Sonic the Hedgehog stirred awake, in part because he felt tears sliding down his cheeks, but also because he was sure he heard someone calling his name.
“Dash?” he asked, finally getting his eyes opened and seeing the pegasus, cast in bright blue-white light coming from somewhere to the side, looking down at him with concern.
“Are you, crying?” she asked, brow quirked.
“No,” Sonic replied immediately, before replying again with, “Yes.” Finally, he settled on, “I’m fine,” as he wiped his eyes. “What happened?”
“I believe I can answer that.”
The creature they saw when they looked towards the voice — on the other side of a row of slick-looking green columns — resembled a pony only superficially. It’s black body glistened slightly in whatever was producing that blue light, looking less like skin of any sort and more like an armored shell. The horn on its head was smooth and curved, not at all like that of a unicorn. The wings on its back were membranous and tattered, not at all like that of a pegasus. Its blue eyes lacked visible pupils, irises, and sclera, not at all like that of anything. The protruding fangs and visible holes in its legs, although simply strange to a Mobian, meant something completely different for an Equestrian.
“Changelings!” Dash exclaimed in shock. Her outburst was followed with a dangerous growl that sounded a bit out of place coming from a pony. Both of these things drew a confused look from Sonic.
“Changelings?” he asked.
“They’re these evil bug-pony… things that can turn into whatever they want,” Dash answered with a very severe expression. “They pretend to be someone that’s really close to you, and then they suck out all of your love and happiness like a vampire!”
In response, the changeling barked with laughter, seeming to make itself — himself? — sound intentionally like a laughing, barking dog. “Whatever you want to give us credit for,” it/he said. “We’ll send you down some food, eventually. In the meantime, why not take a few minutes to imagine what your replacements are doing to all your precious friends.” With a haughty flip of a nonexistent mane, the changeling turned and left them alone.
In an instant, Dash was at the columns. “Jerk! You just wait ’till I get outta here!” With an enraged cry, she spun about, coiled up and bucked the column in front of her as hard as she could. The result was Sonic cringing, and Dash rolling about on the floor, holding both of her hind hooves in pain. “Son of a fish-fondling fruitcake!”
“Don’t bother.”
The new voice, feminine and vaguely threatening with a strange reverberating quality, pulled Sonic’s attention towards the darkness-shrouded back of the cell immediately, and Dash joined in after another moment of getting her pain reflexes under control.
“Those columns are solidified changeling essence,” the voice continued, “They’re as hard as steel, so as impressive as your strength may be, for a pegasus, I’m afraid we won’t be leaving anytime soon.”
“Hold on a second, I recognize your voice,” Dash said, suddenly clambering up to her hooves with a slight wince. “Who are you?”
“Oh, I suppose you would forget my name, although remembering my voice is worth something.” Without another word, the voice’s owner stepped out from the shadows, revealing another changeling. Another changeling that was not like the other one; taller, much taller, with a mane colored a sickly blue-green, hard, green irises in suspiciously un-changeling eyes, and a crooked horn.
Dash’s eyes widened in momentary surprise, before they angered themselves sharply in anger. “You!”
“Why, that’s no way to greet royalty!” the tall changeling said with offense, the mocking grin on her face showing that it was in no way real offense. “‘Chrysalis, my queen’ would be so much more appropriate.”
“Queen, right,” Dash retorted, before hopping into the air and darting forward on the attack. “Lemme crown ya!”
“Whoa, hold it!” Sonic darted in between them with both his hands raised towards Dash, forcing her to stop with a suspicious braking sound. “You two know each other?”
“Darn right we do!” Dash exclaimed. “She crashed Twilight’s brother’s wedding with the rest of those bugs and tried to take over Equestria! It’s just too bad for her that I was there!”
“Really?” Chrysalis asked. “Because I seem to remember you not doing very much aside from knocking out a few of my fighters and then getting captured.”
“Alright, fine!” Dash shouted back, shoving Sonic out of the way and getting right in Chrysalis’ face. “You think you got what it takes to call the shots? Let’s go! You and me, right here, right now!”
“An excellent idea!” Chrysalis replied. “Maybe you’ll finally learn some manners and recognize your place!”
Sonic decided, wisely, that it was not the right time to take further action and stepped away quietly.
