“Wake up, Flash Sentry.”
Do you know that feeling you get after a long night out, where your eyes dry out and get all bleary and crusty and otherwise unpleasant? Take that, and extend that feeling to cover your entire body (including the inside of your mouth) and you'll get a vague idea of what it's like to be a changeling's prisoner. For added authenticity, dangle yourself upside-down by your hooves until all your blood pools in your ears, and have your friends and acquaintances circle around and taunt you in out-of-character ways.
I groaned, and blearily opened my eyes. Sure enough, standing in front of me was none other than 'Princess Celestia.' Her sneer alone was enough to prove she was an impostor, though the fact that I was still bound up and dangling from the ceiling certainly didn't instill any confidence in me. I would've started begging for my life then and there, if I thought it would do me any good.
“You should be proud.” The doppelganger-princess flicked her perfect, billowing mane back. “You almost succeeded. You even put up more of a fight than some of Princess Twilight's friends ... but then again, we took them by surprise. They're all at The Hive, now-- Queen Chrysalis will have her ... fun with them. But you, Flash Sentry. You are all mine.” She raised one hoof to pet at my cheek, and I flinched away. My pulse immediately started pounding faster (and not in a good way, either). I instinctively started pushing and bucking against my bonds, to little avail.
“Heroics. How delicious. But futile.” There was a shimmer of green flame, and the changeling revealed her true, hideous form. She didn't have the stature of a queen, but I presumed she at least had some kind of authority, given her disguise. “And you haven't even seen the best part, yet.”
“What in blazes are you talking about?”
“It won't be enough to eat you, Flash Sentry. I want to make this ... dramatic. Which is why I've brought a guest.” She put a hoof on my shoulder and slowly spun me around, giving me a look at the other side of the room-- and the silently sobbing pony bound to a high backed chair.
Carrot Top.
“Perfect, isn't it?” The changeling cackled, complete with a clacking of fangs and mandibles. “Your one true love shall watch you die!”
“No!” Carrot Top struggled against her bonds. “Take me, instead! Please!” She slumped in her guard's grasp, and sniffled again, the very image of a distressed damsel.
“Please.” I said. “You're not fooling anypony. That's obviously another of your bugs helping you play your sick little game.”
“Flashy!” Carrot Top said. “Don't say that! It really is me!”
“Is it, now?”
“You've got to believe me! I'll even prove it to you!” she said, desperate. “Don't you remember when we visited my parents? You drank a little too much cider and kept singing dirty army songs with my dad. And then the next day we went for a walk in the woods?”
Damn me if Carrot Top didn't wink.
“Bloody hell, it really is you.” I said, stunned.
“Mwa ha ha ha!” The changeling cackled, and buzzed her ragged wings in anticipation. “She shall watch you die, and I shall feast upon her mournful tears!” I briefly wondered if the changeling was speaking in metaphor or not, but she opened her wide, fang-filled mouth, and I got back to the more important business of trembling. A too-long tongue lolled out of the changeling's mouth and slithered up the side of my cheek.
The changeling savored the moment, taking me in as if I were the most expensive and ornate dish on the menu. Which, now that I think of it, I was. It's a lucky thing, too, that my captor liked to play with her food. For as she sniffed and slobbered all over me, she didn't see Carrot Top silently wriggle out of her bonds, lithe as a snake.
Carrot Top moved with confidence and purpose, a far cry from the shrinking damsel she'd played a moment before. Without a moment's hesitation, she grabbed the changeling's head in her front hooves-- and with a single, merciless twist, snapped its neck.
The changeling choked out one last gasp as it died, and collapsed bonelessly to the floor. As she started to free me from my bonds, Carrot Top didn't look twice at the dead changeling. Not that I could blame her-- damn thing was trying to eat me, after all. Good riddance.
“Are you alright? Did they hurt you?” Carrot Top wrenched a large chunk of cocoon away. Gravity soon took over, and I tumbled out towards the floor. I didn't have enough time to spread my wings, but Carrot Top caught me as I fell, cradling me effortlessly with that earth pony strength of hers. Oddly enough, the fact she'd used those same hooves to murder a changeling moments before didn't even register.
“You ... saved me.” I said, staring up into those green eyes like a bewildered child.
“Wouldn't be the first time.” Carrot Top's lips curled up in the faintest hint of a smile, and she eased me back to my hooves. “Can you walk?”
“I can do a lot more than that, if it'll get me out of here.” I gingerly stretched my wings, trying to get the circulation going after being bound up for who knows how long. “How did you even get out of that chair they glued you to?”
