tilting her head.

“Why of course,” said Discord. “Of all my children, you have always been the most reliable.” He pat her on the head once more, then set her down at the foot of the throne. “But now, now, you must be curious as to what task I have for you today.”

The filly hopped in place. “Oh, boy, am I! Anything for you, Daddy!”

Discord chuckled behind a paw. “And such

“Take care of what? What? Tell me!”

“Settle down, settle down,” said Discord. He swirled around the filly and put a claw on her chin, inspecting every inch of her. “Yes, yes, nothing too abnormal... Might need a little sun, but you’ll do...”

“Oh, do I have to go change the sun again?” she asked. “I-I promise I won’t set anything on fire this time!”

“No, no, no,” said Discord, winking back to his throne in a flash of light. “No, darling, that work is behind you now! You get to do something much better, far greater.” He leaned in close and beckoned her in with a clawed finger. “You, little one, get to go to the ‘Surface’.”

“The S-surface?” asked the filly. She scratched her head. “Where’s that?”

“Oh, it’s not one of the isles,” said Discord. “Frankly, it’s a bit of a secret that it even exists. You see, there’s a world outside of mine, you know.”

The filly gasped. “No way! How is that even possible?!”

“Simple,” said Discord, pointing to the floor. “It’s below us, of course. Always has been, always will be. You just can’t see it.”

“Whoa...” said the filly. She pawed at the tiles beneath her hooves. “W-why do I have to go there?”

“Well I can’t go there myself, for starters. If I’m not here, who will maintain the magic? No, I have to stay just to keep home up and running, you see. But I also need to get something from the Surface. An old something that I once had, long ago.” He poked her on the nose. “Even before you were born, little one.”

The filly’s eyes got wider and wider as he spoke. “And you want m-me to get this super-special thing you lost?”

Discord quickly averted his eyes. “Well of course I didn’t so much lose them, so much as, well, left them there. Yes, I left them down there so I could get them when I felt like it. But now, I’m asking you to do it for me.”

“I’ll do it! I’ll do it!” said the filly.

“Up-up-up!” Discord pointed a claw at her and caught her mid bounce, hovering her in place in an invisible grip. “Now, darling, you have to understand: the Surface is very different. There are bad things down there: things that want to hurt you, ponies that want to hurt you. And even worse...” He paused for effect. “Rules. Lots of rules, rules that can’t be broken by you alone.”

The filly shivered and gulped. “I-I can do it, Daddy. After all, you can help me, r-right?”

“Only to an extent.” Discord set the filly down, then snapped his fingers. A pedestal rose through the marble underneath the filly’s hooves, and a new skylight opened in the ceiling to let the sun shine upon her. “You will have to figure out how to find it on your own, understand? I’ll only be there to talk to. I can’t help any more than that.”

“Y-yes, Daddy,” said the filly. She shook her head, then returned with a firmer expression. “I mean, yes, Daddy! Whatever you say!”

Discord chuckled again and pat her on the head, sparking her with magic; the jolt left her stumbling in place, off-balanced and cross-eyed. “Just think of it as an adventure,” he said. “No, a game! Yes, a game: ‘Find the Things Daddy Wants.’” The filly smiled, but Discord rolled his eyes. “Now, we’ve wasted enough time as it is. I’ll explain more once you’re out.”

“Out?”

No sooner had she asked than the skylight opened above her, sucking the filly out like a vacuum. Discord slinked halfway out the opening after her, smiling and waving as she flew away so fast the whipping wind began to sting.

“Have fun! Be safe!” he said. Though the words didn’t carry over the wind. They sounded in the filly’s head.

Before she had time to respond, she looked behind herself to see the shimmery edge of the world flying back towards her. She barely had time to shut her eyes before impact.

— — — — — —

In the Equestrian deserts to the south, it was about high noon, unfortunately for a pair of troopers stuck on watch out on top of a mesa. Underneath a wide blue sky and holding place over a wide expanse of rock and sand and nothingness, two ponies in silver-and-black rough-armored uniforms did what somepony had to do: keep watch for anything odd.

One of the two, a unicorn stallion, lay drenched in his own sweat at the edge of the mesa, holding up a pair of binoculars as he scanned the horizon. The most he could see, even from this high up, was more sand, rocks, and sand. The black clouds well out in the distance weren’t even a break from the droll task. He’d seen it all before.

“Ugh,” he groaned. “Is it our lunch break yet? I’m dying up here.”

The other pony was busy half-underneath a large hunk of metal, working away with a wrench and hammer on the undercarriage of what looked like a chrome boat with no sail. The contraption had all sorts of lights on the sides and top, and a pair of round thrusters at the back. Towards the front was a black square with a pad embedded in front, with a list of instructions taped beside it.

“Don’t remind me,” said the mare at work between strains on a socket wrench. “Can you believe they wouldn’t let us stay in the garage for this? I mean, come on! This thing was clearly not up to snuff when we left.”

The unicorn stallion looked back and lowered the binoculars. “We will be able to get down without calling in for backup, right?”

From behind the vehicle, the mare flexed her pegasus wings. “Well one of us will,” she mocked.

“Oh hah-hah,” said the unicorn, rolling his eyes. “Just keep working, Scootaloo. Of all the ponies to get stuck up here with...”

Scootaloo popped up and waved a wrench at him. “Oh, you know you wouldn’t want to be stuck with anypony else. You’re just cranky in this heat. As usual.”

“Heat, I can deal with,” he said. “It’s getting slapped with the graveyard shifts and working through lunch that I have a problem with.”

As he turned back to the horizon, he didn’t even need to pull up his binoculars to see something out of the ordinary. It looked like a colossal, floating ball of water drifting across the desert, almost as big as the mesa they stood on. “What the flying—”

Scootaloo looked up and sighed. “Chaos Isles, man. Just give ‘em a look-over. Ten bits says nothing happens.”

The unicorn scanned the edges of the bubble intently. “Nothing called ‘the Chaos Isles’ is ever good news, alright? I don’t get how you can be so nonchalant about this.”

“Saw it pass by on my first day, actually,” said Scootaloo. She set down the wrench and undid the lock on the jack, letting the vehicle tilt back over until it was upright, then hopped on over to the unicorn’s side. “Don’t worry, it's pretty isolated. Just circles the desert, never bothers anypony.”

“Well I think it might this time,” said the unicorn, leaning into the binoculars. Just then, near the left edge of the bubble, he could barely make out a small silhouette dropping from down towards the wasteland below. “Uhh, might just be a rock though. Can’t really see too clearly on these things.”

