After Octavia dies, Vinyl Scratch is heartbroken until help comes from a changeling...
After Octavia dies, Vinyl Scratch is heartbroken until help comes from a changeling...surely, she thinks, a counterfeit Octavia is better then no Octavia at all?
It was cold and misty in the Royal Canterlot Cemetery, where the great and the good were interred, and the mournful music of a double base filled the air. Vinyl Scratch made her way through the mist towards the source of the music, to where a beautiful grey pony with a purple treble clef for a cutie mark was weeping as she played beside a gravestone with a copper disc set in it, her long mane and tail blowing in the wind.
"Octavia, why are you crying? Don't worry, I'm here," Vinyl said. Octavia paid no attention, and when Vinyl tried to hug her, to her horror she passed straight through her. Looking at the gravestone she saw the words VINYL SCRATCH written on it. As she did so the wind got stronger and pulled her away from her girlfriend, sending her tumbling up into the sky.
Vinyl woke up, and felt for Octavia to wake her up and tell her about her nightmare. Octavia was always ready to comfort her when she was unhappy for any reason. But there was no warm body lying next to her, and she remembered that Octavia was dead and would never be with her again. I'll never feel her warm kisses again, never hear her play music again or have her walk along beside me. I'll never hear her voice again. Up to the point where Octavia's cancer had left her bedbound and unable to speak, she had done her best to comfort Vinyl. Now she lay in the Canterlot Funeral Parlour awaiting her funeral. She got up and without brushing her teeth or her mane, went off to see Octavia one last time. She was ushered into the room where Octavia lay by a pony with a pony skull as his cutie mark, and left alone. Octavia looked beautiful, as if she was only asleep. The mortician had clearly done his best to make her look good, and her favourite fiddle was in her dead hooves. Vinyl bent over Octavia and planted a warm kiss on her cold forehead. What if I could take her home and put her to bed, and she got better? Don't be stupid Vinyl, she would bloat and rot and in the end only her bones would be left.
"Octy, I did my best. I pestered the doctors and nurses to try and cure you, I tried healing magic from Zecora and I got an audience with Princess Celestia and begged her to make you into an alicorn. She refused. Of course she did. I wanted to have you cremated so that I could take you home in an urn and keep you close to me when I sleep, but it was your wish that you be buried and I will respect that. But I still hate the idea of leaving you alone in the cold dark earth. Hopefully you are up in Heaven awaiting my arrival. Goodnight, my love. Sleep well." She closed the coffin.
The funeral later that day was a large one, for Octavia was a popular pony with a large number of fans, most of which were kept at a distance from the grave. Princess Celestia herself attended as Octavia had been one of her favourite musicians, placing a wing over Vinyl to try and offer some comfort. Vinyl managed to hold her sadness in until the gravediggers started shovelling the dirt into the grave, and then sat there and howled for her lost love. Finally she headed home, to the house she had once shared with Octavia. On the way she came across Trixie, who had been one of those at the funeral. "Trixie, if you really are as great and powerful as you say you are, I'll pay you a couple of thousand bits if you cast a spell for me that will bring Octavia back to me." Much to her surprise Trixie shook her head.
"The Great And Powerful Trixie knows as an accomplished and renowned user of magic that one should never mess with necromancy. It never works well. At best, you would get a few days with Octavia-until her brain rotted from within and she died a second, final death. More likely you would get a zombie that did only what you told it to do. Or worse, much worse, you would get a carnivorous undead possessed by some demon from the depths of Tartarus that saw ponies including you as food. It's illegal for a very good reason-it's far too dangerous to do."
Angrily Vinyl carried on walking home, and when she got there she found one of the many ponies that had been waiting at the funeral, a brown earth pony with a rope noose for a cutie mark. "Vinyl, please could I talk to you in private please?"
"I'm not in the mood, I just want to grieve in peace," Vinyl replied.
"I know a spell that can bring Octavia back to you," the pony replied.
"But Trixie told me that spells that raise the dead cause nothing but trouble and danger. I want Octavia back, not a mindless zombie or a pony eating demon."
"I can do that, just let me into your house and I'll cast a spell that will give her back to you. Not as an undead thing but as a living, breathing mare, the mare that you love so much."
"All right then, I'll give you a chance."
She let in the strange pony, and he entered her kitchen, opened one of her windows, and said," I need you to leave the room, so your presence does not mess up the magic, and then you'll have your Octavia back again by your side."