“I know my place! It’s standing right here, mashing your dumb face into the ground —”
Their argument was interrupted when they both started coughing, the cell suddenly filled with a cloud of dust and a screeching sound, followed by a rush of wind and the crashing of hard resin breaking apart. Only a few seconds later, the dust settled enough for them to see exactly what had happened, and their eyes widened in surprise. Sonic was busy brushing broken pieces of solidified essence off his shoulders, but what caught their attention much more powerfully was that he was standing outside their cell, two of the vertical columns keeping them inside smashed to bits.
Dash looked down at the floor to see that there was an extremely large mark scuffed into it, and realized that the screeching they’d heard was hedgehog quills grinding against stone.
“You, broke it!” Chrysalis exclaimed in disbelief.
Sonic replied with a smug smile and a thumbs-up. “Of course! I’m Sonic the Hedgehog. I can do anything!”
“That better include getting us out of here,” Dash remarked, squeezing through the exit that Sonic had made. The hedgehog was already moving down the tunnel at a much more sedate pace than normal for him, and Dash copied him; they were, after all, attempting to sneak out.
“Wait!” Chrysalis called after them, struggling to fit through the gap in the columns that was just a bit too small for her, and finally tumbling out of the cell. “Wait for me!”
“You?” In the blink of an eye, Dash was back in the air and across the floor, hovering in front of Chrysalis’ face. “Why should we wait for you?”
“Do you know the way out of here?” Chrysalis sneered back.
Dash’s eyes widened momentarily as she realized she didn’t. “Fine,” she said with a scowl, before hurrying after Sonic with Chrysalis in tow.
It rapidly became apparent that the entire structure of the underground tunnel system they were in was intended to completely confound any intruders. The tunnel they were in was well-lit by whatever was producing that blue light back by their cell — it looked like some kind of fungus, but neither Sonic nor Dash cared enough to ask — and there were many other tunnels branching off of it, supported by more columns of solid changeling essence. Those tunnels looked exactly the same as the one they were in, and like every tunnel around it, and there was nothing obvious to indicate what was where.
If Chrysalis hadn’t decided to start providing directions after she had to stop them and tell them to ‘stop screwing around’ and follow her, it would have been slow going. Slower going; even with the changeling’s help, they were still moving along at a pace that, as far as the two speedsters were concerned, was reserved for the extremely elderly and anyone recovering from knee or carpal surgery.
After only a minute of quiet, outside of Chrysalis’ directions, Sonic could stand no more, and unable to run with his feet, decided instead to run his mouth.
“So, Chrysalis,” Sonic began.
“Queen Chrysalis,” the changeling snarled.
“Right, sorry. So, Chrysalis, you were in prison.”
“What of it?” For the moment, she chose to focus on that statement, rather than the hedgehog’s blatant disrespect of her position.
“Right, so, what’s up with that?” Sonic asked casually.
“Hey, yeah,” Dash chimed in, flitting around in front of Chrysalis and flying backwards in order to continue facing her as they moved. “What is up with that? Aren’t you running the show around here?”
Chrysalis gave a disgusted, and very un-queenly snort. “That would be the work of that recalcitrant renegade, General Stinger,” she replied, “He’s gotten the idea that he’s better for rulership than I am, despite not being able to handle a simple hostile invasion, and staged a coup!”
“Weren’t you leading that simple hostile invasion?” Dash asked smugly.
Chrysalis stared at the pegasus incredulously for a few moments before scowling. “The point is, he’s clearly gone mad with the power I foolishly granted him! In any case, he means to attempt another invasion with the use of a ‘something special’, as he insists on calling it.”
“Sounds like bad news, alright,” Sonic remarked, coming to a stop at a sharp turn in the tunnel —a move Dash and Chrysalis copied — pressing against the wall and peering around it briefly, before gesturing to continue and advancing around it. “Any idea where we can find him and give him a talking-to, by which, I mean a good thrashing, and then smashing whatever it is he’s building?”
“As I had attempted to explain, this is Stinger’s plan,” Chrysalis snapped back. “If he was planning a coup, why would he have told me anything?”
“Well, I guess you have a point there.”
“Pfft, plan, schman,” Dash remarked, intentionally falling to the rear so she could keep an eye on Chrysalis. “Chumps like him’re easy to deal with. All we have to do is find him, tell him we know what he’s up to, and then rearrange his thinking. And his face!”
“Now that’s a plan I can get behind!” Sonic added as he glanced around the next corner. Almost immediately, he pulled his head back and quickly pressed himself flat against the wall. Dash and Chrysalis mimicked him without hesitation.
A moment later, Sonic’s head slowly reappeared around the corner, and a moment later, Dash’s appeared below his and Chrysalis’ above.
