//------------------------------//
// Into the Swarm 
// Story: Book 1 - The Behemoth came to Canterlot 
// by Equimorto 
//------------------------------//

The key turned in the lock, the door opened, and the unicorn stepped into his house. He cleaned his hooves on the carpet at the entrance, turned to close the door again, then began to walk towards the kitchen. And as he stepped through the door between the kitchen and the entrance he fell to the ground, unconscious, zapped by a bolt of green magic.
Chrysalis began to drag the pony towards the wall near the sink.
"Do you need help?" chimed in Stellaria, from the entrance room, munching on a bag of chips she'd borrowed from inside a cupboard.
"No." Chrysalis placed the stallion on top of the cocoon base she'd already built, and then began to spin the rest of it around him.
Stella smiled. "Good." She downed the remaining chips, then crumpled the bag and threw it towards the nearest trashcan. Then she walked into the kitchen, and started rummaging through cupboards in search of more food.
Chrysalis threw her a side look, then focused back on the unicorn. "You could leave some."
"You won't need it." Stella downed several slices of bread and swallowed them whole. "You'll get plenty of love to feed yourself with at your new work place."
"Unlike the current one," Chrysalis hissed. She looked at Stellaria again, while the alicorn swallowed the remaining slices of bread. "Sometimes I wonder if there wasn't a snake in the tree I made you from."
"Sometimes I wonder if changeling queens are supposed to be stupid, or if your egg was dropped before you were born." Stellaria's horn flashed, and Chrysalis's muffled grunts filled the room, along with a sound not too far removed from water sizzling when touching heated metal.
Chrysalis wanted to say something else. The pain in her chest told her it was better to shut up for the time being. She closed the top of the green cocoon, and began to fill it up. As she did that, her eyes wandered over the rest of the room, without paying any particular attention to anything. They'd already throughly explored it in the previous days, there was nothing really noteworthy there. Just a regular kitchen in a regular house in Ponyville, owned by a stallion who worked as a researcher at the local castle, lived alone, and wouldn't be getting any visits. The perfect target to replace.
There was just one last thing to take care of. Ignoring the way Stella was eating through a bag of crackers so fast she may as well have been inhaling them, Chrysalis focused instead on the stallion, still unconscious, floating inside the cocoon she'd just finished filling. She just needed to make sure he wouldn't be a nuisance, business as usual for her. But as she fired up her magic, a thought wormed its way into her head. She looked at Stella again, still busy eating, then back at the stallion.
Her magic slowly flowed through her horn and towards the pony. It wouldn't hurt to have a backup plan, after all.