//------------------------------// // Chapter 9 - Developing // Story: Lost Little Wolf // by PrincessColumbia //------------------------------// “In the English language there are orphans and widows, but there is no word for the parents who lose a child.”  ― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper The sound of Chrysalis’ hooves clacking on the stone floor of the lobby to our quarters was the only sound, save the slightly panicked breathing of the changeling next to me. Beetle hadn’t wanted to be part of our little plan in the first place, and I did feel a little bad for putting him in this position. Only a little though, the guy needed to grow a carapace or he’d wind up being nothing more than a refuse worker when he got older. Having completed a pass in front of the line of younglings, of which I was at the head, she slowly and deliberately circled around to walk behind us. We all kept our eyes forward as she paced up the line. Not that there’s anything wrong with refuse workers, but there’s the small hoof-ful of them that do nothing but refuse work, and even Chrysalis (who was their mother) didn’t want to hang around them, mostly from the smell, but also because after years of doing nothing but the changeling equivalent of garbage hauling, septic-tank maintenance, and carting off the dead for proper disposal, the refuse worker’s social abilities tended to fold inward until they were barely able to communicate even over the hivemind. As Chrysalis circled around me and started another pace around in front of us, she let out an aggravated sigh, “Would it be too much to hope,” she began, “That Chrystal was not the mastermind behind this latest headache?” The smaller changelings in the line shuffled their hooves, a couple lowered their gaze in shame. “Uhm…mom…” I began. She pinned me with a look, “I am not asking you, I’m asking your…cohorts.” It was my turn to shuffle my hooves and drop my gaze. It was, of course, Aphid that spoke up first. While sometimes she reminded me very much of my sister from my human life, she had a mommy-pleaser streak a mile wide and I had no doubt that momma-Chrysalis knew it. “Momma, Chrystal said that since we were able to use disguises properly we could visit the pony town at the edge of the badlands.” Chrysalis let out the "I'm not angry, just disappointed" sigh that is universal to all parents and glanced over at the pile of saddlebags we had been wearing when the soldier-changelings that patrolled the exterior of the hive caught us trying to sneak out. Canteens, scroll checklists, and some travel foodstuffs poked out of the openings of the bags of the younger nymphs in our group. OK, that was being charitable, every bag but mine was a packing nightmare. One of them, Barkbiter's if I recalled right, was practically bursting, being packed with nothing but comic books of all things. By the time I'd found out how poorly he'd packed we were already on our way out of the hive and I didn't want to risk the extra trip back plus the time it would have taken to get him properly kitted out. For all the good that did us. "Well," began Chrysalis, "You certainly were prepared…mostly.” We collectively held our breaths as she turned to us with a determined gaze. “For the rest of the day the lot of you are to help in the kitchens, clean-up duty only,” she addressed this last to me directly, she knew how much I liked to cook, “You are still expected to complete your homework and have it ready to turn in the day after tomorrow.” The majority response was a mild but resigned groan. Those of us who were paying close attention (which meant me, Aphid, Barkbiter, and Moth) were now hanging on her words. Chrysalis noticed we caught the scheduling implication in her declaration and her stern visage was betrayed by a tiny smile. “Tomorrow, you will be here before sunrise, you will be properly packed, and you will be ready to visit the ponies.” This was met with cheers and a stampede for the door. Chrysalis pulled me aside before I could leave, “Daughter…” Uh-oh! I thought. “Yes, momma?” I did my best to turn on the ‘cute,’ a trick my daughter had tried numerous times. She sighed, “I know you were an adult in your previous life, and I appreciate your independence and strength of will and the leadership you’re already showing for the younglings…” I was sensing a ‘but’ coming, “But…” I knew it! “…you can’t just go haring off on trips like this without telling me about them. At the least you could have arranged some guards.” I bit my lip. I had numerous things I could have said about her statement, but she was a mom and it would have been unfair of me to argue her maternal instincts. Thinking back on it, if Freya had tried what I had just done with a group of her friends from school or church, I’d have been tempted to tan her hide, and at the very least she’d have lost TV and video game privileges for a month. “Yes, momma. Sorry, I…got used to making my own decisions before…you know.” She hugged me close for a moment, then said, “Go on, you have work to do in the kitchens.” I put a hoof to my head dramatically, “Oh, woe is me! Banished to the deepest dungeons of the dark castle, pressed into servitude! Me, a