Chapter 6: I Become A Vampire Cliché
So, Twilight kissed me.
Yeah…problems with that on so many levels.
Looking back at everything, I can kind of get where it all was coming from. An apparently handsome guy that she thinks she already has a bit of a connection with shows up, talks about stuff like history, takes an interest in her magic, some freak box project thing she was working on and the Tree of Harmony? Hell, what nerdy little shut-in wouldn’t fall for a guy on one of those alone?
But I go and fuck it up even worse, connecting with Rainbow Dash and apparently getting her to give a seal of approval on my character. Then I go and get myself killed for a few days, making Twilight super emotional.
Hell, I knew at the time it was going to end badly. But just for the hell of it, let’s just go down the list of why anyone could see this whole thing was a bad idea from that very moment…
1. I was a fucking changeling. Biology alone said this could not, should not, and would not happen. We eat pony emotions, we don’t act as the means of production. Hell, I was pretty much an asexual creature in my natural state and I already knew taste buds didn’t transfer over because changelings didn’t have any, the same was probably true for other parts as well.
2. Family issues. My mom had tried to ruin her brother’s wedding and turn him into what amounted to an all you can eat buffet. And that was just with Shining Armor, never mind when the hive nearly took over Ponyville and kidnapped the CMC. Twilight would not be coming to any family dinner unless she was on the menu.
3. A lack of sexual attraction to ponies. I had barriers both biological and mental there. Okay, the facial expression make for some pretty damn close human features, but…they’re still ponies! Not to mention the lack of interaction with our pheromones. Sure, I could produce shit that would leave a dripping trial behind any of the Elements while they ran home to fulfill a need, but the scents ponies gave off weren’t arousing to me.
4. It was TWILIGHT! That’s not the character you look for a relationship with. Twilight is the nerdy little sister that makes you smile every time she acts in her adorkable fashion. You smile at her, you pat her on the head when she figures out something cool, you hug her when she cries, and you murder anyone who tries to mess with her. In no way, shape, or form, does that amount to a physical relationship with the girl.
And that’s not even getting into the whole “she was hurt, and vulnerable and bla, bla bla bla” stuff. God do I hate my new life on so many levels.
Of course, I probably don’t need to tell you what happened next, but…
Twilight broke the kiss and raised back up to look down on me. Her body tensed, her eyes widened, and she visibly gulped. I probably would have rolled my eyes if I hadn’t adapted to the level of cliché Equestria threw at me on a daily basis a week ago. As it was, I just saw a young woman who might have accidentally put her heart on the line after several days of worry. A young woman who was also starting to shake with what I could smell was fear as her mind probably started working on everything that could possibly go wrong.
If this had all been done as a human…and Twilight was hot (what can I say, I’m shallow) then I’d have gotten a second lip lock, pulled her up onto the bed, and made the medial tent’s somewhat sterile environment a little less clean. But, she wasn't, and that presented a pretty big problem.
But what was even more problematic was that Twilight was a wonderful pony, and I didn't want to hurt her in any way.
While I prided myself on being able to take in information around me and process it quickly for form a solution to life’s everyday problems, what my mind told me right now was that there was no easy way out of this. I could either reject the girl who was already in a fragile emotional state, or lead her on and probably feel like a complete fucking asshole while doing it for a few weeks before I broke it off…somehow.
Deal with it then and there, or down the line.
Break Twilight’s heart, or do the ‘noble’ thing and suffer silently.
Thinking about it that way (or lying to myself at any rate) made the decision pretty damn easy actually.
So I wracked my brain for five whole seconds to come up with a good line. All I got was, “So, first kiss?”
Twilight froze, then blushed and looked away from me. “Y-Yes.”
“Um…can you get off me now?” I asked, glad my fake horsey hormones didn’t turn it into ‘can you get me off now’ or something even worse. I really didn’t need to be dropping some sexual puns at that moment.
As the alicorn backed off and looked away, I could tell from what I could see of her facial expression alone that she was still nervous as hell. The poor girl had just put her heart on the line and I still hadn’t given her anything beyond stupid small talk as to what I thought of her. So, just to reassure Twilight, I stepped forward and put my hoof under her chin to guide it back to me, then leaned in closer.
“Let me show you a better example of how to do these things,” I told her before licking my lips and tilting my head slightly on instinct as my mouth met with hers. With me leading, it went a bit further as we touched tongues.
Pony lips and tongues were…surprisingly human. I was even able to close my eyes on our third kiss when I reared up on my hind legs to wrap my forelegs around Twilight’s neck to imagine I wasn‘t making out with a bright alien equine. Then she pushed me backwards and we fell the small medical bed that was behind us. Before I could hit the thing, I heard the alicorn extend her wings, and lifted me up with her to position us properly on the bed and continue with the make out session; which Twilight was improving at with leaps and bounds by the way.