Scootaloo tapped his shoulder. “Gimme. I’d rather be safe than sorry.”

“Suit yourself, Hawk-Eye,” said the unicorn, levitating the lenses up for Scootaloo.

After a quick jab at her partner’s side, Scootaloo took a look; her jaw immediately dropped. “Dude. Cross. Get in the skimmer.”

“What? Why?”

Scootaloo turned and galloped over for the vehicle and hopped on the front, tapping the screen with her hoof. The hunk of metal sprang to life, humming and whirring as it hovered off the ground. The thrusters below sent dust and rocks scattering all about. “That’s not a rock!” said Scootaloo, leaning to her right on the pad; the entire skimmer turned with her. “That’s a pony!”

Cross Talk didn’t need to be told twice.

— — — — — —

So this is the Surface... thought the filly as she exited the bubble. Well, that’s what she thought initially, as gravity was just taking hold. In that brief moment of weightlessness, she actually could feel wonder and began to dream of what else must lie out there. That is, before she truly entered free-fall.

As she fell, she felt as if most of her went before her hooves, which lingered behind a ways. She heard a bunch of cracks, like she’d broken open a rock, only they came from inside of her. It felt uncomfortable, yet not painful. Rather, it was a bit tingly, and with each crack another flash of white light came from her legs.

What’s going on? she thought. Why are my legs going all long and squiggly?!

It didn’t take long for the rest of her body to start to catch up. More cracks came from her back and her neck, and even some from her face. She frowned and wobbled her lip while the rest of her body grew out to fit her legs.

Suddenly there was one sharp crack from her spine; this time, the flash was delayed, and for a moment, she felt something strange, alien, and terrifying.

“Gaa-haaa!” she screamed. “Daddy! Daddy, help! I’m eating me!”

“I’m sorry, darling, I’m trying!” Discord spoke in her head. “Stay still. It’ll all be over soon.”

“Wh-what’s going on?” the once-filly sobbed. “I-is this because of the rules?”

“I’m afraid so,” Discord explained. “Here, things always fall downward, and a pony cannot stay a foal forever.”

The once-filly looked down ahead of herself at the fast-oncoming ground. “Wh-what happens when I hit that? Do I feel bad like that cracky-thingy again?”

“Don’t worry, darling. I’ll protect you.”

— — — — — —

“Faster, Scoot! Gun it!” yelled Cross Talk from the back of the skimmer. The two had made it down the mesa as fast as possible, but there was no way they’d make it in time to catch the plummeting pony at this rate. They just weren’t getting close enough.

Scootaloo leaned into the control pad and grit her teeth, sending the hover-boat into full-throttle. Cross Talk had to hold on for dear life in the back, but the extra burst of speed seemed to be worth it. “Come on, come on...” Scootaloo told herself.

Cross Talk shook his head. “We ain’t gonna—”

“Shut up and let me drive!” Scootaloo shouted back. Even still, as she watched, she knew he was right. They just weren’t fast enough. Not in a recon skimmer. “Wait,” said Scootaloo with a wild smirk. “I’ve got an idea!”

“Oh no,” said Cross Talk, his eyes going wide. “Scoot! Wait! Think about this first!”

“Too late,” Scootaloo muttered. In fact it was, as she had already unfurled her wings and lowered herself for the jump.

Scootaloo leaped out from the skimmer, leaving Cross Talk to frantically run up to the controls as their vehicle began to wobble off-course. This was behind her, however. Her eyes locked in on the falling pony; with enough extra speed, she might just get there...

“Yo, genius!” Cross Talk yelled over their headset com-link. “If you two collide, you’re both just gonna smash into the ground!”

Despite this evident flaw in the plan, Scootaloo kept flying. It wasn’t until she did the math that she made the logical connection: if a pony-weighted something hit a lighter-than air pony after falling hundreds of feet, something was getting squashed. Her heart skipped a beat as the pony neared impact. Yet as much as it pained her, Scootaloo knew what she had to do.

As the body fell by, she merely fluttered off to the side and shut her eyes tight.

But the impact was not what she was expecting at all. Rather than just a splat or thud or anything of the sort, there was a rather forceful-if-small-scale explosion that nearly knocked Scootaloo out of the sky and left a cloud of smoke in its wake. Nearby, Cross Talk turned the skimmer so sharply the side scraped and sparked across the dirt and rock.

The dust cleared with the next gust of wind, and Scootaloo quickly flew in to take a better look at the damage.

In the center of the ten-foot deep impact crater was a pallid pony, completely intact, if sparkling with a few white flashes here and there.

Scootaloo shook her head in disbelief for a moment, then swooped in near to the pony. To her surprise, the pony stood up all on her own. And astonishingly, she simply shook off the dirt and smiled, looking back and up as if thinking something to herself. Her eyes were a bit unnerving to look at, actually. Their pupils were faded, almost like that of a corpse, while a distinct white spiral cut through both purple-red irises.

“Oh, I see,” said the mystery mare. “Eat and drink? And sleep, too? But what if I don’t wanna?!”

Back in the skimmer, Cross Talk searched around a back compartment through their tools. “Careful, Scoot!” he yelled. “No idea what you’re dealing with here!”

“It’s a ‘she’, calm down!” Scootaloo yelled back. Though when she turned back to the mare in the crater, she hesitated; she was still talking to herself.

“Tired? Oh, and that was pain? Those don’t seem like very fun things to go through...”

“Hey!” Scootaloo yelled from a wary distance. “You okay there?”

The mare’s ears perked up. When she saw Scootaloo, she simply smiled brighter and waved. “Oh, hi there!” she said. “You must be one of those ‘Surface’ ponies Daddy was talking about.”

Scootaloo raised an eyebrow. “Uhh, ‘Daddy’? Who’s that?”

“Oh, Daddy Discord, he—” She paused, looking up again, then nodded. “Oh, Daddy says you can’t hear him because he’s talking inside my head. Sorry!”

Behind her, Scootaloo heard the sound of a standard-issue pulse rifle priming, sort of a high-pitched electronic whine. Cross Talk, laying flat on the back of the skimmer, leveled such a weapon at the mare.

“Uhh, Cross?” Scootaloo asked. “What are you doing?”

“Discord, right?” Cross adjusted his position better angle the weapon. “Evil, chaos, and deceit are the first three things to know about him. This has got to be a trick if he’s involved, right?”

The mare frowned. “Oh, I don’t know about ‘evil’, but Daddy loves chaos and tricking ponies! He’s the best jokester in the world! Well, his world at least. Do you have a big Daddy for everypony here?”