princess, serving as a lowly scullery maid!” Chrysalis snorted a laugh and whipped my backside with her tail, “Get moving, drama queen!” With a yelp and a giggle, I galloped off to catch up with the rest of my classmates. _-/^\-_ We once again stood at attention in a line as Chrysalis paced in front of us examining us closely, though this time she held a small smile on the face of the pony disguise she was wearing for the day. Her choice of a soft forest green fur with a silvery mane was a slightly exotic touch that nonetheless would blend in nicely with pretty much any pony population, and the unicorn horn would allow her to use magic without raising suspicion. She had chosen a cutiemark of an ink-heavy quill in front of a stamp. My own disguise was that of a teenaged unicorn filly with a white coat and blonde mane. I chose a cutiemark that I’d created for an old OC that never saw the light of day; it was a pair of metallic stylized Pegasus wings spread for flight. Amusingly, my design for the OC, that being a unicorn obsessed with flight that she made a pair of wings using metal and magic, was somewhat vindicated when the prosthetic wing the writers and artists of the MLP staff made for Rainbow Dash in the alternate universe where Equestria was at war with Sombra was nearly a dead-on match for the wing design I’d imagined. And granted, while I wasn’t technically a teenager, my native form was nearly twice the size of my classmates, and changing sizes in disguise took a lot more energy. Chrysalis paused in her inspection, “Hmmm,” she vocalized, “There’s too many cutiemarks for a group of foals this size. Aphid, Moth, you’ll be markless.” Moth just shrugged and with a small burst of green flame was now sans the wrench pseudo-mark he’d been wearing, but Aphid whined a little, “But mo~o~o~m, I worked hard to come up with this mark!” It was, indeed, a very nice mark. Too nice. It was a complete scene of a butterfly emerging from a cocoon, complete with shimmering wings and a forest backdrop framed by expertly designed branches. Chrysalis was refraining from rolling her eyes, “I can tell, now listen to your mother.” Grumbling, Aphid complied, nixing the overly artistic mark. “I expect a report turned in to your teachers on effective original cutiemark design within a week, understood?” With another grumble, the younger changeling gave her acknowledgement with as minimal a head nod as I’d ever seen her do. _-/^\-_ It took a hike of three hours to get through the Badlands desert, and another hour to find a good way of entering the town un-noticed. While the younger ‘lings may have complained a bit (under their breath, and not where Chrysalis could hear), I understood that a lone mare with a teenager and small pack of foals trotting out of the desert would have raised a few questions. Soon enough, however, we were strolling through town, looking for all the world like a teacher simply taking her class around a small town to show them grade-school civics. Chrysalis, or “Short Form” (as her disguise was named) would point to a building and identify it as a courthouse, or a town hall, or a library (she had to magically restrain me at that one…but books!) and explain how it fit in pony society. The questions were typical of foals their age (or the age they appeared) and my own questions were more appropriate of a teenager. As we actually were ignorant of the things we were asking, and referring to “ponies” in the third-person perspective the way we were would make sense in a class setting, we blended perfectly. We even got a few smiles from the adult ponies that passed by, and the town mayor, a stallion the pony mares may have found attractive, in a “distinguished (read - going slightly gray around the muzzle) gentleman” sort of way, even stopped by to greet us and explain what his day was like. (And flirt with Chrysalis, he was shameless! At least she and I got a giggle out of it.) Ah, small towns, gotta love ‘em! Plus, the town being a whistle-stop on the new train line meant that the appearance of a whole class of unknown fillies and colts on a field-trip went completely unquestioned. The whole town was practically lifted from a postcard from the generation just before my parents. They had a barber’s salon, a small schoolhouse that served the towns entire minor population, and even a corner store with an old-style pharmacy lifted right out of 1950’s Americana. I suppose the nearly Disney-esque quality of the whole experience was what left me somewhat emotionally vulnerable to what happened next. It wasn’t a big thing, it wasn’t a terrible thing, but it was one of those reminders that even years after the fact, the gaping wound of loss can still feel fresh. We had just finished having malted ice cream shakes at the pharmacy and were on our way to the nearby firehouse when I heard a little filly with a shockingly familiar voice, “Mommy, can I play on the swings?” My reaction wasn’t logical in the slightest. The filly’s voice I heard was just a notch different, maybe in the timber, maybe the cadence, maybe the pronunciation of the words, but just different enough to not be my daughter… but it was close enough. My ears turned on a swivel, I