//------------------------------// // Epilouge // Story: So, You Want to be a Princess? // by Meep the Changeling //------------------------------// Princess Cadence - 11/03/2018 The Nest - Badlands, Equestria “Can you hear me, Cadie?” Cadence groaned. The voice sounded so far away. What’s going on? She opened her eyes, but nothing changed. The world remained black and distant. Cadence gasped, her body felt numb and distant but also strange. Something fundamental was off and she couldn't quite tell what. Cadence's heart skipped a beat as panic flooded through her body. For a moment she swore she felt a second heart keeping her blood flowing while the other stopped. Her panic deepened, becoming and ocean of terror. The mare's ears drooped, making both stone and chitin creak as she tried to turn her head to find the source of the voice. “Who are you? Where am I? Why is everything dark?” “It’s me, Cadie. Shining,” Shining said as he placed a hoof on Cadence’s side. Cadence felt his touch and smiled as she felt their love along with his hoof. Then she frowned, her lips pulling across her teeth, making her acutely aware of a pair of fang-like canine teeth. “Good… Why can’t I see? What happened to my teeth? What's going on?” A voice Cadence didn’t recognize cleared its throat. “You’re only half de-petrified. What’s the last thing you remember?” Cadence groaned. Her head hurt fairly bad. “Flying away from the tower. Who are you?” “That’s Quick Study. He works for us now,” Shining explained. “Soo… You remember Chrysalis swapping your bodies?” Every part of Cadence's body that could move twitched as a bolt of anger raced through her. The sound of creaking and cracking stone, groaning chitin, and thrumming gossamer from a single wing “Yes! So that’s what she did! Buck! We need to get back to the palace and—” Cadence frowned and twitched her one mobile wing again, listening to the faint buzzing sound it made. That's not feathery rustling... Oh... Oh, god no... That's right. The sudden perspective change. Did she swap our— “I’m sorry, my Queen. We cannot,” Quick sighed, his voice carrying genuine distress. “It’s been almost half a year since the invasion. With you petrified, Chrysalis was able to convince everypony she was the real deal. Celestia did check with magic, but she has your real body, and some of her few remaining agents were able to alter records of your soul’s aura-signature. She got away with it.” Cadence felt the mother of all curses brewing in her gut and ready to explode out of her lips. Her left eye twitched as the sightless draconic emerald orb contracted. “Mother… bucking… daughter of a—” Shining gently placed a hoof on Cadence’s lips. “Quick! We agreed to break that to her slowly!” “I’m sorry, Princess. But she needs to know the truth.” Cadence pushed Shining’s hoof away from her mouth with her tongue. “Excuse me! I need to finish swearing angrily!” “Cadie, it’s not as bad as you think!” Shining promised, his fur rustling as he moved around to her front side. “HOW?!” Cadence demanded, bearing her fangs as her pointed ears perked, looking almost like horns as they jut forward with her rage. “For starters, Celestia is now extremely paranoid. Security all across Equestria is stupid-tight, to the point where dispelling charms are stripping all active spells from anypony who enters any government building. Walk through the door, poof! All your magic is gone. She even found a way to make them force changelings to demorph.” Cadence felt the air move as Quick nodded in agreement. “Chrysalis can do nothing via her normal means of subterfuge… And doesn't seem to want to. As far as we can tell, she’s decided to take on your roll entirely. I believe nearly losing everything has made her decide to… Not turn over a new leaf, but play things very slow and close to her chest. She can get the throne she wanted simply by being you after all. That was her original plan. She won, technically.” Cadence frowned, expecting a knot to form in her stomach as anger built in her, but she had no stomach to be knotted up. Instead, a deep tingling in the back of her throat burned away as her emotions raged. “Oh yeah… She was going to pretend to be me for however long it took before this mess started, didn’t she?” Shining nodded twice and gave Cadence a gentle kiss on the cheek. Cadence's ears twitched as she felt his affection as if it were a real tangible thing she could touch, and also something she could smell. Another layer of the strange sensation whispered in her ear, telling her that the stallion found her now smooth body quite sexy. “That’s right," Shining said. "Her plan B doesn't work because nobody saw you doing amazing things during the invasion, and she’s no longer a changeling. She wouldn’t get the power boost. So she’s just being you. We have till she is given the Crystal Throne to sort all of this out.” Cadence sighed. “More problems… life is always more problems… What are our assets?” Cadence could hear the smile in Quick's voice as he spoke. “We have a decent force, my Queen. Myself, and sixty other changelings, Twilight Sparkle, the entirety of the Hay’s Angels biker gang, the nest we dug under an old castle in the badlands, and