—
I gazed down into Sunlight Plaza, taking in the sight of the numerous ponies flitting to-and-fro on their daily business. Wrapped up in thick coats and jackets, scarves and boots, knit hats and earmuffs, they lent a burst of color to the snow-covered clearing, blurring into each other as they came and went, maybe stopping by a nearby store occasionally until they finally departed for wherever else adults go. The two Royal Guards stood out well despite the darkness of the cloud cover as they patrolled the plaza, their paths well worn into the newly fallen flakes.
I stretched out my limbs and rolled my neck, drawing out a few pops before shaking off any accumulated snow and settled my stupid blank flank back into my perch on top of the fancy Prench restaurant. It wasn’t the most comfortable of places to rest, but the warm smell of pasta and breadsticks wafting up was always welcome, and they were one of the hoofful of stores that didn’t try to chase me off of their roof every so often. Thanks to the abundance of customers coming due to the holiday season, they seemed to always be cooking.
“Thanks for coming out with us, Persimmon!”
My ear flicked towards the direction of the voice, and I turned to look at the newest group of arrivals.
“Of course! It’s been my pleasure! I’ll catch you later!” The pegasus mare who had spoken split ways with the rest of her friends, a cheerful smile on her face and her saddlebags laden with freshly acquired goods.
I looked off to the side and fidgeted with my hooves as she approached my resting spot. Her hoofsteps were loud despite the noise in the plaza until they finally came to a stop right under me.
“You know you’d worry your father if he caught you climbing buildings again, missy!” she called out from the restaurant’s porch area.
I groaned and plopped my head down, forced to acknowledge her. I ignored the gazes of the diners as I called back down, “Yes, mom.”
She simply let out a tired sigh before taking off with a flap of her wings. It took only a moment before mom settled down right next to me and scooted closer.
“So how’s school been? I heard your class was going to put on a Hearth’s Warming Eve play.”
I huffed, brushing a bit of my amber mane out of my eyes. “Yeah, but I don’t feel like acting on a stage. Memorizing lines is boring, not to mention we would have to make our own costumes.”
“Oh, you know I would help sew you a costume if you wanted to.”
I stuck my tongue out in disgust. “Ew, no. The last one you made might as well have been a paper bag with holes cut in it.”
She pouted and rapped me on the back of the head with a harrumph. “Hmph! Ungrateful.”
I couldn’t hold in my giggles, and she put a foreleg around my shoulders with a grin before continuing, “So, planning on doing anything with your holiday? Any more ideas about what your cutie mark might be?”
“No, not in particular,” I said contemplatively.
“Maybe you just need a hobby, eh?” Mom said, shaking me about the shoulders.
I rolled my eyes. “I already have a hobby. I’m a street rat. I like climbing buildings.”
She snorted, but with a good-natured grin. “Don’t let your father hear that. You live in an apartment, not a cardboard box. Hey, maybe you can get a cutie mark in exploring!”
I turned to her and raised an eyebrow. “Aren’t you supposed to be encouraging me not to do this?”
Mom waved it away with a hoof. “And deny you your pegasus heritage? Preposterous!” she said, flaring out her wings and propelling some snow onto the tables below. “Even your father thinks you should’ve been born with wings.”
She sighed, growing a bit more somber. “You know, Sweetie, I know your dad has been busy with his research, but he still cares about you. This holiday will be different now that he finally got his grant.”
Mom pulled away and started digging around in her bags. “Here,” she said, pulling out a thick, long scarf, patterned with alternating red and yellow with a thin white band separating each section. She began wrapping it around me, and I could feel its heat, warmed by her own body heat from sitting in her saddlebags.
“Made this when I could. It can help keep you warm and safe whenever you feel lonely. Never forget, my little Sweet Spot, that your father and I will always be there for you, even if we can’t be there physically all the time.”
I closed my eyes and took a big breath, feeling the weight of the scarf around me and taking in mom’s scent. I felt, for once, at peace, as if the worries of school and life could be pushed away to tomorrow. It was nice.
“Never forget us.”
My eyes shot open, and I spun around to find a demon where my mother once rested. She stood tall and regal, her black shell perfect and her fangs sharp. Her dark cerulean hair formed a curtain through which her piercing green eyes stared down at me.
My legs failed to respond, and the whole sky darkened, the features of the clouds outlined by the glow of haunting green flames. The chill sank its fangs in once more, and frozen in place, I stared back into her eyes, the judging eyes of a predator. For a moment, I thought I could see a flicker of red in them, though perhaps it was merely a trick of the light.