My empathic senses filled with the filly’s psychic scent, and I absently noted how it changed from the sweet smell of fear (which may taste like crap but smells pretty good), the somewhat tangy taste of confusion, and the rush of excitement to the burning zing of…well, I’d have to call it infatuation at this point. Just throwing around the L-word being developed from a make-out session kind of demeans the whole concept; not that they really smell any different mind you.
So, yeah. I smelled an overwhelming amount of infatuation coming from Twilight Sparkle. It was so delectably juicy that it sent my mouth to watering…or maybe it was just her tongue having its way with my tonsils. With such a delectable morsel just giving me its pseudo-love, and me having gone more than a day without a single bite, I did what any self-respecting monster would do and ate my fill.
The sweet taste that ran through my mind was greater than anything I had ever tasted from a cocooned pony. The emotions we forced on ponies was nothing compared to the feeling of what came from them naturally, and the sheer amount of it nearly made me gasp. It wasn’t just the amount of energy Twilight Sparkle had, the ratio of conversion had to have surpassed the even numbers of 1:1 and tilted to at least 5:1 in my favor. Even the amount of power I had stolen from Twilight and Dash just a few days ago paled in comparison. In just a matter of seconds I recovered everything I had spent over the last several days and more!
I took in one breath of the emotion, and then another. I couldn’t contain myself, I wanted it all! I would drain my glass dry and leave her an empty…husk…
A vision of what I had done to my first meal flashed through my mind, and I broke another kiss with Twilight, rather forcefully by turning my head away. The experience left me gasping for air, and trying to fight off the high that came with overfeeding. It was a losing battle.
“That…that was amazing,” the alicorn said between pants, making me wonder if I’d had sex with her without even realizing it. Considering what happened whenever I got doped up on live my first few weeks in the hive while I was still coming to terms with being a changeling princess…it wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility. I had plenty of gaps in my memory from that first week.
What was left of my conscience quickly kicked me in the balls, and I looked over at Twilight as she rolled both of us around in the small bed so we were laying on our shoulders, one of her extended wings lay under me, and the other one quickly draped itself over the rest of me before she snuggled closer, managed to make a yawn sound cute, and closed her eyes.
Before feeding on Twilight’s emotions and the full stomach it gave took me under as well, I had to wonder if she was so devoid of physical contact just a few kisses could bring her close to orgasmic levels of bliss, or if it had to do with the feeding. Then I just stopped caring about anything and fell asleep.
…
And of course with sleep, came my connection with the changeling hive mind.
When I had first touched the hive mind, I hadn’t been able to comprehend what it truly was, or how it worked. It was just a raw mass of emotions, desires, information, and primal urges. It had no real language or means of communication besides pressing those thoughts onto another. Without a proper sense of self and an understanding of how to back away from that mass of thoughts, the hive mind would devour whomever touched it. This was how it was for all changelings, even a monarch with their more defined telepathic abilities.
To say that Chrysalis was the ruler of the changelings was a misnomer. While she could give orders to drones, the hive mind gave her overall direction. As the only two desires the hive had were live and eat, that gave her a lot of leeway in what she could to do in her spare time.
I felt her presence within the hive mind, and a moment later my consciousness willed a bit of scenery around us into being. It was very…homey, according to my life as a changeling anyway. The room was a large mass of black, slightly darker than a changeling’s chitin armor and done in the style of the hive. Although there was no source of illumination, a dark green glow filled the room as I sat erect on my throne like a biped while resting my forelegs on its armrests.
A moment later, the image of my mother appeared as a wavering image that was a simple disembodied head the size of half the room. The changeling motif might have been out of habit, but I still had a soft spot for the classics, and I was the number two villain in an evil Empire, dressed in black armor. “What do you wish of me, my Master?”
Chrysalis couldn’t see any of it of course, it was my mental construct after all. We could communicate through the hive mind that involved actual thought, but that was a long way from reading each others minds.
“Omnifarious,” she addressed me. “I feel you are much closer to me than you should be.”
“Twilight went up north to deal with something in the Valley of the Sun,” I told her. The big problem with telepathic communication was that you couldn’t really lie. Omission was okay, and a twist of words was doable, but pure deceit was impossible.
“Did you not have a chance to slay her during this incident?”
“I’ve had three, and twenty eight in total since coming to Ponyville. As you know,” I told her honestly. “However, the reprisals that we would face from the other alicorns if I were to do away with Twilight would be too problematic. I explained it before, the best way to deal with Equestria as a whole is to disrupt its harmony, divide the tribes and create a dozen smaller problems across the nation to distract the sisters so that we may position ourselves for a crippling opening blow.” After that, we would need to figure out a way to either keep on the pressure, or continue to work on keeping Equestria too divided to martial a real counteroffensive. I wasn’t stupid enough to think we could actually beat the sisters with a single strike like the Canterlot Wedding.