“Uhh, his world?” asked Cross. “Don’t tell me the Chaos Isles—”

Scootaloo groaned. “What did you think they were called that for?” A second later, a new realization hit her, and she whipped back around to the white pony. “Wait, you actually survived a fall from there?! You should be dead!”

The mare frowned. “‘Dead’? What’s that?”

Cross sighed and put his weapon on his back, tapping the console on the skimmer and hopping off just as it set down. “It means you shouldn’t be living anymore. Shouldn’t still be here.”

“What?!” The mare’s lip began to quiver. “Th-that’s awful! Why would something make me do that? Wh-what could be so mean?!”

Scootaloo shuffled her hooves and whispered to Cross, “Geez, it’s like she’s a little kid...”

“Life, that’s what’s so mean,” said Cross, tilting his head. “Wow. What did Discord do to you in there?”

Now the mare tilted her head. “He... took good care of me? Me and all my brothers and sisters?” She paused. “Oh, oh, and now Daddy says you two can take care of me while I’m out an’ about!”

The two troopers stepped back and looked at each other. “Yo,” said Scootaloo. “Uhh, what’s-your-name, we’re not babysitters, alright? We can get you to a safe spot out of the wasteland, but that’s about it.”

“What’s my name?” repeated the mare. “Oh, gosh, I didn’t think I was that important! I’ve never gotten to have a name before.”

The other two stared at her in disbelief.

“Oh come on, you have to have been called something.” said Cross. “I mean, we can probably come up with something if you don’t already have one...”

Scootaloo smacked Cross on the back of the head. “What are we, her parents? And don’t answer that until you think good and hard about it!”

“It’s called doing her a favor, numbskull!” Cross yelled back. “Can’t you see it? This is her first time in the real world, as opposed to whatever Discord has in that bubble thingy. She needs help adjusting, that’s all. No tricks, no deception. She’s just a perfectly innocent pony who needs our help!”

“C-can you two p-please stop fighting?” the mare whimpered. “A-and hitting each other? I don’t want to see either of you turn dead. That would be very, very sad!”

“Ugh, fine,” said Scootaloo. “Sorry, Cross.”

“Apology accepted,” said Cross with a smirk. “Now, come on, help me think.”

“You need help with that? That’s a first.”

“Oh, shut up.” Cross trotted forward and paced around the white mare, looking her up and down. “Well, let’s see: she should probably be dead right now, if not for Discord’s intervention, she’s like an alien who barely understands our way of life, doesn’t really get ‘life and death’ to begin with, and, well, she’s the palest pony of all time. Seriously, she looks like she’s never gotten any sun ever.”

“I’d believe it,” said Scootaloo, pointing over her shoulder at the distant bubble of the Isles. “What’s that all add up to then, huh?”

Cross thought for a moment, then gasped. “I’ve got it! Scoot, fill in the blank: Pale as a...”

It took Scootaloo a moment. “Umm... sn— no, no... ghost! She’s as pale as a ghost!”

“Ghost it is!” said Cross, gesturing to the mare. “What do ya think? Do you mind if we call you that from now on?”

“Goo... go... Ghost?” asked the mare. “Ghost. Ghost! I dunno what that is, but I like it! It’s simple, and kinda silly sounding. Ghostie ghost ghost...”

Cross Talk trotted over and grabbed her by the front hoof. “My name’s Cross Talk,” he said. “And my friend’s Scootaloo. We’re gonna go for a ride now to go see some of our other friends, okay?”

Ghost snickered to herself as they walked over to the skimmer. “Scoooot! That’s a fun name, too!”

Scootaloo offered herself as a stepping stool for Ghost to get onto the craft. She then gave Cross a playful nudge. “See? I’m fun.”

Cross rolled his eyes. “Can you say my name, Ghost? Cross Talk?”

“Cross Talk?” she parroted. “Oh, th-that’s a nice one too. Just not so Scoootie or Ghostie. Sorry!”

“Hah!” said Scootaloo as she climbed on board. “Real smooth. That went about as well as I expected it to.”

“Oh, laugh it up,” said Cross Talk. The two took their positions, Cross Talk in the back keeping Ghost company and Scootaloo at the controls. “You keep forgetting one big thing,” Cross continued.

“Oh yeah? What’s that?”

“You owe me ten bits.”

As they sped across the dust, Scootaloo groaned even louder than the engines. All the sounds from their skimmer intermittently echoed amongst the rocks and empty space. The last thing that could be heard around the crater site was the equally loud voice of Ghost, imitating Scootaloo’s tone and volume:

“What’s a bit?”

Home

Several years ago, the Westfront Resistance Mesa base was casually and technically decommissioned along with the rest of the army calling themselves ‘The Resistance’. While this might imply that it’d now remain antiquated and abandoned to simmer and melt in the heat of the salt flats, it still stands alive and well, just now for a new cause and purpose. Again, this is just like the army occupying its walls.

The base now serves as a coordinating station for the patrols and standing teams that sweep this part of the wasteland routinely. To those outside of the now-called ‘Equestrian Guard’, many see this as either paranoid or futile. Their efforts in the past to fight the threats of the Black Lands were pathetic at best, and the change of scenery to that which no pony in their right mind would want to live in doesn’t bode well for the sanity of the Guard’s commanders. Those outside of the Equestrian Guard are also, sadly, largely uninformed of the ponies’ otherworldly foes.

Put simply, they have no idea what they’re talking about.

Still, many a member of the Guard grows to question why they spend so much time on this one border, especially one that acts as a natural barrier anyway. It would be a lie to say the thought hadn’t crossed the minds of Cross Talk and Scootaloo, but, like the rest of the unit stationed there, the two at least knew better than to speak out to their superiors about it.

The Westfront base itself took up the majority of a hollowed-out mesa with its network of hallways and tech. One of its most defining features was the behemoth double-sided hangar carving a hole straight through the entire rock structure. It had enough room to allow eight to ten sand-skimmers side-by-side, with regulation six foot two-side clearance, through either entrance. That wasn’t even counting the excess room inside for storage and maintenance of the vehicles. The hangar was not without its flaws, however. Even with the gates technically closed, there was no claiming this base was camouflaged in the slightest, from any distance. At least this was justified; they originally identified the mesa as a good construction location by the fact that it had survived a stray meteor impact from the first storm.

That meteor had sailed clean through the mesa and landed on the far side, toppling another mesa in the cluster. Since then, ponies had cleaned up the wreckage, but signs of the crater and debris remained a driving hazard to this day, at least for those on fast-moving sand-skimmers.

Scootaloo loved to push the limit, even just a little here and there.