But she turned and strode away from me. I fell, tipping over the edge. I looked into the flames and the ground raced forward to meet me. My heart seemed to scream in the dead silence, and—
Crystal
Overwatch jolted awake and groaned against the bright sunlight streaming in through the window, taking me out of my meditation. Her emotions were a swirl of annoyance and a little shock, a taste I could really only describe as pungent garlic, the kind that makes a pony scrunch up their face.
Which, coincidentally, was the face Overwatch was making. She peeked down at the covers she had kicked off in the middle of the night and pulled them back up with her magic, turning in bed until she was facing me, an eye looking lazily at where I sat on her bedside table.
“Bad dream?”
“Iunno. Maybe?” she mumbled. “What day is it?”
“I believe today is Saturday,” I replied, mentally taking a few deep breaths to calm my mind.
“Goooooood.” She buried herself deeper into her scarf and pillow and left it at that, her mane scattered everywhere with a few stray strands in her mouth.
I sank back into my meditation. Despite being… less than organic, I have found that, while not necessary, a little rest went a long way to keeping me sane and coherent. Curious, but it is at the very least a decent method of burning through extended periods of downtime.
Of course, to my mild disappointment, someone had decided to knock on the door just a moment later. Overwatch raised her head, looking blearily around with her disheveled mane poking in all directions before tossing off the covers.
“Who,” she grumbled, rolling off the bed and grabbing me in her magic.
“Under Celestia’s bright sun.” She pulled the bedroom door open roughly, holding me as if I were a weapon.
“Is here this early.” Overwatch’s hoofsteps echoed loudly in the empty apartment as she plodded onwards. In the background, I heard Lily flop out of her bathtub, and I discreetly reapplied my transformation spell on her.
“On a Saturday?” Overwatch punctuated the last word by pulling open her front door roughly with a scowl.
Standing on her front step were two stallions, one an orange earth pony with a white mane and the other a beige white unicorn with a dark red mane. It seemed that Overwatch recognized them because she dropped her scowl immediately and just stared dumbly at them.
“G-good morning?” She smiled hesitantly at them, the corner of her mouth twitching.
The earth pony simply raised his eyebrow with a smirk. “It’s the afternoon.”
“Hiya there! Who’re you two?” Lily leaned in eagerly, pushing Overwatch’s head to the side as she tried to get a look at the two visitors.
“J-just a moment.”
And then Overwatch slammed the door closed.
After many stammered apologies by my landlady, I had been placed on a high shelf overlooking the small dining table the two changeling visitors were seated at, disguised as a mere trinket amongst the dolls and models with me. While they had gotten a look at me through the door crack, I do not believe they had ascertained my true nature. Compared to Overwatch’s naivete, these two were much harder to trust, even if they were Overwatch’s hivemates.
The changeling known as Card Sharp looked warily at a happily humming Lilywater, who was currently zipping around with a towel and wiping up all of the water she had splashed everywhere on her way to the front door.
He turned to Overwatch. “Should we be worried about your tenant?”
Overwatch turned to look back from where she was stationed at the stove, a spatula held in her magic. The sound of frying eggs spit and cracked behind her. “She’s… she’s okay.”
“Okay?” Card chanced another look at the disguised merpony as she trotted back into the bathroom. “Should we really be having these meetings where she could hear things she shouldn’t be?”
Overwatch shrugged. “We don’t need to use our voices to communicate, so no worries there.”
“And if she gets kidnapped and replaced?”
Overwatch stabbed her spatula in the direction of the bright green pony with an incredulous look on her face. “Find me a changeling that can replicate that mess empathetically.”
Candlelight shrugged as he picked up one of the lockpicks on the table, left there the previous night. “Fair point. Still, can’t hurt to have one less point of error.” He looked up at the still-wet merpony. “Lily, was it? Would you mind going out and giving us an hour or so with your landlady?”
The green mare poked her head out for a second. “Cor, gimme a sec t’ think on it!”
“There is a public park nearby you may go to. Do not go further than that or I will not be able to continue allowing you to walk on land. Do not go with strangers and do not reveal anything about me or Overwatch.”
“Nevermind, I’m good!” Lily exclaimed as she trotted out, tossing the towel at Overwatch’s head. A moment more, and she was already out the front, leaving the door swinging wide open.
Candlelight simply watched as she left. “Interesting choice of roommates.”
Overwatch peeled the wet towel off her head and sighed, closing the door with her magic as she hung the towel up to dry on an open cabinet door. “She’s money and unconditional food.” she said in resignation as she turned back to the stove and began poking at the somewhat burning eggs. “Speaking of which, does anyling want uh…”
“We won’t be here for too long,” Candlelight said, just as Overwatch squeaked in surprise at the oil popping. “We’re mostly just here to catch up on the news here and figure out your capabilities. You might’ve known this, but well… as strong as the hive is elsewhere, there’s at least one queen already here in Canterlot and it’s been making things difficult.”