The fact that only thoughts, and not emotions were conveyed in this long range telepathy had its good sides and downsides. It all came down to the fact it was just a transfer of focused information expressed as language, there was no real emotions given to the words, or facial expressions. Mom couldn’t read anything beyond what I wanted her to, but that was true for the ‘words’ I received as well.
However, emotions just needed words to get the emotion across when a changeling want others to know how she was feeling. “I’ve grown tired of this waiting around,” Chrysalis told me. “So I have come up with a much better plan to conquer Equestria in one swoop.”
“The last time you tried something like that, you took the place of Cadence-.”
“And I would gotten away with it too, if not for that meddlesome unicorn and her friends!”
On the other hand, sometimes it was a good thing that only what I wanted conveyed was sent across the connection. Chrysalis didn’t take to kindly to being laughed at, and I couldn’t help but picture the Mane Six in Scooby-Doo clothes taking the mask off a captured Cadence to reveal it was in fact old lady Chrysalis.
“So what is your plan exactly?” I asked. If I was lucky, it was something stupid to get her killed despite the problems it would cause Equestria. It was a foolish hope, but it was still here.
Not that the ponies would actually do something like kill Chrysalis…or even imprison her for that matter. Being the Changeling Queen meant she had an entire race at her call should things go out of hand. If they were to imprison Chrysalis, the Hive would retaliate in ways that would involve loss of life. It was like there was a weird unspoken agreement between the two powers of Equestria and the Hive that stuff like that just didn’t happen. Of course we didn’t go around killing ponies en masse either, so the unwritten rules of our conflict said.
If not for that stipulation, I doubt things would be as cold war as they were between us.
“There exists an artifact in the Crystal Empire known as the Crystal Heart, that is powered by the love of the crystal ponies,” she began.
…
I awoke with a jerk…
Okay, that’s being a little harsh on Twilight, she’s one of the sweetest ponies around. So it’s probably better to say that I awoke with an involuntary muscle movement over hearing Chrysalis’s plan to snag the Crystal Heart, which wasn’t all that bad. Unfortunately also involved me heading up to the Empire in order to make sure things ran smoothly.
The only flaw in the plan that I could see was if the Crystal Heart was somehow bound to Cadence, or its love magic wasn’t compatible with what we needed. If that wasn’t the case and changelings really could eat the magic of the heart, it did open up several possibilities…
For one, it would pretty much insure ultimate victory for the Changeling Hive. Chrysalis was able to floor Celestia with the love of a single unicorn, with the love of an entire country behind her, the bitch could probably melt continents with a thought and still have enough power left to feed the hive for a few centuries.
Hell, I wanted the damn thing for the same reason. With that, I wouldn’t need to worry about feeding the hive at all. I could just have the changelings say put for the foreseeable future while I went off to play with ponies for the rest of their lives.
Yes, despite my love of all things pony, I did have a duty to the bugs. After all, once I got rid of Chrysalis and took over the hive, I would still need to provide them with food if I didn’t want my mind devoured by a swarm of psychic parasites for failing them while I slept.
Self-preservation was a good motivator. It was also why I didn’t just abandon ship altogether. No changeling could turn its back on the hive and live thanks to the mental connection.
At least I bought myself three weeks, I told myself. In that amount of time, I might be able to come up with a solution to the puzzle presented to me. Of course it would have to remove Chrysalis permanently, ensure the Hive’s control of an unlimited food source, and not involve the death or capture of any more ponies. Without all three, Mom would either kill me, the hive would eat me, or my own morals would beat me to death when I was awake.
Oh, and I suppose Celestia might get angry at me if I kidnapped ponies under my own initiative, so I couldn't just eat a lot of ponies for a quick jump in power then kill Mom. Everything I had done thus far had been under Chrysalis’s orders, so I could just point my hoof at her for being evil and me seeing the error of my ways and all that once the dust settled, but until then...and especially afterwards, I would need to limit pony snack snatches.
The alicorn whose embrace I was in stirred, and my body tensed for the oncoming freak-out that would accompany Twilight regaining consensus. Her eyes slowly opened and…she smiled before moving her lips close enough to my muzzle for a light peck?
“Good morning,” she said with a smile that made me really wonder if kiss was all we did last night.
“Morning,” I mumbled in confusion. “Umm…Twilight, about last night.”
