//------------------------------//
// Chapter 58:  Ponyville 
// Story: The Accidental Invasion 
// by computerneek 
//------------------------------//

“Evanesco.  First time?”
Hermione took a deep breath through her suddenly acid-free nose, thankful for the vanishing spell, as she looked up at Hailey.  “What was that?”
Then she blinked, and looked around the room.
She…  She had just lost her lunch in the Leaky Cauldron seconds after stepping into a fireplace in Hogwarts.
“Floo Powder,” Hailey answered calmly.  “Travel by fire.  Don’t worry, most people throw up the first time.”  She turned away from Hermione.  “And Thanks, Tom.”
She looked over.  It was indeed Tom, the innkeeper, who had vanished her lost lunch.  Then she looked at Hailey, trying to ignore the sting of her raw throat.  “I bet you didn’t,” she accused.
Hailey tilted.  “Well…  No, I didn’t.  Instead, I misspoke and ended up in Knockturn a few years back.”
Hermione winced.  She’d never been down Knockturn before- but she’d seen it, once.  There had been a couple of Equestrians guarding the entrance, redirecting Hogwarts students- which had included Hermione- away from it as ‘dangerous’.  “Well yes, but knowing you…”
Hailey shrugged.  “Back then, I was a mere HSI,” she told her.  “And it was still dangerous for me to be there.”
“It ever was?” Hermione asked.
“Well yeah.  It was also almost alarmingly full of people trying to catch me- but while I might not have had the Papa Tango yet, I was still fast.  And Dad’s boost was…  Helpful.  Then there was Hagrid.”
A sudden flare of green flames in the fireplace drew Hermione’s attention.  Her stomach wrenched again, briefly- but she didn’t hurl this time.
Instead, Morning Sun stepped out of the flames like she was walking in the front door.  “There you are, Hailey!”
Hailey looked.  “I thought you didn’t like the Floo,” she said.
Morning stopped, and smiled.  “Well, I don’t.  It’s…  terribly impolite.  But I was measuring the plurdality of the gabbleblotchits earlier-!”
“You managed it?” Hailey asked, sounding impressed.
Hermione blinked.  It took her a second to remember that just because she measured them so frequently she didn’t need the bypass she’d given Pinkie anymore didn’t mean it was easy.  As a matter of fact, on the curriculum that she, Hailey, and Pinkie had come up with for teaching others the new concepts, it was the final- and hardest- concept before the Pinkie Transform itself.  After the Pinkie Transform would come a number of useful little spells- mostly the ones Pinkie had used before she crossed the Gate- and, finally, the Granger Warp…  which was, to date, the largest and most complex transformation any of them had come up with.
And, now that she was thinking of it, Hailey had mentioned that Morning was by far the slowest to learn it yet.
“Well…  Kinda,” Morning smiled.  “I still can’t read them directly like you do- but I realized I can calculate how plurdled they are.”
Hermione blinked.  “You can calculate it?” she asked.
Morning nodded.  “Yeah.  Turns out the Changeling transformation is equivalent to a Pinkie Transform multiplied by a Granger Warp then applied to another Pinkie Transform, before being multiplied by another Pinkie Transform and applied to the Animagus transformation, so long as you keep your foot stamped on the freddled gruntbuggly the whole time.”  She took a breath.  “And if I just wiggle the lurgid about twice as hard as I need to, I can instead jump to any terminal on the Floo Network without entering the network!”
Hermione scowled, calculating the named transformations in her head…  Or at least, attempting to.  She had a good memory, but that stack of transformations was very complex and each one made the resultant spell about an order of magnitude or so larger.
Still, though, she was able to figure out some characteristics of that spell.
“That’s not possible,” she told Morning, as the three of them started walking towards the door out from the Leaky Cauldron  “That spell would smash you into a burning paste and send you to Timbuktu at the same time.”
“Unless you happen to be massless,” Morning told her, “where it will instead rearrange you into the shape of your choosing.  But the harmony of the spell- looking at it with those components in mind, there are thousands of extraneous bits that don’t do much of anything- and if I don’t use a British spell as a starter for the calculation, I bet I can free the emergence points from the Floo Network’s anchors, and make it comparable to Phoenix Fire.”
“Massless?” Hermione asked, an eyebrow raised.
She nodded.  “Yeah.  Don’t tell anyone, but changelings are actually massless.  That’s what lets them divorce themselves from conservation of mass so easily:  It’s simulated mass.  Anyways, I think I can make that spell not just safe for humans to use but also simple enough to teach it to Ginny without any prior study.”