of course the Princess.” Cadence frowned, her un-petrified wing slid down along her exoskeleton, making a sad creaking noise almost like a violin. “Which one?” Shining paused as he tried not to laugh at his birde's wing-emote. “He means me. Changelings are weirded out by male leaders, so they started calling me Princess.” “Also you’re still a mare most of the time,” Quick reminded with a smirk. “Oh, buck off!” Shining grumbled. “It’s not my fault I can only be a stallion for about ten—” Shining’s voice changed from masculine to feminine mid sentence as he reverted to Gleaming Shield once more. “— minutes. … Dang it! Once she's on her hooves again you are so fixing this!” Quick giggled. "I thought you liked being a mare." "I do! For short piriods, for fun. I want to be me again too." Cadence smiled, a giggle escaping her lips before she frowned. Someone was missing from this reunion. “Where’s Harley?” If we lost my little girl-bike I will bucking— Cadence felt a rush of happyness come from Quick as he smiled and her synaisthima glands fully depetrified. She could feel Quick's pride, the wizard most differently took extreme joy in his arcane accomplishments. “She’s playing with some of the other sapient motorcycles I made for the Hay’s Angels as a reward for helping you, my Queen. They enjoy racing in the dunes above us.” Cadence sighed in relief and wished she could see exactly where she was and what it was like. Knowing who we have to work with is one thing, but I realy wish I coudl see what we have. I have the feeling we have a cave. This sounds like a cave. "Above us? Are we underground?" Quick tapped the rock under his hooves. "Of course we are, your highness. We dug a proper nest for you. We're working on installing mana-lines to power lighting at present. Don't worry, this will all be state of the art. Far better than our nest on Earth... Just without Netflix." Gleaming snickered. "No, we'll have Netflix. I got Twilight to smuggle the 'laptop' Princess Celestia souped up for me to the next. It's more than able to serve as a network hub." Cadence blinked in surprise. "We will have power, and internet, in a cave?" "Nest," Quick corrected. "We have floors, halls, rooms, furniture, we even have some carpeting! This is a planned structure made from carving out rock. It's not a cave!" Cadence could feel the changeling's indignation. Okay, don't call it a cave. He's proud of this. It's probably nice “Okay… What’s our plan to unbuck this situation?” Gleaming cleared her throat, prompting Cadence's ears to swivel to face her. “Our plan is to depetrify you. Once your back to normal, Quick and I are going to do what Celestia didn’t. Properly educate you as a wizard. While doing that, we make sure Chrysalis can’t do anything sneaky, and when the time's right, we get your body back and make her pay!” Cadence’s lips pulled into a steeper smile, making some of the thin stone covering her cheeks crack and flake away. “I like that plan. It should have been the plan from day one. This whole mess would have been avoided if we just… i don’t know, left me in that pocket dimension till I learned everything.” Cadence squirmed as small spikes of mild pain began to tingle all over her body in seemingly random spots. Gleaming nodded. “Yeah… I said you could handle that, but Celestia was worried you’d go insane.” “Don’t worry,” Quick said. “I can also create such dimensions and will be much less foolish in their application… Princess, we need to put her back to sleep. The pain killing spell is about to wear off.” Cadence gulped. “Pain killing spell?” Gleaming nodded and rubbed the back of her head with her hoof. “Y— Yeah… You’re half stone. That would hurt really bad. But Quick said he could wake you up for a little bit and I missed you a lot.” “How soon will I be okay?” Quick thought for a moment, tapping his hoof idly as he thought. “Another two weeks, maybe a month. Don’t worry, you’ll be up and about soon and we can begin your training for your return.” Cadence frowned. “I— I’m still worried about her being in my body. Can somepony keep a close eye on her while I’m out?” Gleaming gently squeezed Cadence’s left hoof, and she felt a nearly endless ocean of love, affection, and adoration flood from her special somepony. Her eyes widened in awe. "Holy-- Is this... I'm literally feeling emotions. This is crazy!" Quick laughed. "It's not crazy, your highness. He just loves you a lot." Cadence felt Gleaming's embarrassment as she blushed. "It's... a little weird living with emotovores... But I'll bet dating one will have perks!" Cadence's hearts beat faster “Don't worry, Twilight’s become her “best friend” we know almost everything she does. It will be okay. I love you, Cadence.” Cadence smiled, content in the knowledge that one day soon she would be able to retake what was hers. We will have plenty of time this time. We can make a real plan. I’ll have real assets, and proper tools too! “I love you too, Shiny.” Cadence smiled and hummed contently as she drifted off into a normal and restful sleep. Her last thought not of revenge, but of snuggling up alongside Shining, or Gleaming, whichever her love was at the time, and spending the night together.