“That’s a lot of changelings,” Dash whispered.
The tunnel opened onto an outcropping and then into an enormous cavern that was filled wall to wall, although not end to end, with black shapes. Hundreds of changelings gathered in one place at the far side of the cavern, all facing the same direction to watch and listen another changeling address them from the air, although the words were not carrying far enough to be heard by the escapees.
“What’re they saying?” Dash hissed, looking up towards Chrysalis. Sonic turned his gaze upward as well.
Chrysalis, expertly, turned hers downward. “If I could tell what they were saying from this distance, then I would have anticipated their plot before I was imprisoned, don’t you think?” she growled back before returning her attention to the assembled changelings for a few moments more. “There’s so many of them here. Stinger can’t be ready to make a move yet. It’s too soon.”
“We can’t do anything until we get out of here,” Sonic replied. The three of them quickly drew partway around the corner again; whatever it was the changelings were meeting for, it was apparently finished, and the crowd was dispersing out through the many tunnels off the cavern. Luckily, none of them were moving towards the trio. In short order, the cavern was empty. “We can get out through here, right?”
“We can,” Chrysalis replied.
“Good.”
Coolly, and three heads withdrew around the corner, and a moment later, Sonic rounded it, followed by Chrysalis and then Dash, entering the cavern. “All this slo-mo is wearing me out!” Without another word, Sonic advanced forward.
After taking a single step, he darted backwards into Chrysalis, as the dark shapes of two dozens hissing changelings suddenly dropped from the ceiling, forming a tight half-circle around the group, and the mouth of the tunnel they just attempted to exit from.
“Don’t changelings call before dropping in?” Sonic asked, somewhat louder and a bit more frantically than he really meant to.
“You could’ve warned us!” Dash shouted at Chrysalis, backing up with the others into the tunnel behind them. “Why didn’t you say something?!”
“If I knew what they were thinking and where they were, I wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place, would I?!” Chrysalis fired back, before standing her ground — which Sonic and Dash were not so inclined to do —and pulling herself up tall to address the changelings. “You worthless thugs! You should feel lucky to have such a forgiving queen. Surrender and tell me everything you know about that vile betrayer Stinger, and I may overlook your indiscretion!”
As a single unit, the changelings stepped forward, and Chrysalis rapidly stepped backward in response, lining up with the slowly retreating hedgehog and pegasus. “Well, that’s all I’ve got. Any ideas?” she asked, voice barely above a whisper.
Neither of her companions had anything to voice, and all of them were backed into the tunnel, the exit in front of them surrounded completely and the tunnel steadily filling wall to wall with changelings: There was no escape.
At least, there was no escape until Dash happened to look upwards, and then sprung towards the tunnel wall.
The sound of hooves slamming against rock rang out and was quickly replaced by the sound of rock slamming against rock. The advancing changelings looked up frantically, and then scrambled backwards just as an avalanche of stalactites and small boulders tumbled down. Dash jumped away from the wall, while Sonic and Chrysalis each raised an arm to shield their faces. When all the rumbling stopped, they both finally looked, seeing the tunnel ahead of them neatly blocked by rubble. Muffled voices sounded through it, although the most critical information came through; the changelings were moving to circle around the block.
“Conniving traitors!” Chrysalis snarled. “They’re going to pay for —”
“No time!”
Chrysalis was suddenly shoved backwards and over, toppling into Sonic’s arms. An instant later, both he and Dash took off down one of the other tunnels at wholly irresponsible speeds — it was a bit hard to tell which one — with Chrysalis carried along for the ride like a storybook damsel in distress.
“Fool!” she shrieked, wrapping her arms around Sonic for fear he might drop her otherwise. “Put me down immediately! This is undignified! Stop!” It was too late, of course, as they flew past the entrance of another tunnel, and she wildly pointed back towards it with one of her tarsi. “Idiot! That would’ve taken us right to the exit!”
In an instant, Rainbow Dash’s face was directly next to Chrysalis’. “Then stop talking and start directing!” she shouted back.
“How dare —” The changeling queen’s protest was cut off as a bolt of green magic flew through the air, missing all three of them completely but still coming very close. “Left at the next junction, and fast! They can follow our emotions!”
Sonic and Dash both complied, turning hard to change direction; the former corkscrewed from the floor up and around the walls and ceiling and back several times before he settled on a stable run on the ground again (which Chrysalis’ stomach was less than pleased about), while the latter had to briefly gallop along the wall before she could settle into flying properly.