Hermione raised her eyebrows.  Ginny had decided that she didn’t have any time, between her classes and working with Ariel, to learn the magic Hailey, Hermione, and Pinkie were researching.  She opened her mouth to speak, but Hailey beat her to it.
“Speaking of, how’s she coming with her project?”
Morning raised an eyebrow as well.  “You say that like you don’t see her every day.”
Hailey shrugged.  “Well to be honest, there are days that I don’t see her even once, not unlike you.  But that’s beside the point, because you are the one that’s working on that project with her.”
Morning sighed.  “Not very well, to answer your question.  Ariel can walk a foot further away from her than she used to, but that’s it so far.”  She paused, and tilted her head.  “Though…  Yes, using changeling magic as the base might be the solution there too.”
“Speaking of,” Hermione spoke up, imitating Hailey’s tone.  “How are you using a spell that’s not safe for humans when you are human?”
Morning shrugged.  “I’m not human,” she answered.  “My body is literally made out of magic.”
Hailey raised an eyebrow.  “You’re saying that in a public place,” she told her.
“I know.  But all it took was a single time of calculating how plurdled the gabbleblotchits are, and I also suddenly understand how Sadarina works…  and was able to disable and actually completely remove my own self-destruct routine and overwrite my state controller.  As a result, I’m now like Sadarina- except of course that my body is made out of magic, and so heals instantly with basically no energy cost.”
Hermione blinked at her.  “You- you what?”
“I rewrote my own magical core,” Morning told her.  “Rewriting my own essence is easy, no matter how badly damaged it is, so I was able to cut most of the fat out of your Papa Tango by ignoring the Essence.”  She paused.  “Though I will admit, the last time I rewrote my essence was bordering on twenty years ago.”
“Really?” Hailey asked.  “Even with the Fifty First Dates?”
She smiled.  “I didn’t need to fool him magically, only physically.  Rewriting the essence was developed a few months after the Invasion as a defensive measure against anti-changeling detection- and as luck would have it, Chrysalis had the entire Swarm trained on it as a top priority.  Which included me, even though there’s a number of other ‘essential’ Changeling magics that I just don’t know.”  She sighed.  “Good thing, too.  I learned it just the day before the Royal Guard showed up to start ripping the survivors apart- and because I remembered to rewrite my essence, and probably also because I’m a natural with it, I walked free.”
Hermione took a deep breath.  “You- You mean you understand essences?” she asked.
“Well yeah,” Morning answered.  “Don’t you?”
She shook her head.  “No!  I can hardly scratch the surface, and read basic attributes out of it!  I don’t understand half of what my own Papa Tango is doing- all I know is that it’s copying an ideal state from the Identity within!”
She nodded slowly.  “Ahh.  That’d mean…  Yes.  You’re cloning the True Form into the Essence, then.”  She smiled.  “Nice.”
“The True Form?” Hermione asked.
She nodded.  “Yeah.  Every creature has a ‘natural form’- the base form that a changeling will fall into when they die, or that’s otherwise energetically cheap to maintain.  For every non-shapeshifter I’ve ever heard of, it matches their physical form.  Anyways, for the longest time, changeling natural forms have been almost insect-like- so long there were theories amongst the hive that we evolved from insects.  But, by rewriting my essence, I can change my natural form.”  She smiled.  “And while the magic of the worlds will normally force your physical form to match your natural form, the transformation ability offered by your Animagus magic- or my Changeling magic- allows us both to defy that natural form basically as we please…  and resume it, even if we’ve never taken it before.”  She chuckled.  “You know, I should probably have a look at my True Form on this side sometime.  In Equestria, it’s the normal changeling form- Equestrian magic forces the True Form and Natural Form to match at birth- but here…”  She shrugged.  “There’s really no telling.”
Hermione tilted her head.  “Really?  But if it’s your natural form…”
She smiled.  “The funny thing about the True and Natural forms is that they’re more like bunches of concepts.  They get translated by whatever universe you happen to be in to get the physical form associated.  Now, I know I’m powerful enough to override that, and force it to be translated instead by the universe of my choosing- and unless I’m wrong, the Animagus magic is efficient enough to let anyone with magical capability have that same control over how their form is translated, in exchange for a much more limited transformation.”
“The Animaguuugh!” Hermione began- but as she spoke, something rippled about her as they walked down an alleyway between two buildings, and she found herself falling forwards as a pony.  She stumbled upon landing.  “Uhh…”  She glanced to the sides at the other two- and was at once distracted by the large, crystal room she had found herself in.  She hadn’t been paying attention to where they’d been going.