As their skimmer careened through the fallen boulders and dust shrubs, Cross Talk held onto the back rails for dear life. It was almost as if she was trying to get them killed; every time something remotely ramp-shaped cropped up in their way, Scootaloo would make a beeline for it. This next one actually looked somehow steeper than all the rest combined.

“Whee!” Ghost yelled, holding her forehooves over her head and giggling as they broke the maximum hover-distance and entered the jump.

Cross reflexively held a hoof out to press her back into her seat. He found himself to be pressed back tightly anyway, between the forces and his own outright terror. Even once they landed with a clunky lurch, he stayed glued to the floor of the hoverboat.

“Scoot!” he cried out with a cracking voice. “Take it easy, will ya?”

“What’s that?” Scootaloo mocked over the wind whipping by, never once taking her eyes off the rocks ahead. “I can’t hear you over all this fun I’m havin’!”

“We have another passenger, remember?” Cross yelled again. Since they weren’t busy flying anymore and he could actually stand up, he gave Ghost a quick nudge with a free hoof.

Ghost tilted her head at him. “Who, me? But I’m not passenging. Or passenging anything. Or whatever that means.”

Cross groaned and shook his head. Rather than keep trying with her, he just tried to find something solid in the distance to look at before he got sick. In this case, that something was the open hangar dawning before them. Little dots of chrome, sparkling in the sunshine, whizzed in and out of the opening, all of them going straight up or down the rock face.

“Uhh, Scoot?” Cross asked. “Mind taking it easy on the vertical trip at least? I’d rather Ghost’s first trip with us to not end ironically.”

“You’re not using that word right,” said Scootaloo with a smug smirk.

Cross threw his hooves in the air. “Well I’m sorry I’m not so much a perfect dictionary when I’m flippin’ motion-sick!”

“Contrary to popular belief, you aren’t so perfect when you’re feeling fine, either.”

As they neared the mesa’s base, another skimmer passed by on their side, going about half as fast. Scootaloo finally did slow down a hair now, if only from swerving to steer clear of the oncoming skimmers. Ghost had turned around to watch them pass; despite being jostled around a bit by fish-tailing, she kept her balance. She didn’t even seem bothered by the shaking, only rather intrigued.

“Oooh, who are they?” she asked. “More Surface ponies?”

“Friends of ours, don’t worry,” said Cross. He then turned and glared at Scootaloo. “Scoot, just drive slower up ahead. Ease up, then bite me.”

With a groan, Scootaloo leaned back, slowing the skimmer by about a third of its speed over a second or two. “Oh, fine. Just make sure you’re both secure back there, a’right? Pain in my right hoof...”

Once the skimmer neared the mesa’s bottom, it started to tilt up to match the rapidly-steepening slope. Scootaloo tapped a corner of the control pad, then a set of three long, mostly-flat panels unfurled from the back of the skimmer. Each one snapped to a ninety-degree angle from the base. Cross quickly climbed onto the nearest one, and Ghost did the same from the far side.

“I always hate this part,” Cross grumbled, lowering himself down closer to the panel and clenching his eyes shut.

Mere moments later, they entered the vertical climb. The skimmer’s thrusters audibly switched up their modes, becoming far louder than they had been so far. Scootaloo’s controls swung out and angled slightly, giving her a bit of space to stand while the rest of the vessel kept nearly vertically upward. Nearly was the key word; there was enough of an angle to create a pocket between the floor and the panels that Ghost and Cross stood on, yet still little enough of one that Scootaloo almost reflexively opened her wings. Only Ghost seemed to be able to enjoy the ride, no matter how relatively slow they went.

“Oh, wow, look at that!” said Ghost, pointing back down at the ground. “We’re so high up now! It’s like I’m heading home already!”

She peered further and further over the edge, drawing Cross’ attention by the metal groans coming from the panel beneath her. He just bit his lip and held his tongue; she still seemed fairly balanced. At least the panels were a bit curved to help with just this occasion.

Nopony told Ghost that they were not, however, built to act as springboards during a climb.

“It’s like they’re shiny little ants down there... Hi ants!” Ghost waved her hoof as she bounced. “Can you see me, too?”

Cross fought through the forces pressing down on him and stood up, if only to plant a hoof on Ghost’s back. He looked firmly into her surprised eyes and simply said, “Ghost. Stop.”

After a moment of silence, he took his hoof off. Ghost just smiled at him. “Okie-doke!”

“Yo,” Scootaloo called back. “Hitting the hangar in ten seconds!”

“That means brace yourself,” said Cross, dropping back down to his side of the panels. After a moment, it occurred to him that Ghost was still standing. He groaned, his horn aglow, and tried to shove her down manually.

The glow of his magic simply passed through her and fizzled out.

Ghost giggled as the sparkles from the effort showered over her. “Hey! That tickles!”

“Ghost, please lay down,” Cross tried again. “We’re gonna snap back to flat in like half a second, and I don’t want you flung out like a catapult.”

“Really? Wh—”

“That hurts, Ghost. A lot.”

Just in time for that turn into the hangar, Ghost dropped down to the panel. As the skimmer made its dramatic swing, the two in back were knocked about a bit; it was barely more of a tossing-around than when they landed from one of Scootaloo’s jumps. A moment later, the panels flipped back down, and Cross Talk stood up and stretched his legs while Scootaloo carefully navigated the skimmer between the ponies about the hangar.

Ghost was speechless as she looked around. The walls, floor, ceiling... all looked the same chrome as the skimmer, with patches of black like the control panels here and there. There were easily a hundred other ponies there, each running about or tending to some skimmer or another parked along the outer edges. Flickering artificial light filled where the sunlight wouldn’t reach, reflecting in hazy blotches on the walls and floor. Some ponies shuffled various beeping and glowing instruments between each other, while others seemed content to just watch.

While Ghost was busy sight-seeing, Scootaloo found their spot along the right-side strip. She backed the skimmer into a black patch, then finally tapped the control panel to set it down on the ground.

Then when she turned around to check on the passengers again, she was face to face with the sight of Cross Talk futilely trying to grab Ghost’s hooves in magic. Each time ended up the same; fizzle and sparkles floating around the white hoof. Scootaloo just could not stop smiling.

“Hey,” she whispered to him as she passed. “Having trouble?”

“I swear, it’s her,” he grumbled. “There’s something about her that makes her imm—”

“Yeah, uhuh. Sure.” Scootaloo gave Cross’ horn a hard flick. “I’m sure she’s the problem.”

Cross blushed and smacked her hoof away; this only made her smile wider. He growled and yelled, “Do you ever get off my back?!”

Ghost just stared at them. “Are you two okay?”