“Before I became a Special Agent, I spent a year studying under Harry Hoofdini.”
“You're just full of surprises, aren't you?”
“You don't know the half of it, Sentry.”
“Something tells me it's better that way.” I poked the dead changeling's body with one hoof. “Now, what's the plan?”
Carrot Top's expression went grim again. “There isn't one.”
“You're here at just the right place at just the right time to save my hide-- thanks for that, by the way-- and you're saying you don't have a plan?”
“I've been ... improvising.” She sounded embarrassed when she said it,
“Improvising.”
“Not long after you left with the Wonderbolts, the changelings hit one of our safehouses. I was captured ... but they just thought I was Carrot Top, the lovestruck pony, not Special Agent Golden Harvest. I figured it'd be a good way to get into the palace.”
“And then what?”
“Like I said, improvising. And since you're here, and Princess Celestia isn't, I'm betting the train mission didn't go well.”
“That's an understatement. But--” I rubbed at my chin, thoughtful. “Princess Luna did try to get a message to someone named Starlight Glimmer.”
“Princess Twilight's apprentice?” Carrot Top said. “She wasn't in Ponyville when the changelings captured Princess Twilight. If Princess Luna did warn her, we might just have a chance. But there's nothing we can do to help her-- even if we could find Glimmer, we'd run the risk of leading the changelings right to her.”
“So we hide.” I nodded. “Hole up somewhere safe, and wait for all of this to blow over.”
“Where?” Carrot Top ran a hoof through her hair. “If one safehouse was compromised, that means the others could be as well.”
“Actually, I know just the place.”
I'm not much for architecture, but I will say Canterlot Palace's wine cellar is a place of beauty.
Deep below the ballrooms and bedchambers of the palace above, the cellar is cool and quiet, predominantly carved from simple, unadorned stone. Casks upon casks of every kind of spirit you can imagine are stacked neatly along the cellar walls, while the center of the room is home to long rows of bottle racks, each section neatly and meticulously labeled with its contents.
“I should have known you'd come here.” Carrot Top said, deadpan. After we had made a few precautions upstairs (and hastily stuffed the dead changeling into a broom closet), the two of us snuck through the mostly empty Canterlot Palace, down to the most interesting of its sub-basements.
“Pssh. It's perfect, and you know it.” I said as I eased the cellar door shut. There wasn't a lock, so I started shoving heavy barrels of table wine in front of it as a makeshift barricade. “There are only a few ways in or out, which makes it defensible. And, that open window we left upstairs will make them think we've fled out into the city, so they won't think to search for us in the palace. And, the walls are thick enough that we won't be heard if we keep our voices down.”
“And it's filled with liquor.” Carrot Top said.
“That is a bonus, yes.” I leaned on the barrel in front of the cellar door to make sure it was securely in place, and then stepped back. “After all we've done, I'd say the both of us have earned a drink.”
This said, I went to peruse the wine racks, finally coming to a halt as I noted one label in particular. Gently, reverently, I took one particular bottle from its place, and brushed the dust from the label. And for the first time that day, I smiled. I scrounged up a couple of wineglasses and a corkscrew a few minutes later, and set the whole array out on an empty, upturned barrel.
Carrot Top sat on her haunches on the other side of the barrel, and eyed me curiously. “You're practically drooling, Sentry. Should I even ask?”
“This,” I said, “is a Chateau de Cheval. The finest product of Equestria's finest winery. This particular bottle is older than I am, and costs about three years' worth of my salary.” I made short work of the cork, and then poured myself a glass, and another for Carrot Top. I gently set the bottle aside, and then held my goblet up to the dim light available, savoring the wine's dark-ruby color. “The way I see it, either this Starlight Glimmer filly goes and saves Equestria, thanks to all our hard work, in which case a bottle of wine is more than enough compensation. Or, if Starlight Glimmer fails, we're all doomed anyway, in which case it's our duty to drink this wine before some ungrateful changeling chugs it down.”
“You've put a lot of thought into this.” Carrot Top said, but picked up her own goblet anyway.
“Beats thinking about ... everything else.” I said, and looked up at the ceiling. The cellar was still quiet, downright serene, but I shuddered as I envisioned a mass of blood-lusty changelings flooding in. “Especially when there's nothing we can do about it.”
“To victory, then.” Carrot Top said, and clinked her glass against mine.