Chrysalis called out more directions as they moved, but was perplexed that not a single changeling seemed to be trying to contain them, even as the winding tunnels sloped upwards to carrying them towards the exits. The reason why didn’t occur to her until they whipped past a marker on the wall that provided directions, so fast that she barely recognized it: There were no changelings appearing ahead of them because they were passing through hundreds of feet of tunnel each second. Any changeling that was giving pursuit was behind them and struggling to even consider catching up. It was an incredible thought.
“Is that light from outside?” Sonic asked suddenly, snapping Chrysalis out of her reverie.
Chrysalis only needed to look around for a moment to know what tunnel they were running through. “Yes, it is,” she said, “But —”
“Great! Pour it on, Dash!”
“W-wait!” Chrysalis cried, gripping Sonic even more tightly and their speed increased, the walls of the tunnel whipping by them so fast that all details resolved into indistinct blurs. “Stop!”
They zoomed out of the tunnel’s mouth, and into the open, sunlit sky.
The sun, still above the horizon but clearly on its way down, felt warmer on Dash’s fur than ever before — a side effect of having been underground for so long — and she couldn’t help but smile widely before she looked to Sonic and Chrysalis.
The world seemed to move in slow motion as her smile morphed into a shocked frown as she saw them each tightening their hold on the other. The changeling’s eyes were wide with fear and her teeth clenched, while the hedgehog’s were equally wide and his mouth drawing out a single word — “Ohhhhh —” as both of them stared downwards. It was only then that Dash noticed Sonic’s feet wildly bicycling through empty, as if he might be able to run through the atmosphere if he could just move them fast enough.
And then, time resumed, and the terrified pair dropped out of the sky like stones, hurtling towards the expanse of green forest hundreds of feet below them.
“Shooooooo —”
In less than a second, Dash had dropped after them, painting the sky with a streak of rainbow. It was nothing like the Best Young Fliers’ Competition here she’d saved Rarity and several Wonderbolts; in this case, she had plenty of time to zip down, grab them both (since it didn’t look like they were going to be separated at any point in the near future), and then zip off over the horizon before any changelings could even think about giving pursuit.
That was, at least, Dash’s plan right up until the moment when Chrysalis remembered that she had wings of her own and tried to use them. Both she and Sonic suddenly lost a good deal of speed, and Dash collided with them. All three tumbled in the air for a moment before organizing themselves into an unstable column with Chrysalis trying to correct her flight path (and not quite able to determine why she was having no success), Sonic trying to hold onto Chrysalis and keep her from falling (and not realizing this was not, in fact, an actual danger), and Dash trying to carry the both of them while flying in an increasingly erratic line that was rapidly taking them to lower and lower altitudes.
“You two stop squirming! I can’t fly straight!”
“Don’t fly straight, fly up!”
“Idiots! Watch out for that —”
Before Chrysalis could finish her sentence, the trio crashed mightily into the boughs of a tree, each of them crying out several times as they ungracefully crashed the rest of the way down to the ground.
Moments later, a dozen changelings poured out of the hive after them, hovering in the air and scanning with their emotional sensory perception. After a few more moments of finding nothing, the group divided in two and flew off in separate directions to search. Moments later, Sonic and Dash each stuck their heads up from the foliage below, looking at the sky, and then took a few cautious steps forward from the bushes they were hiding in.
“They aren’t even trying,” Dash said, raising a hoof to shield her eyes from the late afternoon sun. “I thought they could like, track our emotions, or whatever.”
“They can.”
Sonic and Dash looked over their shoulders to see Chrysalis stepping out of the bushes, horn awash with acid green magic. “Unless, of course, someone interferes with their ESP, which they never seem to realize when it happens. Oh, ho! For a change, I’m actually glad most of them seem so incredibly stupid!”
“Now, that’s what I’m talking about!” Sonic replied. “How long can you keep that up for?”
At that question, Chrysalis eyed the hedgehog suspiciously, brow quirked. “Why?”
“Well, it could be a long way to wherever it is that Stinger’s going, right?”
“Whoa, whoa, hold it!” Rainbow Dash flitted through the air, stopping in a hover just in front of Sonic, forcing him to look up to meet her — by that point — intense stare. “What do you even care about that, for? You’re not going to help her, are you?!”
“What, help save the changelings from some bad guy up to no good?” Sonic fired back, folding his arms across his chest and not breaking his own stare from Dash’s. “Why wouldn’t I?”
“Because she’s evil!” Dash leaned right into Sonic’s face with an angry glare.
