In the network of caverns underneath the quiet rural community of Citrus Hills, there had long been a deep dark secret. There, ponies were secretly imprisoned, and forced to work in secret mines, gathering dark crystals deep beneath the earth. Beyond physically mining them, they were also pressed into empowering them through fear or anger. The crystals reacted to anger by draining it, and a lot of energy, from anypony expressing it nearby. Fear, by contrast, empowered the crystals while strengthening that sense of fear, pushing it into the debilitating flavor of fear. Adrenaline, fight and flight were drained from the pony, leaving them only to cower and beg.
But they made the mistake of foalnapping two of my subjects, the unicorn filly Midnight Oil, and her pegasus mother Fog Dancer. And while they did initially manage to capture me and most of my forces, we were able to turn the tides, free ourselves and the other prisoners, and kill our captors.
With the suppliers of the dark crystals removed, we were free to go with our newly expanded Itinerant Kingdom, and live in relative peace. And I let most of my people do just that. There are many amusing anecdotes from their lives, scattered in the shadows of Equestria, but this story is about what I set out to do with a handful of changelings in Manehattan. You see, the suppliers were dead now, but in their records they had left behind the address of their distributor, or at least the drop off point for the crystals. So rather than leave well enough alone, and wonder whether the buyers would manage to track us down when the supply dried up, we decided to go after them proactively.
And why not hit that hornet's nest with the biggest stick we had? Ponies were notoriously cowardly push-overs in a fight, we had been through some nasty scraps ourselves, and this way only our most combat-ready forces would be exposed to danger. Plus, with the Kingsblood in our veins, we were practically invincible, right?
Beyond that, though, I felt it was the right thing to do. And it's only because of that reason I still have no regrets.
It was raining hard when we rolled into the city, something I thought seemed kind of odd, until I had it explained. In a city on Earth, such as Manhattan as an obvious example, a hard rain like this was just nature being nature, and you had to deal with it. But here in Equestria, weather was intentionally scheduled and managed by teams of pegasi, coordinating with the earth ponies and unicorns to time things in the most favorable way they can manage. So I wondered why anypony would want this much rain in a city. Surely it could be corralled over the local parks if it was just to water the plants.
It turns out, this is how they clean the sky scrapers. Every Wednesday they deluged the city with a thorough downpour to wash away all the dirt and grime from the top to the bottom, starting just after the end of the morning rush hour, and ending just in time for the evening rush hour. During the deluge, normal ponies stayed off the streets unless absolutely necessary. The notes we got about the crystal deliveries showed they always occurred on Wednesday, and now I knew why. Cheap, easy cover. At the expense of personal comfort.
The rain-slicked loading dock we pulled toward had a couple of earth ponies waiting on it for our arrival, with bandanas across their snouts which we had come to expect meant they were infected with the crystals, and would be able to draw power from them rather than having it drawn away. That made me glad our shipment was nothing but painted rocks hidden from view under a tarp. Though it also meant our cover might be blown even before they got up to inspect the cargo. Curiously, there were also a couple of unicorns lurking around on the nearby streets, their own crystal infections openly shown, glittering from their snouts and horns while their eyes, ears and backs of their heads, along with their actual backs, were hidden under dark cloaks that glittered oddly in the shifting light. They seemed really distinctive and noticeable, but the handful of ponies passing them by barely noticed them enough to divert their path a few steps, paying them no more mind than one would typically pay a random tree in the middle of the forest. But they paid a lot of mind to us.
Mirror and I had pulled the wagon the final stretch of the journey, disguised as earth ponies, while Wind Chaser was disguised as a unicorn, riding on the bench and preparing to be our 'face'. We all had bandanas on, hiding our lack of dark crystal infection. But I wasn't sure how hidden that information really was, especially as the dark cloaked unicorns closed in our location. null, meanwhile, was affixed to the bottom of the wagon, serving as a hidden reserve.
Our original plan was simple enough. We subdue or kill the couple of ponies at the loading dock and take on their forms. Changelings could actually pick up the short term memories of whoever they mimic, as long as the subject is present at the time, and that would hopefully give us enough information to move deeper and sneak up on the next layer of guards or what have you, and repeat the process as needed. That plan was already starting to go out the window with the unexpected presence of the dark cloaked unicorns.
If null stayed hidden, we were facing two to one odds. We were confident in our victory, only bothered that the inevitable noise of the fight would draw reinforcements, or possibly allow our quarry to destroy evidence or flee, letting our trail go cold. But it was too late to set up the ideal approach. It was time to deal with the cards we were dealt. So we unhitched ourselves quickly, and spread out a bit to face all comers. That was enough to get the other ponies into action: without a word, the fight was on.
I was the least familiar with magic, so I took on the two earth ponies. Predictably, one of them spun away from me when he got close, going for a double-hooved rear buck. The technique as quite familiar to me from my farming work: a powerful kick like that could knock all the fruit loose from a tree. A larger stallion like Oak Breaker could even snap a trunk if he put his full force into it. While my foe wasn't Oak Breaker's size, I knew I didn't want to be caught in that kick, and coiled back out of his reach, then lunged in during his recoil, keeping his hooves from reaching the ground and making him collapse awkwardly to the ground, a mere second before a brutal roundhouse hoof from the other pony sent me skidding across the pavement.