“Let's just hope it's ours.” I said, and sipped delicately at my de Cheval. The wine had a subtle, nuanced taste-- not as crisp or overpowering as one might expect from such a famous wine. Rather, the complex combination of flavors played out over my tongue like a symphony. I closed my eyes and sighed, and for a single, too-short moment, I forgot about just how doomed I (along with the rest of Equestria, I suppose) was.
“Huh.” Carrot Top set her empty wineglass on the barrel and refilled it. “Not bad.”
“Not bad?” I blurted. All of those times she'd nearly gotten me killed suddenly paled in comparison to such flippant treatment of a de Cheval.
“I'm more of a cider drinker, to tell the truth.” Carrot Top said. “Must be from all that time I spend in Ponyville.”
“Oh?”
Carrot Top shrugged. “I've got to live somewhere when I'm not on assignment. Which also lets me keep an eye on Princess Twilight-- not that she really needs it. Plus, there's a disaster every few weeks, which keeps me sharp.”
“If you were any sharper, Miss Top, I could use you to shave.”
“Thanks?” Carrot Top sipped at her wine, a little slower, this time.
“I mean, you're terrifying, but you're kind of brilliant at it?” I said. “That whole malarkey about being in love with me, it was the perfect thing to distract a changeling. Which it did. Which is why we're here.”
“Hah. Right.” Carrot Top said. “All part of the plan.”
“And damn if it didn't work!” The de Cheval lent a warm flush to my cheeks, which was a welcome distraction from the aches and pains going through the rest of my body. “You'd think that love-eaters like changelings would have a sense for that sort of thing. Like, you know, how sharks can smell blood from miles away. It'd probably be a lot easier for them if they instinctively knew who was in--” The realization hit me, and I trailed off.
“It was just a trick!” Carrot Top blurted. “All spycraft. Like you said.”
“Right.” I nodded, and drained my glass. “Just in the line of duty. All a ruse. You can do better than the likes of me anyway.”
“I know.”
I frowned. “You weren't supposed to agree so quickly.”
“You said it, not me.”
“Well, if that's the case, I suppose it's worth noting that I could do better than the likes of you.”
“Excuse me?” Carrot Top's expression bordered somewhere between infuriated and confused.
“It's true! I mean, sure, you're pretty enough, but there are plenty of lovely young ladies I could be associating with who won't get me killed.”
“You haven't died yet.”
“I've come damn close!”
“You--” Carrot Top leaned forward and jabbed a hoof into my chest. She glared straight into my eyes, close enough to touch her nose to mine. Whatever further words she had on the subject were forgotten, however, as a heavy thump rolled through the wine cellar. “Did you hear that?” Carrot Top whispered.
“Unfortunately.” Despite the wine in my belly, my blood went icy cold. “Do you think it's--”
“Changelings!” Carrot Top cried, and the cellar door burst open with a blast of green magic. The energy bolt shattered the barrels piled in front of the door, and a small wave of red wine surged across the floor. A considerably larger wave of angry changelings followed it, and the battle was on.
“The rear door, quick!” I cried, and took to the air. I scooped up Carrot Top with one hoof, and the Chateau de Cheval with the other (priorities, you know) and bolted. The wine cellar's ceiling was enough to fly, but only just. But, no sooner had I rounded the corner to the rear door, it burst open with a fresh wave of chittering insect monsters.
“I'll hold them off, Sentry!” Carrot Top twisted out of my grip, and relieved me of the wine bottle for good measure. “You run!”
“Run?” I looked over my shoulder, and ducked a magic missile. “Where?”
“I'm sure you'll think of something!” Carrot Top said. And with that, she tilted the Chateau de Cheval to her lips and chugged down several thousand bits worth of wine like a sorority pledge during rush week. This done, she shattered the bottle over the head of the first changeling to get within reach, thrust the broken shards of glass into the neck of the second, and then she really got to work.
Carrot Top reared up on her back hooves, swaying back and forth in an unsteady, almost clownish gait. She staggered unpredictably, allowing her to avoid the changelings' furious attacks with ease. Her hooves lashed out, too quick for the eye to follow, and chitin crunched with each punch or kick. More and more changelings piled onto her, only to be thrown in all directions as they learned first hoof just what Special Agent Golden Harvest was capable of.
I didn't have much time to watch Carrot Top fight-- the smarter of the changelings soon started after the easier target. Read: me.
A changeling plowed into my side, at which point I immediately started shrieking like a little filly. I flailed and bucked, and shoved the black carapaced monstrosity off of me, at which point Carrot Top broke its spine with a well placed kick. Three more changelings dived in to replace him, so I rolled to my hooves to meet their assault.
