//------------------------------//
// 11| Mother Dearest 
// Story: A Nightmare Come To Life 
// by Alcatraz 
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	Drip.

Drip.

Drip.

Joseph had woken with hangovers and headaches in the past, but nothing could prepare him for this pain screaming throughout his head. He began to regain consciousness, although the jackhammer pounding away at his skull wasn't doing him any favours. He tried moving his limbs, but to no avail. The thing that struck him as odd was his complete lack of ability to move at all, save his head and neck. He pulled and tugged at his muscles, but he couldn't move anything below his neck. It was like he was buried up to his neck in concrete.

"Ughh..." he moaned from his aching everything. "What happened?" He opened his eyes, but there was nothing to be seen. The area was shrouded in a veil of the blackest ink. He rolled his neck to relieve the stress which earned him a couple pops of the vertebrae, like cracking knuckles.

He took a moment to try and assess his situation. 'So I'm god-only-knows-where, in a room more black that a burnt pot of onions, with a leaky pipe that's beginning to piss me off...'

For every drip that fell, his equine ears twitched in annoyance. ’Hey, Nightmare, you up there?'

He waited several seconds, but there was no reply.

'Yoohoo, anyone up there? I could really use your help right about now.'

Still nothing.

'Answer me you living cloud of soot! What are you doing in my head, having an imaginary Siesta?'

He tried waiting several minutes for a reply, or at least something in return, but ultimately nothing came.

With nothing else to do, he could only begrudgingly accept his position for as long as he could before a thought occurred to him. Joseph closed his eyes—which was redundant, yes, but eliminating certain senses heightens others. He tried his best to ignore the headache, which wasn't easy due to a lack of water or food to abate it.

He took a deep, calming breath, letting his ears do the work for him. He figured that since he was a magical creature with magic, and not knowing how long he would be here, thought it a better and more constructive use of his time to try and figure out a way he could use magic, if at all.

He recalled Twilight saying she would teach him magic, but ultimately never got the chance to. And now was just as good a time as any. But... He had no idea how to even begin! He grumbled in frustration at this and just elected to listen.

Apart from the constant dripping, Joseph heard a squelchy noise come from somewhere off to his left. He turned his head in the direction to give it more attention. Several seconds later he heard a more drawn out squelch. His brow furrowed in concentration and his ears pivoted towards the source in full concentration.

Squelch.

Squuueeelllcchhh.

The second instance of the noise sounded like whatever was making the noise, was... moving?

'If the first few times were footsteps being planted, then maybe the last was one being lifted?'

Squuueeelllcchhh.

"Who's there?" he commanded. "I can hear you!"

Having been found out, there were several more unabated squelchy steps before the figure hidden by the inky veil, disregarding any sense of stealth or surprise it thought it had, stopped in front of Joseph.

He could feel its terrifying presence in front of him, then in that moment felt an unnervingly cold breath of air exhaled from a nose hit him across his muzzle, causing him to turn his face in repulsion.

He felt something touch his forehead, at the base of his horn, and the jackhammer inside his head went into overdrive.

Thousands of thoughts and countless precious memories; all flooded through his mind like a thousand movie reels playing at once. He screamed in pain, eyes involuntarily opening and widening to reflect his pain where movement failed. He felt his face contort in ways he didn't think possible out of the pain radiating throughout his head.

Then, in the instant the touch against his forehead left, he passed out yet again, head slumped forward.





Joseph wasn't sure how much more time had passed before he woke up this time around. But, unlike last time, his eyes opened to light. Hazy green was all he could see at the moment.

At some point, his head had rolled off to the side while passed out, and he felt a trail of moisture running down his cheek and neck. Joseph tried to pick his head up, but his neck muscles had temporarily become too weak from being in one position for an unknown amount of time to properly support anything, and his head immediately dropped in the opposite direction. This position, however, yielded a hazy black figure silhouetted against more green.

Each being stared at each other for what felt like an eternity. His eyes began to clear momentarily and the figure before him slowly became more apparent.

Its horn, a twisted, crooked root, sprouted from the forehead. Sitting atop its head, poking out of the oily, grey-and-turquoise mane was what could be described as a fin that resembled a crown, with four lit, light-producing nodes that were illuminating the room. Its skin, if it could be called that, was not reminiscent of anything he'd met in his three days on this world.

It bore a striking resemblance of reptilian skin, although more solid and not pliable. There were sections of it that nestled neatly together like puzzle pieces. The neck had the appearance of armoured plating; downward pointing plates overlapping each other. It looked to be an amalgam of tree-like appendages, the basic shape of an equine in Joseph's previous encounters, with hairless skin that seemed to interlock like plate armour or insect shells would.

Its face seemed regal, like that of Luna or Celestia, but gone was the calm visage; instead being replaced by the kindest of threatening stares that would make the most strong-willed of people think twice about crossing. It stared at Joseph some more, and Joseph stared at it until it spoke two words; two words emphasised with genuine confusion and puzzlement about him.