Card Sharp withdrew a few pieces of paper from his bag, one of which was a large, detailed map of Canterlot that he’s spread across the table.
As an aside, I found it a bit startling that I could recognize most of the city’s layout, given what little I knew about the passage of time at the bottom of Horseshoe Bay. I still recognized the circular Solar District, centered around the Sunlight Plaza. It appeared it was mostly marketplace and apartments around the center, but changed to high class housing near the edges, especially as the land turned to mountain. The Lunar District resembled a crescent moon, wrapped around one side of the Solar District with what appeared to be mostly entertainment and art properties, judging by the labels on the large buildings on the map. The sizable castle grounds were perched on one end of the crescent.
Small red numbers were dotted around the map, and I guessed these were likely locations for the other infiltrators. Many were centered on guard houses, which tended to be one per large neighborhood, but the numbers were not very large, and in the majority of the neighborhoods, the number was zero.
“Oh. That was obvious enough.” Overwatch said, wiggling the flying pan back and forth in an attempt to slide the egg onto a waiting plate. “Caught one of them trying to steal something from the guardhouse.”
“What?” Card Sharp exclaimed, his mouth agape. “When was that? We’ve only been here for what, two, three days?”
“Just yesterday, actually,” Overwatch muttered. “The guardhouse I was at, Penumbra, was empty during the Summer Sun Celebration, and I caught one in the offices. We got into a… scuffle.”
Card Sharp let out an exasperated groan, throwing his hooves into the air. “Couldn’t even wait before this meeting?” He pulled out a red marker from his bags, making a mark on one of the guardhouses on the map. “We’ll have to get into contact with some of the other infiltrators around, Dexter.”
Candlelight breathed out heavily, but turned to Overwatch. “We’ll handle that. We need to get up to speed with them on what’s been going on anyways, and it’ll be a good opportunity for us to see if this has occurred anywhere else. Just lay low, don’t attract any attention. In the meantime however, we need to get to know each other better.”
Card Sharp rolled his eyes. “By which he means we need to figure out what you are capable of.”
“Well, it’d help with planning on future operations if we knew your strengths,” Candlelight continued. “I don’t even think we know your name, let alone what you look like without your disguise, so let’s just start with those.”
Overwatch stared back at them as she trotted up to the table. She placed her plate on the table and stepped back a bit, scrunching up her face a little as she concentrated.
Of course, it was a good opportunity to observe her magic at work, even with the inconvenient meeting, but now that I was intensely looking at her, I noticed several things that had not popped up the first time I asked the young nymph to drop her disguise.
It was transformation magic, but not quite the magic I expected from a changeling. While the magic of changelings tended to be very fluid to allow them to emulate the magic of other races, Overwatch’s magic was significantly more rigid, like maple syrup compared to water. Even undisguised, her magic was closer to that of a unicorn than a clean slate changeling.
She shuffled around uneasily as she felt the gazes of her hivemates. “My name’s uhh… Nymph.”
The other two, however, were concerned with much different things than simply how Overw—Nymph’s magic worked.
“Wait. You’re…” Card Sharp stared incredulously at the much diminished changeling. “You’re a filly.”
Nymph stomped the floor and glared at him. “Is that really so hard to believe!?”
Candlelight just stared back. “Don’t blame Sinister, can’t say I saw it coming either. Usually, all the agents outside of the headquarters are drones.”
Card Sharp looked back at him incredulously. “By the sands, it hasn’t quite sunk in yet that we’re working with a bloody teenager. Dex, you think the Queen has it out for her? Old nag has been a lot more aggressive lately about expanding into Canterlot. Who sends workers out on field work? How many workers are even trained to do field work?”
“Quit it. It’s not our job to question the Queen’s will,” Candlelight replied quickly, turning back to Overwatch as she reapplied her disguise. “It just means we need to adequately note the capabilities of our new infiltrator.”
Card huffed as he stuffed all of his papers back into his saddlebags. “We can start by seeing if she can actually do any of the spells an infiltrator is supposed to do before we start calling her one.”
Candlelight rolled his eyes and got up out of his chair, trotting over to Overwatch. “Ugh, he’s got a point. How good are you with illusions? Transformations?”
The small nymph bit her lip nervously, not quite looking the disguised orange stallion in the eye. “I’m kinda not really good with either? I had more training to be a ranger than either of those, but… here, let me at least try an illusion.”