The alicorn smiled and let out a moan of pleasure that set the red alert alarm off in my head. Oh God! I really did have sex with her! I screamed inside my head before Twilight spoke, “That was simply amazing, wasn’t it? I mean, I’ve read some of Rarity’s romance novels and heard about kisses that are supposed to make a mare’s tail curl, despite how impossible its supposed to be, but…wow, I think I finally get what it all means!”
My mind screeched to a halt before I could mentally throw myself off a cliff for raping Twilight in a love drugged craze while she was too weak to know what was going on. I blinked, then cleared my throat. “Um…you’re just talking about the kissing, right?”
Twilight gave me a confused look, then nodded. “Yes… The tongue was nice, but I really enjoyed that last one!”
The last? Wait! Is she talking about when I fed on her? I asked myself. So…apparently being fed on by a changeling feels as good as sex; at least from how Twilight was reacting.
Really needing to change the subject before Twilight decided to get even more amorous, I cleared my throat and looked out the light of the sun streaming through the tent flaps. “You know Princess Twilight,” I said, hoping the use of her title would put her off and kill the mood she was trying to set, “I think we should probably get up. It’s already past sunrise, and the guards are probably waiting on you.”
The alicorn let out a moan of disappointment and she let me go so I could roll off her wing and get to my feet, hooves…whatever. A second later, she was standing next to me, and we shared a look of uncertainty. “So…um…does this mean we’re dating now?” she asked. “I mean…I’ve read some romance novels where a couple becomes a couple just based on shared experiences and a night of passion, but others say you’re only dating when you’ve been on a date so…”
For a moment, I thought about just saying no. I could have easily come up with some bullshit excuse about what we had shared was special, but just brought on by seeing each other after such a traumatizing experience…which really wasn’t that far from the truth on her part. But…the plan where I just go out on a date or two seemed to make more sense, and push this whole thing back a few days at least.
“So let’s just go on a date,” I told her. “Umm…how’s…” I wracked my brain for a moment as I tried to figure out a good time to take Twilight out. “Oh! How’s two nights from now sound?”
Twilight’s face lit up. “That’s perfect! I can do all the proper research, and…”
I let Twilight’s words fade to the back of my mind as I patted myself on the back while telling myself, not to mention give me time to get some real work done.
As Twilight finished talking, I braced myself for another one of her peck kisses, then she trotted out the door while calling for the name of a guard captain I had made a report to where I had been while MIA for the past few days before my visit to the doctor.
The scent at the edge of the door told me what to expect before I even got outside, and I found both #619 and #666 flanking the entrance to the medical tent. Apparently guarding Twilight's makeshift bedroom. “Is White Knight here?”
“No Commander,” #619 spoke softly, “I thought it best he remain in Ponyville when we were summoned by the princess due to his speech problem.”
Smart girl, I thought to myself. “How did the…scouting mission fare?” I asked while looking around to make sure nopony was eavesdropping on us. Since the tent only blocked sight and not sound, it was safer to just talk out in the open where we could see someone trying to listen in.
#666 made sure to keep a lookout, leaving #619 the one to lead the conversation. A part of me figured the fake female unicorn might have been considered my second for this…operation and consider it strange that #666 wasn’t despite his longer relationship with me. But the beast had been a servant, the changeling calling herself Dawn Star was much more independent. Intelligence and ingenuity beat familiarity.
“We were able to locate the castle and found several ancient books on spellcraft as well as several tomes relating to mysterious locations throughout Equestria.”
I nodded to myself as I mentally did an evil cackle of victory. My time with Twilight hadn’t done much to increase my understanding of arcane knowledge beyond a handful of spells. The only one of which I had learned to do myself being her trademark teleportation after getting a very in-depth lecture on the subject.
Learning new magic wasn’t exactly hard…but…I was starting to really understand why ponies could only use spellcraft connected to their talents. Magic wasn’t just math used to measure the effects of what you wanted, but it also required an investment of one's self. Everything I knew about magic had been downloaded directly into my brain and most changeling magic involved me just pointing my horn at something and magically shouting DIE or MOVE.
From what I figured in relation to how pony’s understood magic, it seemed that our pony base form did have a talent related to hunting. Anything that didn’t involve hiding, stalking, neutralizing, avoiding, tricking, controlling, our killing prey was quite difficult to learn. I suppose things like transmutation or transmogrification might also fall under a changeling’s purview, but I had no desire to learn how to change frogs into jumping oranges.
“And the mirror pool?” I asked.
“Two days of searching through the library found the compartment with the book you mentioned,” #619 replied while I rolled my eyes. It figured Twilight would put the thing right back where it had been before. “Following its instructions, we located the cave in the forest with a lake that did radiate magic.”
I nodded and checked my mental time table. “Good, we’ll test it the night after we get back. Now, I need to go catch up with Twilight and try to look like I'm doing my job.”