Do not underestimate me. I have battled the worst demons of Tartarus!1 I have bent the very laws of our world with my bare hooves!2 My mere presence has cowed trained warriors into submission!3 I have stood over the prone form of Queen Chrysalis4, and now command more power within the changeling swarms than any pony in known history!5 I have strapped myself to explosives and been launched beyond the grasp of our world!6 I have traveled beyond the known plane of existence and walked on worlds beyond our universe!7 I returned to Equis in a fifteen-hundred-degree cloak of shock-heated plasma!8 I am Cherry Berry: Astromare!
Chrysalis re-read the caption. Then she turned it upside down and read it again. She turned it right side up again. She blinked, hoping that her eyes were deceiving her. They weren't. On the cover, prominently attached to the caption stood a cartoonish image that may, at one point, have been based on the loose idea of CSP's lead pilot. Unfortunately her proportions were better likened to an exaggerated supermodel in a suit that made Wonderbolt uniforms look positively baggy. She stood, holding a fishbowl helmet under one leg, on a cratered and rocky surface somewhere in space. Behind her stood stylized versions of CSP's more prominent members (and a few she didn't recognize). Precisely none of them had vacuum-appropriate gear on.
"OCCUPANT!!!"
A moment later a buck-toothed changeling poked his head through the door. "Yes, my queen?"
"What. Is THIS?!?" Chrysalis slapped the comic book down on her desk.
"A, um, a comic book? Cherry Berry: Astromare issue one, I believe."
"And why, pray tell, does it even exist?" the queen snarled.
Occupant fidgeted and did his best to hide the edges of a rather familiar comic book back under his vest without actually acknowledging its existence. "Well... you see... there was this contract, and um, it payed well and didn't require any expenditure on our part, and the other changelings all thought it was the best thing since the Fun Machine and I tried to not let word get out, but Lucky Cricket got past me with a proof copy and now they all want their own copies and then Goddard saw it and hasn't stopped cackling for two days and please don't tell Cherry."
Chrysalis held a level glare at the smaller changeling the entire time. She didn't even twitch when he nearly passed out from lack of breath. "Do you know what you've done? Every drone in the hive is going to want to do every half-baked, irresponsible, insane, impossible thing depicted in this wholly fictitious rag of lies! We get enough of that already! We don't need someone actively thinking up new ideas for them! At least it's just the one."
"Well... um... about that..."
1 Tirek won. It sucked.
2 Her home-built biplane.
3 The CSP prototype crew module had failed to meet some9 of her expectations.
4 Chrysalis had not been as prepared for her first ride in the centrifuge as she had hoped.
5 Several members of non-pony species within the CSP management hold more changelings under their authority than Cherry does as a pilot.
6 Rockets: barely controlled explosion in a tube.
7 Comments made after her return suggest that she felt additional testing of the Sparkle Drive should probably have been performed before use on a crewed flight.
8 Moving at 33 times the speed of sound does impressive things to the air.
9 All of them, even a number of them she didn't even realize she had.