//------------------------------// // Chapter Two: The Morning After // Story: Breaking In to Avoid Being Broken // by Justice3442 //------------------------------// Chrysalis awoke the next morning the same she did most since she had begun staying with Princess Cadance and Shining Armor, covered in fluids and dried residue from the evening’s bedroom activities. Additionally, she found herself part of the couple’s three-part snuggle sandwich, in this particular instance, the meat, or perhaps it was more apt to say she was the cheese between two patties of hot animal flesh with how gooey she currently was. She once tried to explain the particular joy of eating hot flesh of lesser beings to Cadance and Shining. They got ill during the conversation. It was great, if confusing… Why did ponies keep all these lesser beings around like cows and sheep if not for sustenance? So what if they could converse with ponies? She’d been conversing with ponies for centuries! Never did them any good. As much as she’d love to complain about how uncomfortable it was to be smothered like this, the truth was the warmth from the two ponies gave her a sounder sleep than she had ever gotten in her hive surrounded by her brood. Still, as nourishing as the trio’s love sessions were every night, they were nowhere as fulfilling as some of Queen Chrysalis’s more successful raids on ponies during her long and glorious reign. Given enough time, she’d certainly be able to recall the specific raids over the centuries that were better.  Yes… just a little more time. The two ponies who had her trapped in their legs, love, and magical leverage were stirring, their bodies tossing and turning as limbs swatted at the mornings rays and occasionally Chrysalis’s face like the half-functional oafs that they were. Soon, their eyes fluttered open, largely because Chrysalis always swatted back, their brains supposedly abuzz of responsibilities to their oddly not disposable subjects and their pathetically tiny brood consisting of one entity. Still, the couple were practically insatiable in regard to their sexual appetites. Before they’d remove themselves from the bed and free Chrysalis from her tangle of limbs cage, she knew they would have a brief exchange that’d determine if the morning would start with a ‘bang’ or a whimper. Shining let out a tired groan as his eyelid fluttered open revealing eyes spiderwebbed with red veins. “Coffee…” he groaned out. Cadance grunted in reply then managed to work her brain and lips enough to form a word. “I concur…” Sucking in the air through clenched teeth, Chrysalis said nothing and instead quickly detached the two tired ponies from her personage and jumped from the large bed where she flitted to the ground. No breakfast for her from these two, it seemed… Her two depraved junkie hosts just had to have their liquid stimulants to start the day. Well, she’d just have to make do with the energy she had gorged herself on during the trio’s second round until lunchtime. Assuming the couple could spare the time on top of their ‘bargaining’ with Chrysalis… Oh who was she kidding? They somehow always found the time. Cadance flashed Chrysalis the most dazzling smile she could in her tired state.  “Chrysalis? Could you get somepony to bring coffee?” Chrysalis grunted something that was roughly an affirmative. The couple had long since stopped asking her to get coffee personally. What Chrysalis brought back was sludgelike in composition and blacker than her exoskeleton, though still a shade or two lighter than her heart. Worse still, it never failed to give the royals alarming heart palpitations and what they dubbed 'the brown sweats.' They did get a lot of work done over the three days where they were incapable of sleeping, though. She stretched her body to the left, to the right, then was consumed in jade flames that left a smaller, if still somewhat tall and thin pony in place. In this case, black chitin turned to an ashen gray coat and gossamer wings changed to feathered ones. Her eyes also rounded out to look more like a pony’s. However, her jade irises remained. Her hair also remained much the same, though the color had wandered a bit more in the ‘pastel’ direction to better match Chrysalis’s new coat color. To complete her look, a cutie mark of a round, gold-gilded cage containing a black breezie-like creature with bright-green wings inside was added to her flank. When she first came up with the new form, her initial version of the mark had a teardrop on the face of the small creature, but her hosts had said that they ‘get it’ and that she was ‘overly dramatic.’ So, Chrysalis lost the tear and settled for yelling at the pair for a while, which involved a lot of eye-rolling, and then a lot of angry ‘make-up’ sex. At least that’s how those two saw it. A sort of ‘phantom’ horn appeared as her magic flashed jade and a small end table next to the bed opened. Chrysalis levitated out a pair of trendy-looking, bright-green framed glasses and set them on her nose. With merely a few steps, the annoyance on Chrysalis’s face changed from targeted to a general disdain for the planet and everything living, dead, or in-between on it. Granted, it took very little to get in character. With a few more steps she was at the double doors to the royal bedroom and threw them open as hard as she could while stomping around.  Though the blindingly bright-in-the-morning-sun hallway was relatively empty for a moment, a purple crystal stallion pegasus in gleaming metal guard armor clearly heard the noise and rushed over as quickly as his wings would carry him.  It was only when he got about halfway down the hall that he spotted Chrysalis in her pegasus form and his flight slowed from ‘Here I come to save the daaaaaay!’ to ‘I have made a horrible mistake this morning!’ as he slowed and stopped perhaps just out of typical comfortable conversation distance from Chrysalis. Probably because what was about to happen was never a comfortable conversation. “Uh… Miss Persnickety!” The guard quickly stood at attention with his spear held upright. “I heard the doors slam open and thought—” Chrysalis narrowed her eyes and took a moment to adjust her glasses with a forehoof. “Shut up.” “Erm… Yes, ma’am.” “The royal junkies want coffee, random pony guard. And you’re going to get it for them.” The guard hesitated. “Five minutes ago would have been nice!” Chrysalis snapped. “Uh… Ma’am? I technically don’t answer to you and my name i—" “No one cares!” Chrysalis snapped letting genuine anger seep into her tone. “Their most royal neediness-ess want coffee! Go get some! Chop-chop! Rejoice in your deliverance from your monotonous guard duty or lament that cruel fate has deemed that you have to go get mind-altering liquid this morning! Either way, just do it!” The guardspony swallowed. “Ye-yes, ma’am!” Still fully armored and carrying a spear, the guard made haste down the hallway. Chrysalis raise a forehoof to her mouth. “Remember! Three sugars and a HEART in the foam for the FIRST coffee. Then an extra shot of espresso, FIVE sugars, and a six-pointed star on a shield, and three FIVE-point stars surrounding that for the second!” She wasn’t sure what perverse joy Cadance and Shining took in having such peculiar tastes in how they liked their drinks, but that hardly bothered her compared to the fact that it was quite common for a guard to not do what Chrysalis asked the VERY MOMENT she asked it. Regardless of what Chrysalis might think of the couple’s ridiculous morning rituals, it wasn’t the guard’s place to question their betters and the fact that they even shot her the odd confused look made Chrysalis wish she could currently boil their insides with her magic while they were still living. Also, Chrysalis heard tell that the coffee at the local guard’s station had improved substantially and the royal guards were now amongst the best baristas in all of Equestria, so what was their problem?! The whole sordid exchange had left Chrysalis with sourer-sourpuss than usual. The only recourse was to find a little love to soothe her annoyance. If Princess Cadance and Shining Armor were mostly empty taps at the moment, she’d just have to find her meal elsewhere. Luckily, her captors had a snack presented on a massive crystal plate for her. She took a short jaunt down the hall as her ‘phantom’ horn sparked green for a second before Chrysalis thought better of it and opened the door with her forelegs. The pegasus form was inconvenient in that she couldn’t use magic, but at least she could fly without arousing suspicion. She also had learned to get by with mostly pointing and yelling at ponies to get what she needed. It was just a short jaunt down the hallway to the royal heir’s room and any guard ponies that caught sight of her continued on their patrol as if Chrysalis wasn’t there. In fact, it was more accurate to say that they immediately avoided eye contact. Truly, it was the best infiltration job Chrysalis had ever pulled, and rather than convince anypony she was somepony else entirely, she got to freely be as irritating as she wanted and yell at ponies. This also made this ongoing infiltration far more tolerable than most. So, she had worked her way into penetrating a nation at a level she could normally only pull off by kidnapping and replacing royalty, no pony would ever question who she was in her alternate form, and she didn’t even have to be polite to anypony! And she had nowhere to go with… with any of this… Sure, reluctantly going back to Princess Cadance and Shining Armor after their perhaps, too welcoming (as well as unnervingly bizarre) invitation eventually felt like the right thing to do. Given the first option was hide under the bed and play nice with one of her most hated enemies and the other option was accepting love buffets via debauched threesome one-to-three times a day, with snacks on the side… However, was that really all she could do? There were conditions to Chrysalis’s becoming ‘part of the herd’… Ones enforced by magic. Not that Chrysalis blamed her captors, of course, had she decided to keep a former enemy around as a ‘pet’, she’d do everything she could to curtail a sudden, but inevitable, betrayal. Still, this left Chrysalis perfectly taken care of, but with nothing to show for her centuries of rulership. Chrysalis stood up on her haunches and pushed open a set of double doors in front of her. Weeks ago, she would have lamented even having to put in that amount of effort to get around, but the act had become something of a routine. Well… At least I have the chance to do SOMETHING even if it requires playing more games with the most royal of the pony nymphomaniacs. Right. A chance. And it could be a good chance if she could push past her most recent irritations. The soft coos of a tiny infant pony greeted Chrysalis as she walked in, inviting her further into the room. Chrysalis licked her pony lips with a decidedly un-pony forked tongue as she entered the massive nursery. She passed an armoire and shot a glance at a door along the far wall. She had never asked what this room was before it became a nursery, but for some reason, it had a utility closet large enough to hold cleaning supplies and three regular-sized ponies. Or perhaps two alicorns, Chrysalis had surmised. Not that she was ever sure what she would do with this information, or why it had occurred to her. It was also beyond her insurmountable intellect what anypony would do with a wooden bucket that had a hole in it, but it was an artifact of the room regardless. Still, pony babies did seem to be little mess factories, so perhaps the supplies made some degree of sense. She approached the crystal bed in the room. Though