As the sun began its slow descent and red and orange tinted the sky, a slate-grey pegasus with golden eyes made her way back to her home in Ponyville, yawning and subsequently colliding with a lamppost. She slid down the iron pole and hit the ground with a thump, peeling off from the metal with a 'pop'. She shook her head and her eyes went in all directions as they righted themselves to their ordinary, lop-sided position. A passing earth pony winced and leant over, looking concerned.
"You okay there, Derpy?" he asked as he checked both her and the lamppost for structural damage.
"Yup! Just fine! That thing came outta nowhere!" she chirped back, leaping back into the air and hovering. Her ordinarily messy mane had suddenly gained a quiff from its impact, but she was otherwise unaffected. Yawning again, she stumbled back to all fours and smiled. "Worn out after today's mail run. I've gotta get back. Have a good evening!"
She flew away with a wave to the earth pony, who just smirked, shrugged his shoulders, and carried on walking.
Derpy managed to get back to her home without further incident, and managed to unhitch the catch on the second attempt. She stumbled through the door and closed it behind her with a kick from her back hoof, and let out a breath in relief. Stifling another yawn, she drew the curtains and lit the lamps, then collapsed on her sofa in front of the fire.
"Finally," she muttered, as a small spark of light formed at her forehead. It worked its way down across her head, revealing a dull black carapace where previously there was grey coat and blonde mane. Her ears sharpened and a pointed horn appeared between her eyes as they changed from their golden hue to light blue compound spheres. Her teeth sharpened into fangs as the glow rushed down the rest of her body. Her hooves gave way to ragged appendages and her wings became translucent and torn. Finally, her golden tail disappeared and was replaced by a translucent tuft.
Her wings flickered, buzzing, as she drew herself off the sofa and stumbled towards the kitchen. Levering open a cupboard, she grabbed a bag of sugar by her fangs and tore it open, quickly chowing it down as it poured from the packet. She smiled, revitalized, and flopped back onto the sofa, picking up a small pile of letters addressed to her.
Opening the first, she found it to be an invitation to a party, one of Pinkie Pie's many. She could taste the threads of friendship on the card, taking a moment just to savour it. Smiling, she set it aside, and opened another. This she found to be a letter from a pen-friend she corresponded with in Manehattan. Reading the letter was like a delicious banquet for her, better than any material food, as the warmth, friendship and love that flowed from the words fed her.
She leant back and looked at a photo on the mantelpiece of her posing in front of the post office in town, and smiled happily to herself. She remembered, before coming to Ponyville, how she used to have to take form after form for scraps of feeling and emotion from passing acquaintances or travellers. But one day she saw a little pegasus foal, in a city far away, with a grey coat, blonde mane and tail, and the most beautiful golden eyes. Somehow, the sight captivated her: her, a cold and unfeeling changeling. Something about the colours, the simplicity of it. How happy she looked.
She copied the colours, she copied the messy, unkempt mane and long tail, but she could never quite get the eyes right. It had always been the eyes that gave her away in other towns. They knew she wasn't a real pony.
But then she'd found Ponyville. Tired and starved, using the last of her strength to keep up the illusion, she'd fallen into the town and met an exuberant pink pony who instantly befriended her. True friendship. The first she'd ever tasted in her life. It was incredible, and enough to bring her back from the brink.
She'd got a job. She'd rented a room, and slowly, slowly she had made friends. Real friends. They teased her for her eyes, but it was friendly teasing, and she could even find the fruit in that. Her natural clumsiness, accentuated by having to concentrate to keep the illusion going all day long, earned her a nickname, 'Derpy Hooves', and it had stuck.
She had been living in Ponyville for years, right under everyone's noses. A changeling in the form of a pony.
But she loved them all. And she knew that they loved her, too.
Derpy is a changeling? wat
480594
img404.imageshack.us/img404/4433/chrysalissmiley.png
480604
OK, so now that I've thought about it for a minute or two, it, uh, makes some sense. It would explain her eyes at least. This was just about the last thing I was expecting to read today though.
A nice read.
Hugz.
480594
Plot twist!
Sun and Moon, that's creepy. But very well done!
I love this!
ok, this makes entirely too much sense
This would make a good story all by itself, would you mind doing that?
I see I wasn't the only one to envision something like this.