turned my head to where the voice was coming from, “Freya!?” I gasped. Once upon a time, about six months after the divorce, I had been working on a pony OC for myself. Naturally, when my daughter saw it she hopped up in my lap and insisted I make one for her. Giggling, I refreshed the pony creator and started building it with her. We picked a coat color, a mane and tail color, a mane style, an accessory or two, and even an umbrella cutiemark was selected from the small library built into the creator. The little filly I saw with her mom could have leapt right off my screen. The only real difference was the filly was a unicorn, where Freya had wanted the full alicorn look. Back in early 2011 when my wife and I were just getting into MLP, she had designed her own OC. It was an earth pony mare with a loose, curly dark brown mane and light brown coat and a pair of dice for a cutiemark. The mare I saw with the filly was shockingly similar to that OC, though the mane style was more of an up-do and the cutiemark turned out to be a pair of red bricks and not dice. The mother said something to the filly, I couldn’t hear over the pounding of my heart what it was. I didn’t even realize I hadn’t been moving for a couple of minutes until Chrysalis wrapped an arm over my withers. She looked at the tears streaming down my cheeks, looked to where I was watching, and then her face lit up with a melancholy understanding. We stood there for a while, I’m not sure how long. She just held me close as I cried myself out. Even after the mare and filly had moved on. The other changelings, only slightly aware of the situation, formed a curious and somewhat protective ring around us. I knew exactly what was happening, of course. I had spent the last two (nearly three now, actually) years in the hive. There was precisely one mother in the hive, and the voices of the changelings all had a slightly buzzing and dual or triple layered quality to them, which meant that there was no chance my brain would be tricked into thinking it was around other humans, and thus leaving open the possibility, however slight or remote, that my ex-wife and daughter would be nearby. Here in a pony town, however, was nothing but “normal” voices and “normal” nuclear family sets. Even my own appearance wasn’t what I’d been living with, so the part of my brain that had adapted and even somewhat healed from my death had “fallen asleep” enough to allow a filly’s voice to catch me off-guard. The similarities in the appearances, however, was just karma being a dick. As the sun started to slowly sink to the west, I finally got a handle on my emotions enough to stop the water-works. “Thank…thanks, momma.” I said through the last lingering sobs, “I’m glad you caught us yesterday. I’m glad you were here.” She nodded in reply, “Would you like to go back to the hive?” she asked quietly. Taking a deep, shuddering breath, I nodded. As the school was letting out and a train was depositing commuters who were returning home for the evening, we were able to slip out much easier than it was to get into the town. As soon as it got dark enough to hide the black of our carapaces, we all dropped our disguise and flew home. _-/^\-_ While Star Trek: Voyager wasn’t as good as it’s predecessors or even the other sci-fi shows it was contemporary with, it had a few features I really liked, including a pool hall in Paris, France used as a setting for the holodeck. It was in this setting that Nightmare Moon helped me recreate that she finally asked me what was bothering me. I sighed as I used my human body to line up a shot, “I saw a mare and filly that reminded me of my family on Earth.” The clack of the cue ball against one of the striped balls punctuated my explanation. I missed the pocket. Moon nodded in understanding. As a fellow creature of loss, she had no need for me to elaborate. She lined up her own shot, her rather nice humanoid body draping over the table in ways that would have made a male anatomy stand at attention. “You’re not even doing that consciously, are you?” I asked. She made her shot, pushing off the table just in time to allow the path of two solid-color balls to be unimpeded. One bounced off a bumper, the other sank into a pocket. She turned from the table as she walked around to reposition, “Doing what?” I rolled my eyes, “Never mind.” _-/^\-_ Breakfast the next morning was interrupted by a scout, for once not one from Equestria. “My queen,” he said from a deep bow, “Many apologies for interrupting, but this is fairly urgent.” “Rise, Spiracle” replied Chrysalis, “It had better be important for you to abandon your mission and return here from the Undiscovered West personally, rather than simply send a message.” Spiracle, a clearly travel-hardened changeling, stood at attention, “They’re in the West. We found signs of a recent encampment. We were able to identify a slave ring that had been left behind.” Where Chrysalis had been in a mode of “professional detachment” before, she dropped that entirely. “Manically Interested with a hint of Murder” would be a better description. “You mean…?” she trailed off. “Yes ma’am,” interjected Spiracle, “It’s been 500 years, but we found the caribou.”