“Yeah, we’re fine,” the two said in unison. In their mutual surprise, they just stared back at each other.

“That didn’t just happen,” said Scootaloo.

Cross shrugged. “Whatever you say. Where were we again?”

“You’re horrible at magic?” Scootaloo offered with another smirk.

“Oh, like you’re the best at flying or something.”

Scootaloo scowled and put a hoof on his chest. “I was trained by the best, alright?”

Again, Cross swatted her hoof away. “Who, the Captain?”

“Well... no, but close enough!”

A quick rapping on the hull of their skimmer caught both ponies’ attention. Some colt was standing there, looking fairly young and innocent, if a bit nervous in-uniform. “Uhh, e-excuse me?” he asked feebly. “Mind if I help you two unload? Th-the skimmer, I mean.”

Cross barely glanced at him. “Yeah, go ahead, kid.” The colt nodded back and went around to the back of their vehicle.

Scootaloo sighed and leaned back into a slouch. “Sure is about time somepony gave us a break around here.”

“Like you’d know anything about that,” Cross snapped.

“Oh, come on! Fine, ‘I’m sorry’,” Scootaloo said with a roll of her eyes. “Geez, Cross, you can be such a big baby sometimes.”

“I just want some respect!” Cross yelled, taking a step towards Scootaloo. He paused, slowly reversed the motion, then reached a hoof onto his back and tapped around; his weapon was still there. “Ugh, hang on,” he said, hopping down and trotting around to the back where the colt was.

When he took the weapon off and presented it for the colt in his magical grip, the colt took one look and jumped. “Ga-ah!” the colt yelped.

Cross looked at him sideways and chuckled. “Dude, relax. It’s off. You know, standard poli—”

The two froze, staring into each others’ eyes. Slowly, Cross’ began to widen. “Name and call number,” Cross mumbled.

“Um... wha—”

Cross stepped back, flicking a switch to turn the weapon on. “Name and call number. I’m Cross Talk, U-one-five-nine. You?”

The colt quickly looked side-to-side. “Oh, umm, well, I-I’m new here, I haven’t got one y—”

Immediately, Cross lunged forward after the colt, grabbing him around the neck and wrestling him to the ground. The few ponies nearby stopped what they were doing and craned their necks to get a better look; this included Ghost and Scootaloo, still on the skimmer.

“Scoot!” Cross barked as his weapon primed. “Hold ‘im!”

Scootaloo saluted and jumped down, swapping out for Cross in the pin. Even during the brief window he had, that colt tried to bolt for it, though to no avail. Cross took a few more steps back, leveling the weapon at the colt as Scootaloo lifted the poor pony up.

“Clear!” Cross shouted.

A sickly green bolt fired from the weapon, jagged almost like a lightning bolt. On impact with the colt, however, it all collected in an aura around him. He crackled with the energy from the shot, until patches of it started to gather. The patches grew outward, opening up their centers and revealing something quite unlike a simple pony.

When the energy finally fizzled out, Scootaloo was left holding a struggling changeling. And that struggling turned violent as the big bug frantically bit at Scootaloo’s hoof.

“Ouch!” Scootaloo yelped. The bug got her, first with a bite and then a kick, and took off towards the nearest hangar exit. Scootaloo herself dropped down to the floor. Not because she was that badly hurt, but because she knew what was going to happen next.

Cross jumped up on their skimmer, then cupped his forehooves around his mouth and yelled, “Breach!!”

In seconds, the air was filled with red magical bolts, sailing off in a swarm towards the changeling. Despite all the shots, the bug miraculously kept swerving around and dodging, each bolt missing it by mere inches. The occasional shot singed by its back, causing it to dip in the air, but after each one it quickly caught back up with its own wingbeats.

A few of the shots were fired from near Scootaloo’s skimmer, barely grazing over Cross’s head. He ducked down, then gasped. “Ghost, get down!” he shouted.

“Huh?” Ghost just tilted her head again. Cross barely tackled her to the skimmer deck in time to get her out of the way of a stray shot.

After a few moments of wild firing from the hangar personnel, a loud, booming stallion’s voice echoed over the shots: “Hold your fire!!”

The shots immediately halted. The changeling, only about two-thirds of the way to the exit, nervously turned about to look over its foes. Most of the troopers still had weapons raised, but a few started to put them down. One of the ponies stood out far and above the rest; the stallion barking orders who stood at the now-open entrance to a stairwell. He was easily the strongest pony there. Yet despite his menacing glare, he was unarmed.

Somehow, the changeling got to turn and flee in relative safety. Its wings beat tirelessly as it flew outside. It somehow looked... relieved.

“Now open fire,” the stallion ordered.

The few troopers still aimed didn’t hesitate to launch more bolts at the bug, but the others didn’t even bother. By the time the bolts even got there, the changeling had flown down and away out of sight.

Slowly, Cross and Ghost and Scootaloo each stood to their hooves.

“What was that?” asked Ghost.

“Changeling,” said Cross. “Big bugs that disguise as ponies and feed on emotive energy. Not friendly whatsoever. Not to mention they don’t look too friendly to begin with, outside their disguises.”

Scootaloo trotted around to the side of the skimmer and looked the two over. “Is everypony okay? Nopony’s hurt?”

Ghost smiled and waved a hoof around in front of her face. “I think I’m okay. I’d know if I was hurt, right?”

“From one of those bolts? Definitely,” said Cross. “I remember one time when I was—”

“Corporals!” barked the large stallion. He had trotted straight up to their skimmer; both Scootaloo and Cross instantly saluted him. Even Ghost tried to copy them, but Cross quickly put her hoof down for her.

“Yes, Sergeant Marble, sir!” Cross and Scootaloo recited in unison.

The Sergeant pointed a hoof at Cross. “You! Cross Talk, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good call today,” said the Sergeant, albeit at a non-shouting tone for once. “Those buggers are getting feisty lately. Glad to know we can catch ‘em if we need to.”

Cross Talk stood up proudly and with a smug smile. “Just doing my job, sir.”

“I helped,” Scootaloo grumbled.

Sergeant Marble nodded. “I’m assuming you’re back from your recon work then? Looks like you’re gonna have some report to give after that and this.” On ‘this’, he pointed to Ghost. “Cross, I’ll be frank with you,” Marble continued. “... really? After all those other times, really?”

Scootaloo snickered behind a hoof as Cross flushed bright red. “Sir, if I may, this one’s different! Caught her falling out of that Chaos Isles bubble thing. Nearly wiped us out on impact with some sort of detonation that softened her fall... somehow.”

