//------------------------------// // Chapter 1: The Internet & I // Story: Queen Chrysalis, Attempted Mind Thief // by HiveLordLusa //------------------------------// Canterlot, the capital city of Equestria. From a distance, the white city on the mountainside looked majestic, radiant, the shining heart of the Pony nation... Or at least it had been that way earlier. After the Changeling queen ordered her people's invasion of the city, it looked much worse for wear. The queen herself didn't have much time to think about any of these facts as she was pushed away from the city. After her attempted impersonation of Princess Cadence was discovered, she had tried to take the city by force. It worked for about five minutes, only for the changelings to be defeated by the princess and her fiancée. Somehow they had combined their love for each other into a massive anti-changeling pulse, expelling the invading army in a single moment. The queen herself - Chrysalis - was using her brief air time to both lament the fact that she had failed and hope that the end of her travel didn't result in a squishy mess. Chrysalis rapidly approached the Badlands, the desert where her hive was located, screaming all the way. She saw the ground rising up to meet her, and knew it was the end. She reached terminal velocity and felt herself touch the ground... Without warning, the rock around her opened up with a tear in reality and a stunned Chrysalis flew right through the hole. As soon as she passed through, it closed again, a heated, glassy patch the only visible mark that it had existed. "Wha...?! What is this place?!" Chrysalis was utterly baffled by her new surroundings. They looked nothing at all like anything she had ever seen in Equestria or any of its neighbours. Given she was a changeling and therefore could go almost anywhere - which she had done; among changelings, she was considered well-travelled - it scared her that she had no way of processing the lights, colours and noise swirling around her faster than she could blink. One thing she did manage to notice was that she was still flying backwards through whatever space this was. Her wings tried to flap uselessly, but the force pushing her was still too strong for them to be of any use. The changeling quickly folded her wings back. She had always found it useful to stay prepared for the next situation, and she didn't know if she'd need them. Better to have them ready and unused than regret their physically painful absence later. As Chrysalis continued to fly back, she was again distracted by her surroundings. She kept staring at the colours, in wonder at a place like that existing. After looking for what may have been minutes or hours - time seemed to have no meaning in that place - Chrysalis found herself noticing actual shapes amongst the swirl. The harder she looked, the more she began to recognise some of what she was seeing. There were different pictures of all the species in Equestria and its surroundings, amongst many other unrecognisable things. The longer she flew, the less she saw of anything remotely familiar. The most prominent things she started to see were of strange bipedal creatures, doing a variety of things in an even larger variety of colours than even the ponies were capable of. Time continued to pass, and Chrysalis continued to fly. One Year Later Ah, the things she had learned. Chrysalis was, of course, a changeling. Changelings usually did as much research as possible into the pony they were disguising themselves as, including information about common interactions and the environment. The only reason she was discovered when impersonating Princess Cadence was that she had a lot less time to get into character than she needed, and so had to improvise based on limited information. An entire year to do nothing but study her surroundings was different. Eventually Chrysalis’ forced flight had slowed down. Unfortunately she still lacked any real control over her direction and speed, though she had been able to change her orientation within the strange space. It had been enough, though – she had come to learn many things about the goings on around her once she could actually see things for more than a split second. One of these things was that this purgatory was labelled anything from “the Internet” to “da webz” depending on where she looked, at least from the oddly almost-perfect Equestrian text she could read. It was also so full of interactions that she was able to siphon off varying forms of love to survive, though she was not in good shape. It didn’t help that some of the things flying around her did sometimes cross her path quite painfully. One particularly stinging incident somehow involved a lewd image of the Queen herself flying into her face! At this point she found herself nearing something she had been able to see for a very long time now, something that was sorely missed on her journey – an actual solid, unmoving wall. Or at the very least, something similar enough that Chrysalis was hopeful she might finally be able to escape this wretched place. She’d had enough of this ‘goggle’, ‘tube’ and ‘tumble’ nonsense for the rest of her very long life. Closer and closer she flew, and the ‘wall’ came more into focus. Chrysalis realised that it seemed to be made up of a collection of strange, differently-sized windows. Her changeling heart fluttered in joy for the first time in oh so long, as she found herself heading straight for a window. She then noticed collections of smaller objects in front of every window, and immediately hoped her exit wouldn’t be painful. Late September, 2013 A.D. "…Well, shit. I’d better run- ah! Stop that!” Hello, I’m Daniel. “Bugger off you skeletal wankers!” Right now I wasn’t having that great a time. Fighting for your life and pretty much losing against a skeleton horde isn’t normally what I would consider- “Ah, you little midget bastard! Come here, I’m angry now!” – sorry, what I would consider fun. I ran through the graveyard, a group of “immortal skeletaurs” or something chasing after me. I had to take down their health and spam my 'e' key near their bodies. Doing so would pull out the spirit sword that gave them their immortality, and would allow me to finally get rid of them all. Oh, did I mention I was playing Borderlands 2? Probably should have by now. Specifically, Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep. I very slowly managed to get rid of the skeleton enemies around me, running around while invisible and stabbing them or blasting them with sniper rifles or shotguns at close range – in my opinion, the best possible range for a weapon in games – and pressed on ahead. About half an hour later I found my character in a large stone room, a narrow doorway behind me and a skeleton on a throne at the far end. In the middle of the room sat a set of large weapon crates. I opened two and took all valuable gear. Feeling pretty confident and lax, I moved right up close to the third, opened it… As Chrysalis flew closer and closer, she closed her eyes and hoped she wouldn’t hit the objects in her way. … She peeked open her left eye, and noticed she was simply passing through everything painlessly. “…oh” Then she hit the window. That’s where the pain began. “AHHHH-!” I was greeted with an enormous fanged maw literally bigger than my character and couldn’t help but yell out, “WHAT EVEN-!?” I could’ve sworn I also heard someone else screaming as well. I made my character sprint back to a small doorway, more surprised and confused than scared. I fired at the monster repeatedly, only just remembering the existence of ‘Mimics’ like the thing before me. I fired shot after shot of my four weapons, even my rocket launcher, and it just took the hits and kept attacking. I finally killed it, sighed, and just sat for a moment, letting myself just relax a bit. I took my mouse in hand once more and set off further, though I seemed to have picked up a headache. I assumed it to have been a result of adrenaline or something. It’d happened before, so I just ignored it for now. About half an hour later I stopped playing and got ready to go to sleep, annoyed that my headache was still around and very persistent. It was a painful throb, like nothing I’d had before. I was pretty sure it was going to become a migraine or something, but decided that I was probably overreacting. I hoped it to get better in the morning, lay down and waited for whatever tomorrow would bring.