After all, no one fights harder than a coward.
I've always been happy to run, lie, and/or cheat my way out of anything even resembling danger at the first opportunity. But, when there quite simply isn't any opportunity to run, lie, and/or cheat, there's little for me to do than to fight like the mad hero that everypony seems to think I am. A desperate, frantic strength surged through my limbs as I grappled with the next changeling, twisting him around to smash its head into the bottle racks with a cacophony of smashed glass.
Still screaming (of course I was screaming) I dove towards the next two, swinging away. I landed a couple of wild punches, and the buggers reeled back. Acting on pegasus instinct, I flapped my wings and made for the highest point I could find: the top of a pyramid-shaped stack of wine casks. Yet another changeling lunged for me, slamming into my side hard enough to dislodge the barrel I perched on. Several hundred pounds of oak and wine thundered down, rolling into a knot of changelings with a hellacious wet crunching.
Fangs snapped at the air mere inches from my throat-- I twisted in midair and dived, pushing the changeling in front of me. We hit another row of casks hard enough to break the head of a barrel full of Shiraz. I grit my teeth, and shoved the still-struggling changeling's head into the wine barrel, where I held it under the liquid until it finally stopped thrashing.
I stepped back, sides heaving. I took a moment to realize nothing was trying to kill me (for once) and all my desperate strength poured out of me like the wine already coursing down to the floor. I staggered away from the drowned changeling, turned my head to the side, and proceeded to puke up a small fortune's worth of Chateau de Cheval.
“Sentry.” Carrot Top's voice snapped me from my post-combat daze. Gently, she touched a hoof to my shoulder. “You're alright. It's alright. We won.”
“We what?”
“Won.” Carrot Top said, and winced slightly. In a word, she looked frightful. Her hair was wild, her lip was bleeding, and spatters of green changeling ichor were smeared all over her-- particularly around the hooves. Of course, I imagined I didn't look much better, either.
“You're hurt.” I said, rather obviously.
“So are you.”
“I've had worse.” I spoke mostly by reflex at that point.
“So have I.” Carrot Top said, though that didn't stop her from leaning against me for support.
“I believe that.” I said, looking down into what I had to admit were a rather lovely pair of green eyes. And for once, neither one of us had anything snide to say to each other.
So we kissed.
We must have made quite the picture: ankle deep in spilled wine, surrounded by broken changeling corpses, snogging like there was no tomorrow. Which, to be fair, could have very well been the case, for as much as Carrot Top and I knew.
Which is how they found us. The two of us had allowed ourselves to become so ... distracted that we didn't notice the flash of teleportation magic from the stairwell, nor the small platoon of princess ponies that accompanied it.
“Well met, Lieutenant Sentry!” Luna's voice boomed through the wine cellar, the sheer volume of it alone enough to nearly knock me from my horseshoes. “I should have known not even changelings could hold a gallant warrior such as you!” She trotted regally through the open doorway, having recovered from her slimy sojourn as a changeling prisoner.
“Your highness!” Carrot Top and I blurted at the same time, stumbling away from each other in a futile pretense of propriety. I bowed, and immediately regretted it as a whole array of sore muscles protested the movement. The sudden burst of pain reminded me just what I'd been through over the last day and a half. “If ... it really is you, if you'll forgive my saying so.”
“Wary to the last. Good. But you are safe, Lieutenant. I am the same Princess Luna you spoke to on the train. And, thanks to your efforts--” Princess Luna said. Her eyes didn't linger on Carrot Top and I, so much as the dozen or so dead changelings strewn all through the wine cellar. “I was indeed able to warn Starlight Glimmer. She, with the help of her friends, in turn were able to defeat Queen Chrysalis through the power of friendship. I was afraid there would be pockets of resistance here in Canterlot, but it appears you're a step ahead of me, in that regard.”
“Er.” I scratched at the back of my neck, and looked over to Carrot Top. She could only offer a helpless shrug, also at a loss for anything to say. “Thank you, your majesty?” I finally managed.
“I am the one who should thank you, Lieutenant.” Princess Luna said. “But for now, you and your ... friend may rest. I shall escort you to the infirmary, where your wounds shall be tended to.” Princess Luna sized up the mess Carrot Top and I had made of the room. “Which should also keep you away from King Thorax long enough for the palace staff to clean all this up.” She murmured to herself.
“King who?” Carrot Top said, frowning.
Princess Luna sighed, and shook her head. “I shall debrief you in the infirmary. It's ... complicated.”