The ending of the episode could have been completely different. Both ponies and changelings benefit from having more love in the world, and having more live in the world would definitely be a good thing. That would have been an epic alliance.
Yeah, the main problem was that the changelings in the swarm were all incapable of love. "No I do not love the groom / in my heart there is no room..."
A changeling who wasn't a psychopath could do just fine in Equestria. If she had enough friends, they probably wouldn't even notice the little bits of energy she was stealing from them every time she made them smile.
482849
That can be taken a number of ways, and strictly speaking that only applies to Queen Chrysalis herself. Personally I saw that as meaning that she had no love for Shining Armour (obviously, she was just using him), because, in her own way, she loves all her Changeling children and has no room for ponies.
But a lone Changeling away from the rest of the swarm? Who knows?
You know who else is a Changeling making her way in a Pony's world?
Pinkie Pie!
Come on everypony smile, smile, smile
Fill my heart up with sunshine, sunshine
All I really need's a smile, smile, smile
From these happy friends of mine!
Yes a perfect gift for me
Is a smile as wide as a mile
To make me happy as can be
Smile, smile, smile, smile, smile
Come on and smile
Come on and smile!
483379
That's an intriguing idea...
483379
Oh, I have my own theories in regard to her.
Friendship = Magic.
Therefore, we can assume that the more bonds of friendship a pony possesses, the greater their magical potential becomes. For example, Big Mac, under the influence of a Love Potion, was able to pull a house, while he struggled under the weight of a cake. Likewise, love being the strongest of friendships gives Shining Armour and Cadence the ability to temporarily access the power of the Elements of Harmony to bring the forcefield back up.
However, Pinkie befriends everything she meets, pony or otherwise. It's got to the point where her sheer magical potential is overflowing, and...
... allows her to affect reality itself.
Or she might be Death's granddaughter, who knows.
/overanalyze
One consistency bug IMHO is that Derpy can still stand and manipulate clouds while only a pegasus should be able to do that.
Is Dinky a changling as well? Or she a natural pony? Does she know what her mother really is?
Though if Dinky is a normal pony, could she even LIVE with her mother without being reduced to an emotionless husk?
483591
Strictly speaking, anything with wings has been shown to be able to stand on clouds.
And 'feeding' off emotion doesn't mean you have to consume it, does it?
483833
Tell that to Queen Chrysalis.
483933 Shining Armor didn't love Cadence less, he just got tired
484341
Yes. But it makes for better drama.
Personally I saw it as a more targeted thing. Chrysalis, posing as Cadance/Cadence, was re-directing Shining Armour's love for the REAL Cadence/Cadance to herself, as the object of those affections. But because his love for Chrysalis wasn't requited, it was powerless, and as a result the shield was weakened. The more unrequited love Shining Armour gave, the weaker the shield became, to the point where (through some degree of mind control) it was focused entirely on Chrysalis instead of Cadence/Cadance, and the shield failed.
/overanalyze.
Ok, I can get behind this, I guess. Nicely written Miya, as always.
>> No-Brand Hero that actually raises some dark implications, specifically that Pinkie's sonic-rainbow story is a lie, and the one day, a gray family living a gray existence on the desolate edge of Equestria lost their daughter and either didn't notice or couldn't bare to accept that Pinkie was gone.
... Holy hell...
That's one interesting theory!
New headcanon for me! Thanks!
484640
Personally, I don't think Shining Armour was being weakened by Chrysalis's depredations, it was just the fact that she was using mind control magic on him at the same time, both to assuage his doubts about her identity and to get him to lower the shield. He probably has pretty good barriers against mind control magic, considering his special talent.
Great story! I do love the idea of a changeling getting along in pony society just by being loved for herself, and loving others in return. And being friends with Pinkie Pie means a changeling need never go hungry...
483591
Two ways of avoiding that.
First is if the "eating" doesn't HAVE to be any drain at all on the source. Obviously it served Chrysalis's purpose to wreck Shining Armor so the shield would go down.
