Altered Visage Chapter 9 · 7:15pm Jan 21st, 2016
In which I speak of the ninth chapter of the story: "Home in the Hive". Spoilers after the page break.
We're already to chapter nine....how time flies. I imagine I'll be saying something similar once I reach chapters I hadn't written yet when I started posting, and again once we reach the end of the story. The title of this chapter set off a bit of a chain of similar chapter titles. I have five chapters total that are "of the Hive" at this point. Part of me likes the titles, another part of me thinks it's just being lazy. Oh well.
As the chapter title suggests, we have reached the changeling hive and Chance's reception has been quite positive. A few misconceptions and biases have been corrected, she (for simplicity's sake, I'm just going to refer to Chance as "she") gets to meet Doctor Dew-Drop, a kind older changeling who's primary goal is to help changelings who are sick or injured. She also gets to meet Chrysalis, who is really friendly to her, and kind of touchy feely even. She is offered the chance to learn proper magic, how to shield her emotions from other changelings, and how to actively feed on somebody (as opposed to the passive feeding she's already been doing). She has even been given the chance for some revenge by being allowed to actively feed off of Nutcase. In addition to all this, Chrysalis herself has offered to search for a way to get her back home to the human world.
Things have taken a massive turn for the better in Chance's life. Nothing bad actually happens to her in this chapter, which is a first for this story. I figured that she, and potentially my readers, might appreciate a break from all the personal calamities. Anyway, it wouldn't be much fun to do something terrible to her at the position she'd been in for that previous chapter. She was already at pretty damn near the lowest point she could be what with nearly being killed in an experiment after a week of being raped. Give her a breather in this chapter to establish an improved outlook and then have things go south again, that's what I'll do. There's a lot more room to fall then, and fall she will.
Another chapter opening with a dream....there's a lot of dreams in this story. I wonder if some of them might actually have a bit of meaning and/or are building up to something.
When I was "building" the hive, I wanted to make it alien, yet familiar and to show that despite the differences, changelings are just as much people as ponies are. The alien nature would come from the entire hive being carved out of rock, the use of crystals to light the place, the distinct lack of sunlight, and the prevalence of subterranean plants and fungi for decorative purposes. The familiar, humanizing aspects would come from interaction with Doctor Dew-Drop, the presence of Silver Cloud (the changeling foal in the doctor's care), the general friendliness of the changelings, and that there are many civilians just going about their life and have never gone out to harm anybody.
I decided to have it so that eye colour can actually be used to determine a changeling's profession, with orange representing one that is part of the medical field. I thought it was a brilliant idea, especially for a race that is almost uniformly blue eyed (the only canonical exception being Chrysalis). It feels unfortunate that I hadn't explored it any further than that really. I don't know a single eye colour for any other profession, but that's at least in part because it just never came up anywhere else in the story. Who does Chance ever communicate with outside of soldiers/guards, Chrysalis and Dew-Drop? Not very many. Soldiers and guards have already been established as being blue in the show itself, so I couldn't change that, and I had established that the majority of changelings have blue eyes whether they're soldiers or no, so I couldn't just make blue the colour of the army or anything. At most at this point, I could make green a sign of high social status. It wouldn't conflict with anything I've established, though the green eyed changeling that's been mentioned a couple of times would still be naturally green eyed in my mind.
If anybody cares, Drymanid is named after a genus of cockroach as Dew-Drop suggests. I had spent far more time than I probably should have googling the names of bugs until I found Drymaplaneta semivitta, known more commonly as the Gisborne Cockroach. Obviously enough, I took the genus name of Drymaplaneta and morphed it into Drymanid. Both of these names I could see being shortened to Dryma. I also consider Planeta to be Drymanid's unofficial last name that is never actually mentioned in the story, so he would literally be Dryma Planeta if you use the shortened version of his name.
Anyway, that's enough rambling. I'm sure there's other stuff I could talk about, but I won't.
Actually, one more thing.....I noticed that after posting last chapter, the amount of dislikes Altered Visage had dropped from 7 to 6. Seeing as the charts that you can look at seem to completely delete that extra dislike from it's entire history, my knowledge of it having been 7 and the notes I've taken on it's progress are the only thing to show that it ever existed to begin with.
