A long moment passed, dark and terrible, before Celestia moved. Unfurrowing her brow from the knot she’d twisted it into a few seconds prior, she slowly lifted a hoof and pointed it straight ahead, singling out one pony amidst the crowd gathered before her.
“You’re not Rainbow Dash,” she said. “Are you?”
Rainbow Dash blinked, her eyes shifting back and forth as her comrades meekly shuffled away. “Uh… yes? Or wait, no. Which question am I supposed to answer?”
“The second one, I think,” Applejack advised, just as Rarity proffered the opposite suggestion.
“Ugh,” Pinkie Pie groaned, “this is always confusing! I hate these kind of… what’s the word for when someone asks a yes-or-no question and it’s not clear which answer is affirmative?”
“Tautology?” Fluttershy suggested.
“No, that’s when you repeat yourself with two different phrases,” Twilight chimed in. “Like, ‘tiny little shrimp,’ or something. Unless you meant a tautology in the traditional logical sense, which actually means–"
“Okay, stop!” Celestia shouted, her eyes squeezed shut behind the hoof she’d slapped in front of them. “Everyone… neutral forms!”
Another moment passed, short and awkward, and then one by one columns of green flame enveloped each and every pony in the room. In their places a moment later stood dozens of chitinous black changelings, each of whom specifically tried to stand in as non-eye-catching a way as possible.
“Now, then,” said Chrysalis, now demorphed from a pony princess into the towering, imposing form more befitting a changeling queen. “I am going to ask this question one time, and only one time… who in this room is supposed to be playing Rainbow Dash?”
Every changeling spoke up in the most innocuous, non-attention-hogging way possible, which is to say no changeling said anything at all. The only sound came from Chrysalis, as she took in a deep breath to hold trapped behind her bared, gritted teeth.
“My… faithful changeling hive,” she finally said, her emphasis on “faithful” echoing through the chamber like claws on a chalkboard, “you all recall the purpose of this endeavor, do you not?”
After another silent moment passed, she leveled a fearsome glare at the changeling who was most decidedly not Rainbow Dash, who even more decidedly seemed to wish he’d never been hatched. “Um… you did it again, your High…” he started to say, before the low growl rising in her Queen’s throat convinced him the point was moot. “To enslave the pony race by taking the forms of those whom they love the most, your Highness. And also kidnap the real ones first. I guess we’re supposed to start with that. And then… I guess vengeance?”
“VENGEANCE!” Chrysalis proclaimed, drawing a startled chitter from her current target and incredibly quiet sighs from every other changeling so blessed as to not be said target. “Against the ponies who ruined my previous master plan. For those ponies, I have planned unyielding and unspeakable horrors, torments and tortures so terrible they will beg for Tartarus rather than submit to another second of suffering! So, with that in mind, you wouldn’t want to know what I have planned for anycreature who ruins my current master plan, would you?”
The changelings present dodged the spotlight so well, they could’ve closed their eyes and imagined no one was even there at all. In fact, many of them were doing so at that very moment, aside from one who couldn’t help but whisper, “Okay, she has to be doing this on purpose…”
“Good,” she said, “then with that also in mind… where is the changeling I personally hoof-selected to take the role of Rainbow Dash?”
Several moments passed, each as ill-defined in exact length as the previous—and then finally, someone broke the spell.
“She said she didn’t want to be Rainbow Dash,” a tiny voice near the back replied.
“She didn’t…” Chrysalis tensed each and every muscle in her body in succession, a tried-and-true method of calming herself down that, one of these days, was bound to actually work. “What precisely does that mean?”
Even faster than they had Not-Rainbow Dash, the crowd parted to leave the changeling who’d spoken up on a truly tautological island all her own. “W-Well, she, um… said she didn’t identify with her role very well,” she mumbled. “She wanted to play somepony with more, uh… depth?”
Chrysalis stared at her like she’d morphed a second head. “They’re ponies,” she eventually intoned. “They don’t have depth.”
Now the crowd shuffled around a bit, stirred from general anonymity by the boldness of that statement. “Well, some do,” one near the front responded. “At least, more than others.”
“Rainbow Dash does have depth, it’s just kind of inconsistent with her actions sometimes,” another argued, accompanied by a few nods from the changelings gathered around him. “Now, Applejack, on the other hand…”
“Oh, for hive’s sake, don’t start with this again!” cried a changeling from the opposite side of the room. “Just because she has simplistic goals doesn’t mean she’s a simplistic-–"
“QUIET!” Chrysalis paradoxically screamed. With a few last murmurs and “Rarity’s way shallower anyway”s, the crowd settled down once more. “I do not even slightly care what role any of you want to play!” she hissed. “This is my plan. I am in charge, and that means that what I say will happen is what will happen! And I say that Mandible was, is, and will be until my moment of ultimate triumph: Rainbow Dash!”
At first, no one argued the point, or at least they all knew well enough not to do so when Chrysalis was visibly in “turn someone from a drone into a worker” mode. Once she seemed to simmer down, though, the changeling in the back hesitantly raised a hoof.
“I mean, Mandible does do a really good Fluttershy, though. Like, it’s really good. Mandible, show her.”
After a few seconds and another whispered bit of encouragement, green flames erupted from another spot in the back row, leaving behind what everyone had to admit was indeed an extremely good morph of Fluttershy. “Um…” she said, shuddering with every syllable, “I-I’m sorry, Queen Chrysalis, I… didn’t mean to be a bother. I can, uh… p-play Rainbow Dash if that’s what you’d like.”
Two forces went to war inside Chrysalis’s mind: one abject rage at the insubordination shown to her over the last several minutes, and the other begrudging admittance that, yes, Mandible’s impersonation of Fluttershy was really, really good. Much better than Carapace’s, at least. “Fine,” she muttered before she found her regal tone again. “Fine. I consent to this. Mandible and Carapace can switch roles. Now where’s Carapace?”
Several seconds passed before the named changeling revealed himself. “Actually, if we’re switching roles… can I be Rarity?” he asked. “I’d really like to be Rarity, if it’s all the same. I’ve been practicing her accent.”
“He has,” Mandible confirmed. “It’s pretty impressive.”
Chrysalis blinked, that being the only action she could stand taking at the moment that wouldn’t leave hemolymph stains on the walls and ceiling. “We are not switching roles,” she said. “This is a one-time–"
“Ooh, ooh, can I be Big Mac?” another changeling called out. “I like big morphs!”
“That… he is irrelevant. He bears no role in the coming–"
“I wanna be the Cutie Mark Crusaders!” someone else shouted.
“Those are three ponies, you can’t be all of them at on–"
“We wanna be Lyra,” a changeling right up front said, flanked by three grinning companions. “That’s fine, right? She doesn’t have a speaking role, really, so we could totally–"
“There cannot be four of one pony in a single town,” Chrysalis seethed. “How is this hard to understand?”
But it was too late. The room was lost. Chaos reigned as every changeling present buzzed with excitement, each claiming a role other than that which they’d been assigned.
“I call Mayor Mare!”
“Dibs on Minuette!”
“I’m Twilight Sparkle!”
“No, I’m Twilight Sparkle!”
“Let’s all be Twilight! Then we can all be alicorns!”
A great cheer rose up, the true Twilight indistinguishable from the horde of compatriots claiming to be her. The true Chrysalis, meanwhile, just collapsed back into her throne and buried her head in her hooves.
“This was so much easier when we were a hive mind,” she muttered to herself.