//------------------------------// // 12 Yin and Yang // Story: For science - Book two // by Znegil //------------------------------// We had paid for our lunch and were ready to go back to our lab when I spotted Applejack from afar. "Hey AJ!", I shouted. "How are you doing?" She trotted over to us. "I'm great, thanks." "How are things with your marefriend?", I asked with a grin. Her cheeks started to blush. "Luna is a wonderful mare, we’ve gotten really close but she let me set the pace we're going further. It’s been a lot of fun when she’s helped on the farm. Without her magic, she was a little clumsy at first but sooo adorable.", she told us smiling. "Well, that has to be expected.", Twilight replied. "If you used magic all your life you can have problems adapting to using hooves only, it would be the same for me." "She fell face first into an apple pie when she tripped over a log as we chopped firewood.", Applejack continued. "Since nopony else was near, I used my tongue to clean her up." She showed a sly grin. "We should find some time to do something together, a double date.", I suggested. "Cough, COUGH!", Lyra made herself noticed. "Okay, how about a triple date?", I asked. "Sounds fine to me.", Applejack answered. "Let's talk to our marefriends to confirm it and think of some things we could do." "Good idea, let's meet here tomorrow at lunch to talk about specifics.", I told them. ... Since we had made good progress with the crystals, I decided to look into another thing I was interested in. Carefully I poured a small amount of the green changeling goo out of the water bottle into a test tube. I held it into the sunlight and studied its appearance. You would expect a foul smell from something like this, but there wasn't any noticeable odor. On second thought, something that would give away the position of your trapped hidden victims wasn't a helpful property. "The biggest question for me is how you could survive inside this stuff, you looked like you were just sleeping." "Where is the mystery in that?", Lyra asked shrugging. "Maybe that is all it does, just making you sleepy." "Well, I got totally covered by this stuff when we got you out and I didn't feel sleepy.", I told her. "But more importantly, what or how did you breathe?" "Ohhh, now I understand the mystery." "Maybe you react in a different way than a pony.", Twilight suggested. I slowly nodded, this could be a possibility. "We can test that easy enough, just put some on my body.", Lyra offered. I thought about it. "This would be a good experiment. Since you already bathed in it and we haven't seen negative consequences it should be safe." I dribbled the content of the test tube on Lyra's back and we waited for ten minutes. "Anything?", I asked. "It's a little bit cold, that's all." "So maybe this is the wrong approach or your body needs to be fully covered…”, I pondered. “But we haven't got enough to try that. I'm sure you swallowed some of it while you were in this cocoon, maybe that is how it stuns you. But I don't want you to eat any of it right now, maybe we should focus on the breathing part instead." "Could this goo contain air within it, like water contains other things too?", Lyra asked. "Water is made partly of oxygen, and oxygen is what we breathe, but you can't breathe under water, so why should that be possible with this stuff? And even if there was oxygen or air stored somehow in this goo, that would only last for a few hours even with the slower breathing you had. You would have been dead when we found you if that was the mechanism." "Well there is only one other explanation I can think of at the moment.", Twilight declared. "Air can somehow pass through this stuff." We all thought about a possible experiment to test this theory. After some discussion, we had constructed a simple but effective way to try it out. Twilight got two candles from the library while I searched the cupboards for two big glass beakers with an bottom outlet. We put the lit candles in a flat bowl of water and put the beakers upside down over them. I plugged one with a cork while we stuffed the other outlet with the changeling goo. We brought some chairs out and sat around the candles watching them. After three minutes the one with the cork went out. we waited to see what what would happen to the other one. Five more minutes passed... Ten more minutes... "Bon Bon will be thrilled to hear I watched a candle burn today.", Lyra joked. "Sometimes science looks boring but the results ain't.", I replied. Half an hour later I decided we had a result. "Looks like we have proven our theory. Oxygen in the goo could not have kept the flame alive for so long." I plugged the outlet behind the green goo with a cork and sure enough, the candle went out three minutes later. I started to put away all the lab equipment we had used. "Looks like we learned a little bit more about the changelings." -----0_0----- 'If that stupid non-pony hadn't noticed something was wrong I could have taken them out one by one. With all the info I gathered about Cadence on the trip it would have been easy to infiltrate Canterlot palace from a position of power.' I paced inside the hotel room I had rented in the disguise of 'Night Star' a mare with a black coat and dark blue mane. I had used this disguise before back when... This wasn't the time to think about her, I had to concentrate on my plans. It was hard enough to do all this without mother noticing, it had taken years to figure out which changeling captains were displeased with mother's leadership of 'stay hidden and live among them' and would follow me with an invasion plan. "Do you still think this is a good idea? If anything fails the whole hive could be in danger.", Nigrum asked. "Everything will be fine, we will have the element of surprise.", I answered. Nigrum was my nanny when I was born and had raised me since. She was the one changeling I absolutely trusted and always had my back. "I will show them all, all of my sisters who said I could never do anything. I may be the youngest and last in succession for the throne, but when Equestria is mine, they won't have any other choice but make me the changeling queen... and then no one ever will call me 'Crooked' again!" Without noticing I touched my warped horn.