Around ten in the morning there was a knock at the door to the library. Spike answered it to find the callers were Lyra and a brown unicorn. Next to the two was a cart containing a few suitcases. “Welcome to the library Lyra. I suppose this is your uncle Twilight was telling me about?”
“Yes. Good ole uncle Ein. I understand Twilight wanted to speak with him.”
“A dragon? How fascinating. Are you her familiar or some other sort of bonded ally?” Ein was all sorts of curious and muttering to himself about Spike and as such really didn’t give much of a hello.
“Yeah, come on in. She is down in the basement. Let me lead you two to her.” Spike lead the two down into the basement while trying not to be too weirded out by Ein’s inspection of his person from less than a foot away. Lyra unfortunately was left having to lug the luggage inside and down the stairs with them.
“Hang on a moment.” The dragon breathed a bit of green flame onto a candle in the corner causing what had appeared to be a solid wall on the south side of the basement to become transparent. “Alright step on through please.” The two unicorns would have done so even if he had not made the request as they saw on the other side their Queen having a conversation with Twilight.
“As such if he kept their wills broken it would have eventually built up enough despair and hopelessness so that at the next charging ceremony he could have spread it across the land. That way he could take over other countries without having to do much in the way of fighting.” The queen was saying to Twilight.
“So Sombra was something of a softie after all. Good to know. If you break your enemy’s will before hoof there is no need to fight and no loss of life. It’s always interesting to learn something new about history. Oh, looks like we have guests.” Twilight announced as noticed the wall shift.
Lyra just ran up to the queen and began to check her over to make sure she was physically alright. Ein stepped in and nodded to his Queen. Given that she had given him an all clear on her health before hand he knew she was alright but sadly Lyra would never know what it was like to be linked to the hive mind so had to see things for herself.
“I am fine Lyra, I assure you. Twilight has been helping us to recover from our imprisonment. It would seem she had need of my unique talents and some of our hive’s information.” The queen tried to calm her pony agent down.
“Are you sure? She was the one that trapped you to begin with.”
“Lyra, calm down. Your queen is fine and perfectly safe. The rest of your comrades that were sealed up are already getting set to be shipped out to a new home. With any luck the hive will have a perpetual source of food from here on out.” Twilight tries to assure her old schoolmate. Noticing that Lyra still appeared panicked she decided to turn her attention to the other guest instead. “Ein, I presume?”
“Indeed, Princess. Mind if I drop this disguise?” The unicorn requested.
“Go ahead. No one will see you in here.” As she said that Spike snuffed out the candle and the wall returned to a solid block. The dragon would return upstairs to oversee the library while they talked below.
With a sigh of relief the unicorn returned to his real graying chitinous self. “Alright, I think I remember Lyra telling me about you so I don’t think I’m going to have to dumb this down. You ready to see some of the projects we changelings could bring to the table for your country?”
“Of course, Herr Doctor.” Twilight grins in response even as Ein good naturedly frowns.
“First up is the revision to air ships. From what I’ve observed all the air ships your country have, and indeed most all of the countries have, are based on a blimp. Let me show you…..”
It would be hours before anyone left the basement that evening as Twilight and Ein discussed all the minutia and details of the three projects he had brought. While Twilight agreed to start a commission of a ship based on Ein’s designs, and a contract to a changeling held construction company in the process was discussed between them and the queen, the computer held her attention. The idea of a repository of information that could be easily used and uniform appealed to her immensely and she helped him work out some of the methods of taking those designs closer to being realized when she asked him about information crystals. Ein also was rather surprised at Twilight’s idea to weaponize the magnetic rail idea and how to apply it. While this did somewhat worry the changeling it wouldn’t be the first time a prospective client turned something of his into a weapon and had had learned to deal with it long ago. Lyra and Chrysalis were rather lost past the first five minutes of conversation as the two geniuses got to going at each other. They were pretty sure at one point the two were talking in pure numerical expression.
Lord Blueblood head of the Blueblood family and as he liked to think of himself king of unicorns looked over the documents left on his desk by his butler. It would seem that another one of the kill teams he had hired had failed to remove that upstart Twilight. He had become rather jaded to such reports over the years as he and those he could manipulate kept failing to remove that thorn in his side. At least this group had been so low on the pole that it would be impossible even to find the proxy he used to hire them never mind linking it to himself. He would have to step his game up soon before she had a chance to become more powerful as an alicorn. His idiot son would never manage to get rid of her that he knew was a certainty.
For now though he had some papers to fill out to notify Oblige’s next of kin of his demise so they could come to Canterlot and decide what to do with the family mansion. Perhaps the newcomer would stay and could be easily cowed into helping get policies he wanted passed through the courts. If not, well Canterlot could be a dangerous place for newcomers.
As twilight begin to settle in across the country and traffic into Canterlot had been restored Celestia paced inside her room. Perhaps Fuss was right after all given what had happened. It was time she checked in with her pony on the inside of the remaining house of the Lunar Court. The problem was going to be how to get a hold of them since House Star had locked down their section of the city during the security alert in order to make sure no outside threats could steal any secrets contained within. After a few moments she sent Philomena out with a letter in her talons to her mare on the inside. The phoenix never noticed the slit eyes watching its flight path.
The Eclipse docked without troubles and was met upon arrival by two rather well to do unicorns judging by their retinue of servants. As the servants stepped aboard to secure the cargo the captain explained what they had found to his employers. Night Light and Twilight Velvet both seemed to be rather understanding of the whole thing and paid extremely well. They even said he could keep a third of the metal to sell somewhere else as the amount he had brought in was more than they needed and they were feeling generous.
It never occurred to the captain that all the servants that had been hauling the cargo from the ship to a waiting wagon looked exactly alike or that of the ten that had shown up to help only nine left with the wagon and the unicorns. As he and his men bunked down for the night they didn’t know that come the morning customs would have questions for them concerning what had been found on their burning ship.
A train pulled to a stop in the Crystal Empire and began to offload its cargo of passengers and their stuff. Of note to those present was that Vinyl Scratch had apparently taken her tour here to the Empire and probably brought along a whole studio. Large containers likely holding speakers, turntables, lasers, and other equipment begin to be removed from the train and loaded onto various carts bound for the empire.
Within two hours the carts would stop on their way to release their actual cargo onto the tundra. The changelings that had been with Chrysalis during captivity begin to head to ground so as to start on building a new hive here. They had all felt the surge of energy the love in the air provided. It would seem that their former captor had delivered on her part of the deal and they could indeed make a home here with food for every ‘ling. It would be a glorious new age for their kind they knew. As they set to work Vinyl’s entourage continued into the Empire so as to set up her concert to entertain the masses. If her upcoming week of concerts happened to help cover some of the noise out on the wastes so much more the better.
Mesmer, now appearing as a pegasus maid within House Star looked up at the streak of red she saw coming towards her. It would seem Celestia needed her ‘secret agent’ to report to her about what the family was up to. She opened the window to allow Philomena in and accepted the letter. After reading it over she wrote out a report on the back side of the letter and gave it to the phoenix to return it to Celestia. If it was intercepted it would read as just a report on the usual day to day of being a maid but when held in direct sunlight certain letters would be highlighted due to the unique ink she would go over them with. The message though was that nothing unusual was going on here given the usual kind of strange one can expect in a house of spies and assassins.
The beauty of being Celestia’s agent was that she could always be truthful, something she could rarely be, while still hiding everything from her supposed employer. She would need to inform Lady Velvet and Lord Light later though that Celestia was snooping. After all, an outcast changeling gave its loyalty to those who took it in and that was first Twilight’s family long before she met the solar alicorn.