She did so and noticed a flash of green light under the door. When she opened it Octavia was standing there, and she rushed to her side, hugging her and covering her face with kisses over and over again. "Octavia, you're back from death, I can hardly believe it." Octavia's body was warm, not cold and dead. "He brought you back from death and then he...where did he go? He must have climbed out of the window. I was ready to pay him thousands of bits. Play me a happy tune, Octavia, on your fiddle."
Octavia hesitated, and when she did so, the music that came out was anything but nice. In fact it was so awful that Vinyl pressed her hooves over her ears. If this was indeed Octavia, then her ability to make music had clearly been left behind in the afterlife. Vinyl said "Stop it, stop that racket." She hesitated and thought to herself. "You're not Octavia, my Octavia knows how to play the fiddle and you don't. So who are you really?"
The not-Octavia let out a deep sigh. "You're right, I'm not your beloved Octavia although I want to be. I'm a changeling...a shape changer. I can take the shape of pretty much any pony, griffin, diamond dog, even timber-wolf that I want to. I have been undercover for a long time, and I saw you two together in happier times. We changelings, although we do consume solid food as well, need a lot of love to keep us healthy and at our best. The love of a pony tastes like the sweetest chocolate to us, without any of chocolate's bad effect on teeth." Vinyl stared wide-eyed at the changeling.
"You eat love? How can feelings be food for you? And why did you want to replace Octavia?" Vinyl asked, not sure if this changeling was her friend and a way back to happier times or her foe and a menace to Equestria and everypony that she knew.
"We ourselves are unaware of just how and why we eat love, we just know that it is good to eat. As for replacing Octavia I wanted to feast on your sweet love and make you happy again at the same time. Please, give me a chance. I know I don't have Octavia's skills yet, but I can learn them. Given enough time, we could both benefit...you get your perfect Octavia back again and I get as much of your sweet love as I can eat. I'd need access to everything of Octavia's that you still have, and you would need to help me at first, so that I can be as Octaviaish as possible."
Vinyl thought for a while. "I would love you to become a new Octavia for me, but...how can I trust you? What if this is a plot to rob or murder me or to undermine Equestria in some way? And how can you possibly take the place of the love of my life? You may look and even sound just like her, but you quite clearly have none of her musical skills and none of her...Octaviaisms, all the little things about her that I knew so well and loved so much. At the moment, you are just a pale imitation of Octavia. You surely have no idea what she meant to me. She was my world. I'm not turning you down...you are my best chance of being happy again, but I want to know more about you and what you do. Tell me about changelings. Otherwise I will have to reject your offer and deny you my love."
"I can't tell you a lot of things, because it's classified and I could get executed for treason if my Queen found out, or at the very least sentenced to years of cleaning out the latrines. But I'll give you the basics. We live in Hives, each under a Queen. We live partly on fungus and the like, and partly on the love that we gather whilst in disguise. Without the love of other races, a changeling will fall sick, and as we are feared and hated by those whose love we need, we take other shapes to get it. I can't tell you what Hive I'm from or which Queen I serve-but I can say that my Queen means as much to us as Princess Celestia does to you. That's pretty much all I can say. Please don't tell anyone that I'm a changeling, the Royal Guards would come after me. We are not a popular race-they see us as vampires and worse. Some of the most ignorant ponies even think that we put the blood of kidnapped and murdered pony foals in our bread. All utter nonsense of course."
"So what do you look like when you are not borrowing another shape?" Vinyl asked. "And what is your real name?"
"I'd rather not let you know. I want you to think of me as Octavia, and one day I want you to love me as much as you loved her. And if you knew my true shape, how could you ever see me as your true love?"
"You do have a point," Vinyl agreed. "I'll give you everything you need-all of Octavia's records, and you have two weeks to make progress to being her for me...or you'll have to leave. If you can really *be* Octavia for me...if you can fill that hole in my heart, I'll give you all the love you would ever want. But if you can't, or if I even think you are plotting against me or Equestria, then you'll have to go." And she hugged the faux Octavia and managed a weak smile when she felt soft, warm kisses on her forehead. Think of Octy, this is Octy that is kissing you, and all will be right in time. Her mind is just a bit rusty, that's all. She just has to relearn the old ways, that's all, and things will be happy again.
The faux-Octavia smiled as she felt the love begin to flow. It was warm love, sweet, chocolate-like love, far better then the weakened down love that was brought in to feed the Hive. This must be the quality of love that my Queen enjoys every day in her private royal quarters she thought. Do all Infiltrators enjoy love of this quality or is it just me? This must be unique, she knows that I'm a changeling and that her true love lies in a grave, and yet she is still giving me a chance to be Octavia Philharmonica for her. I must be the luckiest Changeling in the entire Hive. What if other Changelings could do the same thing that I did and it worked for them too?