most pony babies were usually caged, most pony babies didn’t have wings bigger than Chrysalis’s in her true form and a horn to boot. Her parents likely gave up on conventional containment bedding immediately, understanding it was unlikely to stop the foal when they saw it escape her disgusting mammalian birth prison. No matter… Trust was the most reliable cage of all. Smiling malevolently to herself, Chrysalis caught sight of her prey. An alicorn baby with a coat color slightly pinker than that of a changeling larva, a mane and tail of a grotesque purple-pink gradient with a bright blue swish through it. The foal also sported a horn jutting out from its forehead, and a pair of folded wings that - when extended, were larger than the creature itself. While Chrysalis had it on record the baby could be a hassle, even a danger if mishandled, to her it was as docile as a domesticated pet. In changeling terms, it was pretty much a crème puff. The baby burbled in delight upon seeing Chrysalis’s pony form, releasing a spore of palpable pink-love into the air. Chrysalis took a moment to suck in the heavy concentration of love. It suddenly went quiet, hugged herself, and shivered. That apparently done, she burbled again and even laughed, letting out even more love that swirled around Chrysalis. In a blaze of jade fire, Chrysalis resumed her changeling form. Grinning with a mouth full of sharp white teeth, and a pair of fangs to boot, she loomed over the infant like a predator ready to strike. Slowly, her lips split open wider as she lowered herself closer to the little princess. “Boo!” The pathetic pony larva giggled mirthfully and playfully swatted up at Chrysalis as even more love was released. Chrysalis did her best to consume it all in one gulp, but it was a bit much even for her legendary appetite. Flurry Heart -that is- the putrid filthmonger of a creature cringed slightly as it sensed something was amiss, then immediately broke into a titter and threw its forelegs up and down as if trying to say ‘Again! Again!’ It was something peculiar, the love of an infant pony. Well, particularly in the sense of having it straight from the source, instead of cocooned and fed off of in dribs and drabs. It came in short, powerful bursts before the creature would get distracted and their love waned quite quickly. However, it never seemed to completely go away and lingered in the air much like… Oh, probably something ponies liked, the smell of cinnamon buns perhaps… The aforementioned filthmonger pulled a twisted face for a moment then giggled again. Chrysalis sniffed the air… Well this certainly doesn’t smell like cinnamon buns. She quickly placed the infant back in its crib as it looked up at her with big, glassy eyes and Flurry Heart’s lower lip began to quiver. “Oh, don’t give me that look!” Chrysalis exclaimed. “You know the rules! You being in a clean, well-behaved state barely qualifies you as being worthwhile for the love you give me! Once you spoil either of those things with a tantrum or by making yourself literally smell like you’re spoiled food, you’re your parent’s problem, not mine!” To the barely-grown love engine’s credit, it managed to stop itself from wailing if only by virtue of compressing her lips together harder as tears rolled down her cheeks and she began to sniffle. Chrysalis simply grunted in displeasure. She could simply disable her olfactory receptors, but did she really want to give this tiny creature the satisfaction as well as start teaching it that it was ‘okay’ for it to soil itself in her presence? No. No to both those things. Before Chrysalis could make a production of abandoning the child to its refuse, Cadance and Shining Armor poured in. Causing the smaller, dumber pony to let out another burst of merriment as they regarded the scene in front of them with tired smiles. Before either pony could say anything, Chrysalis did an about-face. “Your infant has messed itself!” she declared. “Fix it. Now,” she added as she transformed back into her pony form. Shining just chuckled. “Of course, we’ll take it from here.” Cadance nodded. “Thanks for checking up on Flurry Heart.” Chrysalis just tightened her eyes. “Its love was delicious!” she hissed out as evilly as she could. Rather than have the desired effect, the two pony parents simply replied with a perfectly synchronized warble of “AWWWWWawwwww!” Growling, Chrysalis arranged both her wings so only an extended middle-feather was showing as she flounced out of the room. She couldn’t remember when or what creature she had picked up that little display of anger from, but it was somehow satisfying to share with ponies even if it mostly just left them confused.   “Uh… We’ll meet in my study at lunch to talk about your little vengeance run, okay?” Shining called out. “THE SKY WILL TURN BLOOD-RED WITH THE LOVE OF THOSE DEAR TO YOU AND THEIR TEARS WILL FLOOD THE STREETS!” Chrysalis shot back. This was met with an unamused “Don’t do that,” from Shining Armor, a chipper “That’s the spirit! Never give up!” from Princess Cadance, and one more delighted burble from the little perpetual love dispenser. Chrysalis just grumbled to herself as she left. She figured she’d make the rounds through the palace and ask the staff and guardsponies on shift helpful questions like, “Why are you so disappointing at what you’re doing right now?” and offer helpful follow-up advice like, “Perhaps you could STOP being such a waste of space and do better?” Plus, despite the annoyances, her head was clear, and her goal quite focused. There was no way Cadance and Shining Armor would allow her to directly harm any of her targets, so she’d have to look at the problem from all angles and come at it sideways. Fortunately for her and unfortunately for everypony else, she was the Changeling Queen. Coming at things sideways was all she ever did.