“Welcome to Equestria,” Morning told her, drawing her attention from the room.  She was a fully-grown unicorn mare, and at least a foot taller than Hermione.  Unless…  She glanced the other way, at Hailey.  Unless they’d both grown massively since the last time she’d become a pony, she was significantly smaller than her human form, but it felt like she was a lot bigger.
Hailey’s horn glowed- and with a bright flash of light, a long black cloak appeared on Hermione’s back, hiding her wings and matching Hailey’s cloak.  “Yes,” she told her.  “There’s a scale difference between Earth and Equus.  An adult pony is about the size of a six-year-old human, with a direct result that they’ll fit in an adult human’s lap pretty easily.”  She smiled.  “Morning’s only about four inches taller than us, but the scale difference makes it look like quite a lot more.”
Hermione blinked- and finally voiced a question that had been bugging her, in the back of her mind, ever since that first time she’d become a pony.  “But what about conservation of mass?”
Morning smiled.  “That’s the thing:  They do obey conservation of mass.  As a matter of fact, the dimensional crossing transformation does too- it just has the dimensional Void to serve as a sump.  And since Changelings are massless, our transformations already automatically obey conservation of mass.  As a matter of fact, British magic is the first thing I’ve seen capable of violating it!”
“You do know it’s not safe for even an invulnerable changeling to talk about that in the Castle of Friendship, right?” Hailey asked, as they walked up to a set of massive double doors.
Morning smiled in response.  “I combined a few bits and bobs of Changeling magic- the same stuff I helped you teach your class for the Imperius Curse, actually- with Hermione’s privacy spell, and got a spell that’s just as effective, but targets ponies instead of areas.  Means I can maintain it on the move- but it’s got one caveat:  It will only protect you from observation, not even your clothes.  Means I can talk all I like, and even transform in front of ponies, and they won’t notice- unless they’re particularly observant, it’s not as impenetrable when I cast it as when you do- but I can’t, say, hoof you a book about whales without everypony around being able to see that I’m hoofing you a book about whales.”
Hermione nodded slowly, while Hailey let out a small snort of laughter.  “Would it let us…  Uh, transform, without anybody noticing?”
Morning tilted her head.  “...  Sort of.  You’d still look like the same shape, but…  Well, say you were to take your human form now.  You’d still look like a unicorn to everypony around you- albeit a unicorn that decided to try wearing her Hogwarts robes while in Equestria.  And the, er, reverse, is also true.”
Hailey raised an eyebrow.  “But it’ll cover the difference between a unicorn and an alicorn?” she asked.
“Yes,” Morning nodded.  “It relies on several unique changeling facets, though, so I’m not entirely sure you’re going to be able to do it.”
Hermione looked at her.  “Then I’ll just have to make another Papa Tango, won’t I?”
Morning winced.  “Absolutely not,” she stated.  “Ponies and humans are similar enough you can migrate and combine without much difficulty- but changelings…”  She sighed.  “It’s like transfiguring a piece of parchment into a house, where the Papa Tango turns a piece of parchment into a piece of paper.  It just isn’t done.”
Hermione tilted her head.  “Why?”
“Not only are we made of a completely different substrate, which already presents a particularly large gap to bridge, but we’re also a fair few orders of magnitude more complex.  The only reason I can understand myself well enough to rewrite my own essence is because I’m made of magic- and magic naturally understands itself.”
“That’s also the reason you can speak Parseltongue, right?” Hailey asked.
Hermione blinked.  “You can?  I thought it was just…”  She paused.  “Hailey, Silver, Ginny, and Ariel.”
“And you and Ron,” Hailey told her.  “Silver was already a parselmouth by the time we did our potion, so that got transferred too.”  She smiled.
Morning smiled.  “I can natively speak any language that any magical creature has ever spoken.  That means that, from basically the moment I stepped into Britain, I could fluently speak several thousand different languages- and even Sadarina can only speak six hundred and fifty or so.”  She chuckled.  “I was glad the worldwall automatically makes sure anyone crossing can understand the main language found on the other side without realizing it.  It didn’t touch me- but that little function meant my fluency wasn’t suspicious.”
“Now, if you’d spoken French…”
She laughed.  “Yeah, that would have been suspicious.  But I wasn’t thinking about language- it’s automatic for me to respond to someone in the same language they’re speaking to me in, and we only crossed paths with English-speaking wizards.”
“Anyways,” Hailey chuckled, as they walked up to the doors.  “Hermione, Welcome to Ponyville.”
Right on cue, the doors emitted a couple heavy clunks and began gradually swinging themselves open, revealing a short road down to a quaint little town.  There were a few ponies moving about, but there didn’t seem to be very many.