One thing about having the Kingsblood overclocking my mind.. sometimes I have time to see something coming, almost like it's in slow motion, analyzing every detail of the movement while I have not even the slightest prayer of doing anything about it. No matter how fast the mind is, the muscles still have their limits. And I hadn't seen that kick coming, literally or figuratively, until it was too late. I hadn't even known ponies physically could move like that.
The blow had, however, repositioned me closer to the unicorns holding Mirror at bay. Behind them in fact, though still some distance away. With a flash of green magic, I had a pair of wings at my disposal and used them to produce a sharp burst of speed toward the back of one unicorn's head, and then a sharp burst of torque to produce a roundhouse kick of my own toward the unicorn's snout.
Sadly, I was defeated by the most mundane of techniques. The earth pony that had tried to buck me shouted a warning. The other unicorn snagged me mid-flight in a field of telekinesis just moments before my kick connected, and hurled me back to my own fight. He kept my wings pinned at the sides until a pair of double-hooved bucks slammed into me from both sides at once.
I refused to black out from the immense pain, determined to keep up the fight until we won. Reality, however, overruled my veto. I collapsed into the puddle of my own blood.
Losing me was a crippling loss of morale for my changelings, but also a very practical loss as well. The extra love I had been channeling to them from the rest of the kingdom was lost, and without it they weren't able to hold their own against two unicorns each, much less two unicorns and an earth pony.
Mirror tried surrendering, but they just used it as a chance to close and start brutally beating the poor changeling until he succumbed as well.
Wind Chaser was duly discouraged from surrendering, and encouraged to start fighting dirty. She used her kingsblood to assemble electromagnetics in her forehooves and used those to rip a knife from the belt of each of the unicorns she was facing off with, then fire them off into their necks before they could realize what was going on. A quick spinning hoof before they recovered from the shock sent the embedded knives slashing across their flesh, leaving horrific, potentially deadly injuries.
And then a lightning bolt dropped her to the ground, twitching in uncontrollable spasms as her consciousness quickly faded. They had pegasi in reserve. Of course they did.
Being dead already held certain advantages for null. The dead changeling could cover himself with a layer of copper, just inside his carapace, that worked wonders for keeping lightning at bay, including the EMP shockwave that it sent out. Living bodies couldn't cope with that. The rest of us had managed a compromise, coating our bones with copper to create shielded pockets in our brains and marrow that kept all of our nanospiders from being knocked offline at once, but even that took some constant effort to counter the toxicity.
Being dead also kept him off the radar of the enemy ponies, who swept the area quickly with a life detection spell. Surely, they would only make that mistake so many times before they caught on to null's nature. But we weren't about to pass up a good opportunity. Peeking out from under the wagon, null saw that only the last unicorn bringing up the rear was looking back to check for potential reinforcements, the rest looking where they were going as they headed into the warehouse. So null rolled out between the final two ponies, quickly and as quietly as possible removed the rear guard from the ranks of the living even as he changed into the unicorn's shape, and kicked the body under the wagon while taking his cloak and dagger. It was a horrible place to hide the body, and would buy him very little time before it was uncovered. Inside the wagon, under the rocks would be better, but he couldn't move it in the few seconds before someone would look back and see him. For now, though, it was enough to get him in the door, following the other unicorns and pegasi as they dragged Wind Chaser inside.
The earth ponies, meanwhile, were loading Mirror and I into the back of another wagon, this one laden with sacks of garbage which they used to cover us. Securing themselves to the front, they took off at a modest pace, dragging their haul away from the crime scene.
Inside, the unicorns brought their captive up to another unicorn. null recognized him instantly: the same unicorn that had teleported away from the scene of the carnage under Citrus Hills. "So they did come here after all?" he asked. "Such fools. How many did they send?"
"Three, boss," one of the pegasi said. "At least two of them were changers, like you said."
"Changelings," he corrected. "You do read the newspapers, do you not?"
The pegasus shrugged. "Whatever. They grew horns in the middle of the fight, and I think one had wings for a bit. The other two we beat to a bloody pulp and threw out with the garbage. But this one's just stunned."
One of the unicorns with a bloody neck chimed in. "She had some magic tricks I haven't seen. Like telekinesis, but it wasn't, you know.. 'magic'. She could use it even while we had her horn locked down. And speaking of horns... hers is damn powerful."
"Not any longer," the leader said, placing a horn blocker ring into place on the offending appendage. And then he grabbed for the hammer and nail to hold it in place. He paused a moment, perhaps remembering Midnight Oil popping her ring off despite the nail. But that was no reason to have less precautions in place, only a reason to have more. So he hammered the nail into place, causing her unconscious body to spasm with pain until he was done. "Lock her up, but make sure to keep at least two guards on her at all times! This one deserves some of my 'extra special' attention."
"Right, boss," null agreed. As one of the uninjured unicorns, it just made sense for him to take the first watch.