The Sergeant just stared at Cross for a moment. “Alright, come with me,” he finally said, heading back to the stairs. “And bring her with ya.”

Cross and Scootaloo exchanged a look, then followed Marble. Ghost hopped shortly after them. “Uhh, sir?” asked Scootaloo.

“You got a briefing for the Captain, right?” he asked as they walked. “I just wanna hear this for myself. Sounds like the long version o’ that’ll be a doozy.”

“Fair enough,” said Cross. “Come on, Ghost.”

The group stopped at the door to the stairs. Marble quickly whipped around, stern expression back on his face, and started to yell, “And the rest of you! I wanna see these stations triple-checked for any tampering! Now! Who knows how long that bug was in our base?!”

Scootaloo just barely squeezed by the big stallion to get to the door, then opened it and waved for the others to follow while the Sergeant kept shouting.

Ghost went first, followed closely by Cross. She couldn’t stop glaring at Sergeant Marble with every word he spoke. “What’s his problem?” she asked. “Why’s he all shout-y?”

“It’s his job,” Scootaloo explained.

The Sergeant stomped his hoof on the hard metal, then turned and stepped into the doorframe. But before he left, he turned to add one last remark. “And for Celestia’s sake,” he said, motioning at the door, whose knob had been roughly scorched, “learn to aim!”

— — — — — —

Twenty two and a half minutes later, according to the clocks on the wall, the group found themselves in the Captain’s office towards the top part of the mesa-base. It was fairly similar to the rest of the base in style: lights and chrome with a little black matte here and there. There was a table over to the side with a hologram projector above, currently showing a rough diagram of the base’s infrastructure. At the far end from the door was a desk surrounded by windows to the outside, some currently doubling as monitors linked to the base’s security system. One in particular was stopped on a still frame of Cross zapping the changeling.

Everypony in the group saluted as the captain stood and stepped out from behind her desk.

“We have our report, Captain!” said Scootaloo. “Ma’am, we found somepony you might be interested in hearing about.”

“First,” said the Captain, “at ease, Scootaloo. I’ve had a long day, and the last thing I need is somepony overdoing it.”

“Yes, Ma’am— er, Captain Spitfire, Ma’am,” said Scootaloo, offering an apologetic smile.

“Second,” Spitfire snapped, “Cross Talk: good call. I’ve been watching the recording on loop.” She smirked, nodding at Scootaloo. “You two aren’t half bad when you need to be.”

“Thank you, Ma’am,” said Cross.

Suddenly Spitfire’s expression grew much more serious. “However,” she said, “who is this, and why shouldn’t I kick you out in the dust for bringing another mare back here?!”

“She’s different, Ma’am!” Cross whined. Scootaloo tried desperately not to break down laughing. “She’s not Equestrian, Ma’am. She’s from the Chaos Isles.”

Spitfire rolled her eyes. “Let me guess, she fell down from the heavens...”

“Yeppers, Ms. Ma’am Spitfire Captain!” said Ghost, bouncing out from behind the others. “Spitfire Ma’am Captain? Captain Spit-Ma’am-Fire?”

The Captain’s jaw dropped. “Alright, I’ll bite,” she said. “Where’d you find a non-Seether alien?”

“Er, he’s not exaggerating, Ma’am,” Scootaloo said feebly. “The Isles passed by this afternoon near our patrol route. We caught her falling out of it.”

Sergeant Marble raised an eyebrow. “Falling out of the Chaos Isles, eh?” he asked. “How are you sure?”

“She says she’s Discord’s daughter,” said Cross. “Or... something.”

The officers each took a step back from Ghost. “And you brought her here?!” Spitfire yelled. “Are you out of your mind?”

Cross quickly jumped between Ghost and the other two. “Sh-she’s harmless!” he said. “I swear! A little weird and loopy, sure, but she’s just an innocent filly at heart!”

The Sergeant and Captain summarily ignored him. “I think,” said Marble, “this could be some changeling scheme. They could see our patrol routes. They could see the Isles on its own path.”

“I don’t know...” said Spitfire, rubbing her chin as she tried to get a better look at Ghost. “What’s with the eyes, anyway? I’ve never seen that on anypony, not even as some weird civilian fashion thing.”

Cross bit his lip. “Come on, come on...” he muttered. “There’s got to— Wait! Sirs, I can prove it!”

Spitfire glared at him. “Stand aside, corporal. This isn’t your call.”

“But I can help make it, Ma’am,” he insisted. Cross trotted across the room towards the hologram-table and started rummaging through the drawers behind it. The officers just let him go, both more focused on giving Ghost a thorough, three-sixty inspection. Scootaloo, on the other hoof...

“What. Are. You. Doing?!” she whispered harshly in Cross’ ear. “This isn’t your stuff! Put it back!”

Cross scoffed. “Scootaloo, please. I know what all this does— Aha!” He lifted out a small device, something like a barcode scanner with more buttons and switches on it, as well as a small screen above the handle. “Magic scanner. They use it to find changelings that aren’t so dumb as to blow their cover.”

Scootaloo glanced quickly over at the officers; to her relief, they still weren’t looking. “Neat,” she said. “Now put it back!”

“Hang on,” he said, hovering it out and snickering to himself. “Come on, Scoot, you gotta admit this is cool.”

“All of it’s cool. I know that, that’s half the reason I joined the Guard,” Scootaloo said with an exasperated sigh. “Now put it back!”

Cross flicked a switch on the front of the device and pointed it at himself. On the screen, a purple bar began to rise and waver around the middle of the screen. “Unicorn magic,” he said.

“Great,” Scoot grumbled. “Now—”

He turned it on Scootaloo for a moment, then turned the screen to show her. Now a sky blue bar had risen to that mid point, although it started to fall as they watched. “Pegasus magic, too. You know, that stuff that lets you fly so well. This thing just goes to show how much magic is out there that we’re not even aware of!”

“Good grief, Cross, do you realize how much of a nerd you sound like right now?”

Before he could respond, the device began to glow brightly and make several high-pitched beeping noises. On the screen, every bar was drawn out to a steady maximum, with several warning flashing across the bottom. The two ponies stared at this for a moment before their eyes slowly rose off the screen; the device was aimed at Ghost.

“What does that mean?” asked Scootaloo.

“I can settle this!” said the Sergeant, continuing from his conversation with Spitfire. He stomped on over past Ghost, making her spin around as she tried to watch both officers as they’d watched her, and up to Cross. “Rifle, corporal. Now.”

Cross gasped. “Sir, you can’t shoot her! She’s a civilian!”