She took a deep breath and began concentrating, her face quickly scrunching up again as she began her cast, though even I could not predict what would happen next.
The concept of an illusion spell is straightforward. One would simply wrap a magical field around what they wanted to put an illusion spell on and then alter the appearance of that field. While Nymph seemed to have no problems with putting illusions on other objects, the problems arose when she tried to put an illusion spell on herself. While her spell was formed passably well, it simply could not latch onto her malformed magical field, just like how the modified acid splash spell reacted to her.
The result was that she seemed to flicker in and out as she constantly shed illusions, her image flitting about like a spastic fae spirit. Anyone looking at her saw double, maybe triple, and it blurred her outline enough where it would be incredibly difficult to pinpoint where exactly she was.
It also hurt to look at, which is why Card, the crass boor that he was, covered his eyes and shouted for her to stop.
The following trials over her abilities to transform were similarly… intriguing, though not to the benefit of Nymph’s self esteem. Her ability to transform were incredibly weakened due to her unusually rigid magical network, and the only form she could hold perfectly well was, to no one’s surprise, that of the charcoal unicorn Overwatch. She could temporarily transform herself into another unicorn and seemed to succeed in copying Card Sharp’s appearance for a few moments, but it snapped back like a taut rubber band into her usual form.
She was in the middle of her latest attempt to turn into an earth pony when Dexter spoke up. “Alright, alright, that’s good enough.”
Nymph’s magic fizzled out and the disguised mare slumped forward, though she was caught by Candlelight’s hoof before she tumbled face first into the ground. On her warpath to prove her competence, I could have sworn she had gone ethereal, and it was a relief that Dexter had sensibly called for a stop to the whole debacle.
Card rubbed at his forehead, slouched forward onto the table. “So all we really learned is that she can’t do things like a normal infiltrator.”
Candlelight hummed in contemplation, taking a brief moment before saying, “No matter. We can do those things ourselves.”
“We’re up against changelings, right? I can still do a few things to help,” Overwatch said meekly.
“True. Her ranger skill set might still prove useful on certain operations. Being hidden from their empathy sense is not to be underestimated,” Candlelight continued.
“Feh, fine,” the beige unicorn said, straightening up with a groan and rolling his neck. “Even if the original purpose of the rangers was to find changelings.”
“Doesn’t make her other skills any less useful,” Candlelight replied with a frown before turning to Nymph. “In any case, that was about all I had planned for our visit. Just a couple logistics stuff and getting a sense of our resources. We’re going to head out and see if we can make contact with some of the other units here, so until our next visit, just gather what information you can, especially regarding anypony associated with Princess Celestia or the rival hive, and lay low, alright?”
Overwatch nodded with a small sniffle, pawing at the ground with a hoof.
The atmosphere subdued, I watched the two of them leave with just a few polite goodbyes. Overwatch trotted back to the table and slumped into a chair, levitating me down onto the table beside her cold, forgotten eggs.
“How are you feeling?”
She stabbed an egg with a fork and took a bite. “I feel like I’m still sleep deprived.”
I sighed mentally. “You did go a bit overboard with your magic. It did give me a good look at how your magic functioned, however, and despite your spells not working as intended, there are still potential uses for them. When you are rested again however, I must see the memory spell you used.”
Overwatch frowned at her eggs and promptly levitated over some salt. “That’ll probably have to wait until after I can track down Lily again. I can’t believe she left so quickly.”
“That would be my fault. I told her to wait in the nearby park, so as to let your hivemates open up more.”
She raised an eyebrow at me. “And you trust her on her own?”
“No, but I do trust that she will not wander far, knowing that she needs to stay close so I can maintain her disguise. Still, it would not be inadvisable to go searching for her.”
“Sure sure,” she thought, shoving the rest of her cold lunch into her mouth. She rose from the table and levitated me into her scarf, placing the string around me around her own neck.
We departed from her apartment in silence, leaving me to my thoughts. While I would have to inform Nymph of the true nature of her magic field, more and more, I believed the reason her magic was so unorthodox was centered around her incident with the real Overwatch. That she can only transform perfectly into Overwatch’s form was the biggest indicator of her uniqueness, and her memory spell, whatever she cast, was the only possible route by which she could change the innate composition of her own magic. It was unprecedented, and I was… excited.
Perhaps this was why I was so drawn to Canterlot, even from my watery isolation at the bottom of Horseshoe Bay. This capital was important for reasons I cannot remember, and I am certain that meeting Nymph was just the tip of the iceberg. Maybe, behind all of this, I can find that thread leading me to my identity and past, and maybe, just a little further, I can find a purpose.
But I can be patient for one more day. No hurry.