Vinyl pulled away and let go. "There is a big complication in that you are officially dead and buried. If you walked into town in Octavia-shape, ponies would panic and think you were undead. And then the Royal Guards would descend on both of us. So our romantic walks will have to be in the dead of night only, whilst most ponies are sleeping or out clubbing. And given that I work late at night, how am I going to find time to fit you in? Tomorrow I'll start teaching you the basics of what I call Taviness, being Octavia. But for now I need to go to work. "
"You can go out if you want to, but only in disguise. The other ponies would never accept that you had come back again. They would either find out that you were a changeling, or think you were some horrible dead thing raised through necromancy, and panic or worse." Vinyl managed to smile as she looked at the faux Octavia in front of her and forced herself to think of her as the real thing. Death itself could not separate us, nor the darkness of the grave. Our love will always keep us together. When I get back to her I'll help her recover from her memory loss, and then I'll have my Tavi back again, just like old times. Just like old times. As she did so, her love poured out a lot faster then normal, rapidly filling both the love sacs of the changeling. The first smaller sac acted as a stomach for the changeling itself, whilst the second sac was a larger hive stomach, meant to provide extra love for the changeling's Hive. Both soon got as full as they could to the point that they had to be closed to new love. Goodbye, my love, I need to go to work for a while, making new music for my club. They'll be very happy to see me back." She kissed *Octavia* goodbye and left the house, leaving her spare house key where the changeling could see it.
As soon as she had gone, the changeling decided to shift shape into that of a pegasus but nothing happened. There was no burst of green flame, and no shape change. She tried to change several more times, into unicorns, earth ponies, pegasui, griffins, and even back into her true shape. Panicking, her mind went back to when she was young and was being taught in her Hive's school about all the important things that Changelings should know, and to a lesson about Changeling illnesses. Mr Opaque, her favourite teacher, was giving the lesson. "You should never totally fill both of your love stomachs unless in a true emergency when you don't know where your next meal of love is going to come from. Why, you might ask? Surely a changeling should gather as much love as he or she possibly can, both to consume and for the Hive? Because if both stomachs are totally filled, it often happens that said changeling gets stuck in the shape that they are in a the time, unable to change into any other shape, even their own, until a bit of that love has been properly digested. Which is not really a situation that you want to find yourself in when out there harvesting in the field."
I'm stuck...stuck fast in this shape at least for now. I wish I had paid a lot more attention to Mr Opaque's lessons. And Vinyl is right. In this shape I'm a dead pony walking. If I went out like this I would either panic everypony or they would find out my secret. So for now at least I can't leave the house. I don't want to make Vinyl angry with me or get chased out of town by an angry mob who think that I'm undead. She decided to try and learn how to play the fiddle, but the result would have drawn boos from the most well behaved crowd, if a crowd or indeed anypony else had been around to hear it. Why of all the ponies to shape shift into did I have to choose a dead one? One that was not only dead but dead and buried as well. Because of the rich love I knew I could get from the beautiful, intelligent Vinyl Scratch . This love that I carry in my hive stomach, even second hand, would do my Hive a world of good if only I could get to the Hive, but I'm trapped in the form of an earth pony, and without wings there is no way that I could ever get there and back in time. I feel like a mouse that squeezed into a granary, ate as much as it could and too late found itself too fat to get out again. My greed has grounded me.
She decided to make some use of the time without Vinyl by tracking down Octavia's diary and spending a while reading it from cover to cover, to help her learn how to be as Octaviaish as possible. Then a thought came to her. Vinyl knows who I am, and yet she still accepts me as her Octavia, as the love of her life. And as long as she is still filling me with rich warm lovely love, it's going to be impossible to diet enough to regain my ability to shift shape. Which would mean that I won't be able to leave the house by day without panicking every pony around me. Either they'll find out that I'm a changeling and that won't go down well, or they'll think that I'm one of the undead. When Vinyl came back she found her favourite food set out on the table for her, prepared just right, and her new *Octavia* sitting there with her legs spread wide open invitingly.
She grinned, and greeted the changeling with a kiss. "This is really just like old times. But you need to change when in public into a pony shape of your own so that you can leave the house without freaking everypony out."
"That's the problem," *Octavia* replied. "I gorged myself on your love so much that I'm too full to change shape, until I've gone on a diet. Only that will get me change shape again. But your love is so delicious that it's hard to resist gorging on it, it's that good."