He pressed right back, just as angry. “That’s not a reason, and you don’t know that for sure!”
“She’s never done anything good! She’s bad news!”
“Yeah, well, so was Shadow!”
Barely a second passed before Sonic pushed Dash away from him, and then turned and stomped off a few paces, fuming. Almost instantly, Dash was in front of him and in his face again, looking no less angry.
“Is that how you get to be a hero where you come from?” she demanded. “By helping the bad guys?”
“Drop it, Dash,” Sonic growled back dangerously. “Just drop it. You don’t know anything about him.”
“So he gets a free pass, just like that? How’s that fair?”
“Stop it, both of you! Stop this at once!”
Magic momentarily wrapped around the shoulders of hedgehog and pony alike, pulling them apart from each other as Chrysalis stepped forward. “I can’t believe I’m about to do this, but I’m going to make an effort to care,” she said with a huff before looking to Sonic. “Sonic, isn’t it? Who was ‘Shadow’, exactly?”
Sonic hesitated for a few moments, shooting a disbelieving look to Dash as if to confirm that he wasn’t imagining anything; the pegasus wasn’t much help with regards to a confirmation. “He was a confused and angry hedgehog,” Sonic finally said, addressing Chrysalis. “He blamed everyone because someone close to him died, and he thought his purpose in life was to get revenge by destroying everything. The whole world. And he almost did it.”
By then, Sonic was agitatedly pacing back and forth. “But he changed his mind. He saved the world, and then he died —” He whirled around to face Dash again, jabbing a finger at her — “How’s that fair? He saved the whole world, and then he was right there, and I thought I had him, but I didn’t, and he fell and he died!”
Dash and Chrysalis were silent, while the only sound Sonic made was the deep breaths he was taking to settle his nerves. Breathing that stopped quite suddenly when he felt feathers laying across his shoulder, which he knew must have belonged to Dash. Sure enough, she was right by his side, one wing around him.
“Hey, I get it,” she said, before looking briefly at the ground — “I mean, I think I get it —” And then back to Sonic. “It’s like with those things that live up on the moon, or Discord, I guess. Yeah, they did some really bad stuff, but they were good in the end, and maybe it’s the same here? So, yeah. I get it now.”
The smile Dash offered was met with another one from Sonic, but both of them turned to Chrysalis with concerned frowns when they heard her harrumph. Regally, she strided over towards them, appearing somewhat threatening given that she had not dropped the spell hiding them from the other changelings, and both Sonic and Dash stepped a bit apart, watching the queen warily.
“Tell me, Sonic the Hedgehog, and tell me truthfully —” she leaned down right into his face, horn slowly even more brightly than it had been — “I’ll know. Why are you offering to help me and my changelings when it is apparent that you stand to gain nothing from doing so?”
Sonic matched the Queen’s glare, and delivered his reply without any hesitation: “Because I see you, and I see you need help, and I know I can help. That’s all the reason I need.”
For several seconds, Chrysalis glared dangerously at Sonic before finally speaking her mind on the matter: “The Foal Mountains.”
Both Sonic and Dash were left to stare uncomprehendingly as the changeling queen turned away. “We were constructing another hive there as a fallback point if the invasion of Equestria didn’t go as planned,” she added. “If I hadn’t been so impatient, we might’ve used it, as it was mostly finished. There wasn’t much there, but that was a long time ago, and Stinger’s been working on this betrayal of his for a long time.”
“So that’s the best place to look for him,” Sonic said, finishing the implication. Already, one foot was in hand, bending the attached leg back behind him to stretch the thigh. “Sounds like we have a plan, right Dash?”
Hearing her name, Dash shook her head rapidly as she realized she was the focus of conversation, looking from Sonic, to Chrysalis, and then back to Sonic. “Ugh, fine!” she said, less out of agreement and more out of capitulation. “We’ve got a plan, completely ignoring the fact that she held out on us, but sure, we’ve got a plan. But we also gotta be real, Sonic.” With a flap of her wings, Dash was in the air, zipping over to the hedgehog’s side and hovering there. “I mean, we can’t carry the whole way, so how’s she going to keep up with us?”
“Oh, don’t worry about that, little pony,” Chrysalis said with a toothy grin. “I’m certainly not as fast as either of you, but I promise that I’m much faster than I look.”
“Well, that settles it then!” Sonic said, raising a hand and pointing one finger towards the northwest. “Come on, ladies! Let’s thrash us a vile betrayer!”