“Or a changeling,” said the Sergeant, scooping the rifle off Cross’ back by hoof. “Frankly, be thankful I’m not testing you for this. You’re way too protective of her for your own good.”

The way Marble worded that, a thought came to Cross’ mind. “Discord... he—” His eyes grew wide. “Sir! You can’t shoot her!”

His rifle, however, was already primed in the Sergeant’s hooves. “Antimagic bolt, corporal. Just a little zap, and we’ll see if she’s really what she says she is.”

“If not more,” Cross muttered pathetically, gulping as he stared at Ghost and the overloading scanner.

“Clear!” yelled the Sergeant. Spitfire stood back a few paces.

Scootaloo and Cross took one look at each other, grabbed the other by the shoulder, and hit the deck.

Now, none of the ponies in that room that day could ever quite agree on what they saw next. There was something of a blinding white light that flared up from the end of the Sergeant’s weapon’s beam. That’s one of the few things their stories would ever have in common. Spitfire would claim she saw a swirling mass of some white gel, that almost seemed ethereal in nature. Scootaloo thought she saw a dark abyss, gazing into the infinite, amidst a swirl of deformed pieces of a pony’s body. Cross Talk only claimed to see white and black swirled together and clouded through watery eyes; he would also claim that the only tears in his eyes were thanks to the sheer intensity of the light.

Sergeant Marble, however, would be very vivid in his description of the incident. A swirling mass of white tendrils surged forth from the point of impact, growing ever closer though never quite reaching him. He believed there to be, masked in a sea of white, a single, red, draconic eye with a distinct swirl on the iris staring him down, lulling him into a hypnotic state.

There were only a few certainties about this particular incident. For one, the effects were both blinding and deafening. Second, while the ponies in the office were incapacitated, all the windows in the room and most of the screen were shattered, while almost all of the computers and similar tech, including lights, in the first forty floors of the Western Resistance Mesa base started to display random images of static and turn off and on in varying intervals.

Lastly, Cross Talk was the one to break the effects by shutting his eyes, retrieving the rifle from the Sergeant’s hooves with magic, and switching the fire mode to ‘stun’ mid-stream.

As he did so, the green magical bolt-stream turned to white and shorted out. Whatever was there in the middle of the room, it was gone now, leaving only Ghost with smoking hair and a dazed look on her face.

“Whe-ee...” she groaned, stumbling about with a loopy smile on her face.

The Sergeant collapsed to the floor, mumbling something incoherent to himself. The others slowly stood up, dusting the glass off of themselves.

“That,” Spitfire growled at the corporals, “is called an asset! Not a civilian!”

“We didn’t know until you did, Ma’am,” said Cross, shaking in his hooves.

“Well now you do!” Spitfire slowly stepped away from her desk and towards the corporals, avoiding the glass as best she could. She took a look around at the monitors and sighed. “Yes, now we know your new girlfriend is really some alien... E-M-P... bomb. Or something.”

Ghost shook her head. “E-M-P?” she asked. “Isn’t it p-o-n-y?”

“Whatever!” Spitfire snapped. She looked over at her desk and groaned, shaking her head. “Are you all done destroying my office? I mean briefing me? Because I’ve got a new assignment for you three anyway.”

Scootaloo glanced over at the Sergeant and rolled her eyes. “Uhh, Ma’am? I think Sergeant Marble’s down for the count.”

“Not him,” said Spitfire. She pointed a hoof at Ghost. “You two and your asset.”

“Ghost is a ‘she’, Ma’am,” said Cross. Scootaloo gave him a quick jab to the side.

“That’s not what I saw, corporal,” Spitfire said, a bit softer in tone. She took one look at Ghost and shuddered. “Look, the point is, she’s useful. Frankly, we might be able to use that on your next mission.”

Scootaloo tilted her head. “Mission, Ma’am? I thought we were just a recon team.”

“Recon, scout, same thing. At least it is when we’re strapped for hooves around here.” Spitfire raised her hoof towards her desk, but saw the shards again and thought better of it. “You know those changelings, right? How they’re getting bolder?”

“And stupider, right?” Scootaloo offered.

“Actually, that’s not far off,” said Spitfire. “Another recon team spotted them circling a mesa like vultures due West of here. And another after them confirmed it. We’ve found their hive, and tonight, we’re taking it down.”

“Sweet!” said Scootaloo. She saluted, ignoring a piece of glass in her hoof. “We’ll do our best, Ma’am!”

“Hang on,” said Cross, looking at the Captain sideways. “What’s Ghost got to do with this?”

Spitfire looked around the room, gesturing along with her hoof. “You see this? You see what she does if we light that fuse? I call that quick clearance. Emergencies only, of course, but—”

“You want us to weaponize that?!” Cross asked. “Ma’am, that’s Discord’s protective magic, least as far as I can tell. How can you be sure it won’t backfire?”

Spitfire cleared a space on the floor, then stomped her hoof. “What part of ‘emergencies only’ don’t you understand, corporal? Take her— Ghost with you to the changeling hive. If things get hairy, you know how to set her off and set it right.”

“But—”

“That’s an order, Cross!” Spitfire yelled through grit teeth. She paused, then sighed. “Look: just get it done, and come home tonight. That’s all I’m asking.” Finding careful hoofing, she made her way closer to the two and put a hoof on Scootaloo’s shoulder. “You two aren’t bad out there. Don’t think I’m trying to get rid of you or anything.”

“But you kind of are,” said Cross.

“Wrong,” said Spitfire. She nodded back over her shoulder at a very flustered looking Ghost. “I’m getting rid of a monster.”

“She’s not—”

“I don’t care!” Spitfire yelled in Cross’ face. “Callsign’s ‘Charlie’. Main group should be in the hangar massing by the exit. You take lead.”

Scootaloo nodded, but Cross once more raised his hoof. “Ma’am,” he said. “I don’t th—”

‘I. Don’t. Care.” Spitfire glared at him and pointed to the door. “Get going, and get that abominable, living E-M-P out of my base!”

“She means you, Ghost,” said Scootaloo, already hurrying out the door with Cross.

Ghost trotted on after, yet stopped just short and smiled at Spitfire. “I don’t know what’s going on, but I’ll help if I can,” she said.

“Please leave,” Spitfire grumbled.

And so she did, just barely sidestepping the quivering Sergeant on the floor.

The mesa in question was a fairly unassuming one, especially compared to that of the base. There weren’t any particular paths up or chips carved out by impact or erosion or anything of the sort. Only a few scattered dark spots, presumably holes to act as entrances and exits for the bugs, showed any sign that it was more than just a large rock in the desert.