“Looks comfortable,” Hermione commented, before looking at Hailey.  “So why are we here, again?”
“To visit the bank,” Hailey told her.  “HSIs and, indeed, Student Instructors are actually paid positions.  Since you’re British, it’d normally wait until you graduated, before being paid out as a lump sum…  but the rules are different when you can cross the portal.”
“That’s…  It?” Hermione asked.
Hailey nodded.  “All the British Student Instructors have accounts at the Ponyville General Bank as well.  They can’t cross the portal, though, so they can’t come get money, and have to wait for it to be delivered to their Gringotts account as a lump sum when they graduate.”
She scowled down the road.  “So…  How much is it?”
“One bar per school week,” Hailey answered.  “Or for HSIs, twenty bars per week, year-round.”
Hermione looked at her.  “So I…  I’ve been a Student Instructor for three years, and an HSI for about two months.  Meaning…”  She paused.
Hailey nodded.  “About a hundred and twenty bars over three years, then a hundred and sixty over the last two months.  Well…”  She paused.  “A hundred and forty.  Payday is Tuesday, so we haven’t gotten paid for last week yet.  And that’s not even counting that you’re on the specialist team too, that’s another ten bars a school week.”
“How much is that?” she asked.
“Well, each bar is a hundred bits, which are worth…”  She paused, looking at Morning again.  “What was it?  About seventy-five pence apiece?”
“Thereabouts,” Morning nodded.
“That’s not much,” Hermione observed.
“No, it’s not,” Hailey agreed.  “A hundred bits a week isn’t even a living wage in Equestria- but since it’s only meant to compensate them for helping out, as a supplement to whatever work they still have in Equestria, it doesn’t really matter much.  The big kicker is that Equestrian bits, when you take them to Gringotts, enjoy a forty-nine point three times advantage on the exchange rate.”
She blinked.  “Forty nine times?” she asked.  “What’d that make it?”
“Two bits to the galleon,” Hailey told her.  “And a hundred bits might be chump change, but fifty galleons is more than all but the richest wizards make in a week- somewhere around three and a half thousand pounds.”
“You could buy a car with that,” Hermione muttered.
“An expensive car,” Hailey agreed.  “Every other month.  Or twice a week, if you’re an HSI.  But the point is, since you have access to this kind of money, and a Floo Network capable of taking you to Diagon Alley, there’s no real reason not to make a dash to Diagon Alley to get something expensive if you want it.”
She looked at Hailey.  “Something…  Expensive.”
She nodded.  “Yeah.  Like a TARDIS-trunk, or enough shirts to last you a small eternity.  You could even do something like I did, and get custom dress robes of a different color for each day of the week.”
Hermione let out a snort of laughter.  “Really?” she asked.
Hailey nodded.  “Yeah.  Those dress robes are basically dresses, right?”
“More like literally,” Hermione muttered.  “All the way down to the lack of pockets.”
“That’s why I asked Madam Malkin for custom ones…  that have pockets.”  She chuckled.  “And since I like how they look, and magic can make them mighty durable, I splurged to add some to my muggle wardrobe as well.”
She rolled her eyes.  “You’re going to look like you’re going on a date every day.”
“Well no,” Hailey told her.  “I didn’t get that kind of dress robes.  I much prefer the simpler ones that aren’t just begging to get stepped on.”
She sighed.  “You’re still going to look like you’re going on a date every day.”
“...  Huh,” Hailey muttered.  “Whatever, I’m sure there are muggles that like to dress fancy every day.”
Hermione only shook her head.
“Hi Hailey!”
Hermione jumped, and looked past Hailey- who seemed to have missed the ‘jump’ step.  “Wha-?” she began.
“Hi Bonbon,” Hailey answered, then looked up at the giant, oddly starry bear that Bonbon- she assumed that’s who the cream mare was, anyways- had trotting behind her with a muzzle on its face.  “What’cha got this time?”
“Ursa Major,” Bonbon answered briskly.  “Not sure exactly how she got all the way from the Everfree to Las Pegasus, but she did, so I thought I’d stop by to pick her up on my way home.”
“From Baltimare?” Hailey asked.
“Yes,” Bonbon nodded.
“Which is on the other side of the continent from Las Pegasus,” Hailey stated.
She nodded again.  “Yes.”
“Did you manage the Pinkie Transform?”
“Mostly,” she answered cheerfully.  “I got it well enough to manage the level one compressed time and space spells, but my grip on the lurgid is a bit too loose for much else right now.”