Second is if the "eating" has to be conscious and can be regulated by something other than physical proximity/meaningful interpersonal interaction. You might be able to get more maple syrup out of a maple tree if you did stuff to it that killed it (don't think you could just grind it up, but I could be wrong, and it hardly matters for our purposes), but it is more efficient in the long-run to take just a little. Same for pine-pitch, and maybe even cinnamon. For an animal example, consider the horses (total coincidence) that they inject with snake venom, then later take blood from to make the anti-venoms that save human lives. You COULD completely exsanguinate one of those horses if you were really desperate for anti-venom, but there is no percentage in it (maybe when and if they get too old to be healthy donating blood you could do that and call it economical if not exactly the most noble).
tl;dr (and I know that doesn't apply to you Alex)
Either there is a "good" mode of eating that gets full value, without harming the donor, or Derpy is only allowing herself to take in 1/100th of the love that Dinky directs towards her at any given time.
483379
The thought had occurred to me that she was "feeding" off of them, even before the season finale. But I thought of it as being more in terms of "refilling her mana gauge" than "food".
506264
Here is something CRUEL to think about.
Can any Changeling REALLY 'experience' or 'feel' love? At all? I don't mean physically or chemically. I mean psychologically. If you preventing from straving to death depended solely on someone loving you (or many loving you) could you ever actually FEEL for them beyond just being cattle to feed on?
You would be desperate to play every card you could to keep them feeling good about you, or you'd starve. A better question to ask is how ANY Changeling could NOT be a sociopath. Wolves and deer. Wolves and deer. A relationship as unchangable and unavoidable as wolves and deer. :-( It's really really horrible when you stop and think about it. Could you act different?
506317
Pardon me if I run on at the keyboard even more than I usually do... I have a cold and it is making me a bit in the head.
I have to be careful in answering this lest I say something that I don't believe, so just bear with me a second.
I am a Christian.
More specifically, I believe in Salvation as a free gift. This means I believe that it is possible to be a paragon of virtue and go to Hell, and to be a monster in every aspect of your life except one and go to Heaven.
With that safely out of the way...
There are plenty of people who believe that good people go to Heaven and bad people go to Hell. In SOME cases, this MAY mean that if such a person really sat down and traced out their own logic behind any good thing they ever did in their life, they would come back to "I want to earn my way into Heaven." (shoot, for SOME people who believe the way I do, you can substitute "I want a richer reward in Heaven"). Now we could argue about whether such motives genuinely earn you anything, but let's not because it doesn't change a thing for the purpose I am considering. I say that such a person can still feel genuine love as an emotion, despite the core of that action being completely selfish in the end.
To use a more mundane example, let us take somebody... no wait... somepony, because that works better down the line in terms of providing ready terminology. Let us say that this pony is living in a very harsh, pre-alicorn society where the only way to survive if you can't earn your own keep is to have relatives who support you(or accumulated wealth). Let us further suppose that we have a pony who has no relatives, and at least at the start, isn't able to earn much more than they need to survive hoof-to-mouth each day. But let us say their cutie-mark, and how they earn their "just enough to survive" is as an artist. I say that they could still find joy in the act of creation, even though their daily bread depends on it. I don't think they would hit CMFIS any more often than any other pony.
531309
I do know the difference, remember the report was written by Twilight Sparkle. As I previously said, I'm sure she knows the difference as well, but the theory she was testing was explicitly about sentience; sapience as a result of the spell had never previously been observed.
532843
Sorry, I was replying to Chatoyance, but the website didn't resolve the identifier. I was being uselessly pedantic anyway.
I really like these stories - thanks! I have a similar collection, Pony Tales.
Check out the story "Flitter" on this site for a similar take on changelings. It's good.
558822
Since it's been up a while now I'll provide the translation. You read Gallifreyan clockwise from the bottom of the circle, spiralling inwards. The full text then reads:
"Help! Doctor!"
"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
(Chapter 6)
559294
I meant at a more basic level: What is the story about? I've only seen about 4 Doctor Who episodes since the 4th doctor. I could probably find a plot synopsis if you told me which episodes it referred to.
559380
It's not really about anything. I deliberately left it completely ambiguous as to whether Sepia Tock is or isn't The Doctor, and even then, whether he's a pony incarnation of The Doctor or entirely unrelated to our own universe. It's just a small glance into the mind and morning routine of Ponyville's number one clock maker.
Derpy and Bon-Bon need to hang out together, now.
Hmm. This raises the question of where Dinky Doo comes from. My thought is that Dinky is an orphan; Changeling!Derpy helped her when she was in trouble, discovered the strength of unconditional love a child can produce, and adopted her.
*Grins* Derpy is always the best changeling.