Captain Spitfire wasn’t kidding; the entirety of the sixteen sand-skimmer party headed out of the base and took a straight western heading for at least two hours. It gave Cross Talk and Ghost at least a little time to pick glass out of Scootaloo, at least once Cross had finished with himself.

By the time they had gotten there, the sun was mostly set, illuminating the desert in a beautiful orange-pink glow. Scootaloo’s skimmer was the first to arrive, as planned. They had been shown a few pictures back in the hangar from the recon team that caught the first glimpse; supposedly, there was an entrance four-fifths of the way up. Unfortunately, trying to set the skimmer there nearly capsized the vessel, forcing them to make an emergency stop at the peak.

Ghost trotted around in a circle around the outer edge of the mesa flat, staring at the sky. “I never knew night could be so pretty...”

“Easy there, Ghost,” said Scootaloo as she trotted around back for the supply compartment. “Stay close around here. We’ll keep ya safe, but we gotta keep track of ya, first.”

Cross, meanwhile, was laying on the back of the skimmer, fiddling with his headset. “Repeat,” he said into the microphone, “prepare rappelling equipment. The landing balcony is too narrow. I— yes, we tried! I almost died because of that stupid thing!” He looked over the rear railing at Scootaloo; she didn’t even look at him. He held a hoof over his mic. “Uhh, Scoot? You there? Where’s the snark?”

Scootaloo put on a helmet from the rear over her headset, then slammed the compartment and fluttered up into Cross’ face. “You listen to me, then I’ll listen to you. Got it?”

“Okay, about the scanner? I’m sorry. But that was totally not my fault! I tried to stop him!”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Scootaloo flew over to the edge of the mesa and peered over. “Look, it’s a matter of judgment calls, alright? You’re kind of... well if today’s any indication, you’re just awful at those.”

“Scoot, you know that’s not fair.” Cross put a hoof up to his headset again. “Mhmm, mhmm... yes, just head up the northwest face. North. West. How hard is that to understand?!”

With a groan, Scootaloo fluttered up and over the edge of the mesa. Ghost quickly ran after to watch; the quick-moving white pony caught Cross’ eye.

“Scoot?! Where are you going?” he called over the com-link.

Scootaloo scanned the side of the mesa for the balcony they’d skipped, then swooped in for a landing. “Relax, Cross,” she said.

“Relax? Are you kidding me?! Get back here and wait for the others!”

“Re-lax,” Scootaloo repeated as she landed. Before her was no doubt of the changelings’ presence; the entrance was coated in a thick green membrane. She took a deep breath, then hovered back off the ground and un-shouldered her rifle. “Cross, I’m armed, and I have the coms to keep in-touch with. Besides, we’re the scouts. This is our job, checking things out before the others.”

“If I hear so much as a single shot...”

“Twenty bits then,” said Scoot. “Double or nothing, I’ll be fine.”

“... fine. If only to make this a win-win for me, fine. Just please be careful!”

“Hey, what’d I tell ya? I was trained by the best, remember?”

“I don’t even know how to respond to that.”

Good, thought Scootaloo as she flicked on a flashlight on her helmet. The light seemed to make the membrane contract on reflex, opening it up for her. Still, she proceeded with caution, especially once the membrane closed shut behind her.

Inside, as far as she could tell, there was just a single exit from the chamber at the far end. There weren’t even any side burrows or tunnels, at least none big enough for a changeling. At most, there were piles of green goo stuck around the walls. Scootaloo nearly gagged; she swore one of them was moving.

“Hey,” she whispered into the mic, “First room’s clear, only one way through. I’m heading in deeper.”

“Oh no you aren’t,” said Cross. “Scoot, just wait. I see the others, they’re on their way n—”

Scootaloo rolled her eyes. “What’s that? I... an... eak... ingup...”

“... what are you, four?”

“Four what? What’s this thingy? Who are you talking to?” Ghost had apparently found Cross’ headset. From the sound of things, she had taken it off his head and they had started to fight over it, too. Scootaloo just smiled and carried on. She was especially glad after a short click on the other end and the the silence that followed.

Down the hall she went, carefully navigating as the rock grew narrower, then wider, then almost too narrow to squeeze through, then wider again. All the while, she felt the musk and must of the area dampen down her armor and exposed feathers. If not for feeling the need to hold a weapon in her hooves, she would’ve set down and tried to walk the rest of the way to keep her wings closer by her sides. At least the intake on her helmet was filtered, to an extent. It wasn’t custom-fitted, so some of the raw stench of changeling slime got through occasionally; the odor was dizzying.

She then found herself in an odd cavern. It was a bit larger than the first, and as she scanned about, there were many more tunnels and other openings to be found. The green slime and membranes piled up over most of the room, but one massive blob caught Scootaloo’s eye. It was almost perfectly rounded, centered against the far wall, and seemed to be a bit discolored when she shone her light upon it.

Scootaloo slowly and warily fluttered closer to it, through a beam of sunlight shining through a crack in the ceiling. It wasn’t just a glob; it was a pod of some sort. The discoloration came from what was inside; a changeling. But on close inspection, this wasn’t just some normal changeling. It had hair, a longer, more elaborate horn, and... eyelids?

“What the...” Scootaloo gave the pod a prod with the end of her rifle, and the entire contents began to shift for a moment. She jumped back, leveling her weapon at the thing, but nothing else seemed to happen. “Hmm,” she said, looking between her weapon and the pod. “I wonder...”

Next she gave a sharper jab with the barrel. She wasn’t quite prepared for the results; the pod’s ‘skin’ burst open, and a surge of viscous green fluid flowed forth, directly onto Scootaloo. Soon, the creature inside the pod flowed out with it, parts of its carapace ripping at the membrane of the pod in the process.

Some of the fluid ran past the visor on the helmet and got in Scootaloo’s mouth. Immediately, she threw the helmet down and gagged and coughed onto her hooves; the rancid taste lingered in her mouth like a film made of sewage waste.

Yet as she did so, she heard something else do the same. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a bright green flash; she quickly scooped up her rifle and aimed it at the source, the creature from the pod, only to almost immediately drop the weapon again. “No,” she said. “N-no, you can’t... no!”

The changeling shook her head, and what was left of the fluid on her hair drained off; that hair, along with the changeling’s tail and non-black body carapace, slowly pulsated through the colors of the visible spectrum. The changeling herself, for it was clear by her figure it was a she, looked over to Scootaloo and smiled, made only more twisted by her inches-long wicked fangs. Even as she spoke, it was off. Familiar, yet distorted beyond all comfort:

“Hey, kid,” said Rainbow Dash. “Um... where are we?”