"Who are you?" The voice sounded arguably like someone was speaking through a voice box filtered by a vacuum cleaner. "You taste..." It smacked its lips together as if to sample a morsel of food. "...familiar, somehow."

"Gyuh?" Joseph dumbly muttered, his new head still trying to sort itself out.

Joseph managed to elevate his head slightly to see what this thing was pointing at. The colour which filled his vision was found to be a gel-like, gelatinous substance coating every available surface like honeycomb in a hive. Only instead of hexagonal combs in which honey was stored, pods, or chrysalis' –like that of a monarch butterfly–were pasted to a wall by the same gloop they were made of. In each pod there was a pony, with over a dozen in the little room. 

Joseph recognised one of them the second he laid eyes on it.

"Sweetie Belle!" he exclaimed. His eyes shot to the creature. "What did you do to her!?"

"She is fine," it said dismissively. "But you... You have the body of a normal alicorn pony, but yet you have two souls! One is very much dark and powerful, but the other is nothing unlike I’ve seen since I’ve been alive. The body of one of those ponies but with two souls claiming home: one dark and very powerful, and one I've never experienced before. You're the most interesting thing I have ever seen. Or rather, the most delicious I’ve snacked upon."

"Ugh, do I even want to know?"

"We eat memories and emotions mostly," it said apathetically. "They give us our energy, but we also eat regular food to sustain ourselves."

"What are you talking about?" Joseph asked in confusion. "You look like a twisted deformity born of a tree and one of those ridiculous ponies. What's your name? Harold? Do you have a friend whom you call Bob?"


The creature gave a fierce hiss and snarl, striking Joseph across the muzzle with one of its forelimbs, earning him a short gash across the corner of his mouth. "I am not someone you can talk to contemptuously! I am a Queen; you shall address me in such a manner!" The self-proclaimed "Queen" magically grasped Joseph's horn and yanked it back to stare into his eyes from above as she looked down on him. "Now tell me," she seethed, "who exactly are you?"

Wincing from the grasp against his horn and cut on his muzzle, Joseph had no choice but to answer. "Just when I got used to everything it got flipped upside down. So now I'd like to take a minute, so just sit right there. Let me tell you how I became a girl and an evil mare."

"Enough games!" she roared. Joseph's eyes widened with genuine fear.

He wisely decided to play it safe for now.

"I honestly don't know how to answer that!" Joseph pleaded. "One minute I was walking down the street, the next thing I know I'm waking up in the body that belongs to someone these 'ponies' are calling 'Nightmare Moon'!"

The queen released Joe's horn and turned her back to him, sitting down and looking over one of its legs like a manicurist would a hand. "Ah yes. I've heard the legends surrounding her. I'm not as old as I appear, at least not old enough to have been around when Nightmare Moon tried staking a claim to Equestria." She looked over her shoulder and spoke with genuine curiosity. "But that doesn't explain why I sense two entities inside your head."

"I have no idea either," Joe relented. "What happened was I was helping a woman in distress when the man that was attacking her, turned on me after I pulled her away from him. He caught me with his knife, bing bang boom, here I am."

The queen just gave a contemplative "Hmmm". "You share the same mind I'm assuming?" Joseph nodded, then the queen just started laughing cynically at Joseph's expense. "Nightmare used ancient magic..."

"I know it was a spell, but I don't see how old it was making any difference."

"It's simple. Nightmare used a spell to bring you here from your world. She was dying and needed a soul to power the vessel she was possessing. Or at least recharge hers..."

"Yeah, I've already established that with Twilight. What are you getting at?"

"Just... Putting it out in the open." Her expression suddenly become dour as she turned and marched back at Joseph. "You still haven't answered my other question: why are your memories so familiar to me?"

"How the hell am I supposed to know!?" Joseph exclaimed defensively. "Apparently you're the memory expert, so you should know!" he seethed.

"Nga 'eveng..." the queen replied exasperatedly. "You're like a hatched drone making noise; don't know what to do."

Joseph rolled his eyes in response and said, "Well when you get ripped from your world then I think I can do as much complaining as damn well please!" He paused and gave the queen a cheeky grin. "I can't move, my leg is cramping, I'm hung—mmmhpph!" The queen picked up a glob of the green gel in her magic and slathered it over his mouth, letting a sigh of relief wash over her.

"Pardon me for not introducing myself. I am Queen Chrysalis of the Changelings. This room is, how shall I say, a sort of temporary holding cell. Your friend over there has not been harmed, rather she is in an induced coma. You might be wondering about the Sweetie that captured you for me." Chrysalis went over to Sweetie's pod so she could look between it and Joseph.

"Simply put; we can shape-shift. Sometimes physical, sometimes an illusion. What you saw was one of my drones impersonating this filly. Capture a pony, replace them with a drone. Feed off the pony until it's an empty shell then put it into a conversion pod. When all that's done, I pull my operative drone, leaving the pony to disappear. Well, they've been missing for weeks but it's more a case of muddying details to throw the ponies off my trail." Chrysalis demonstrated this shape-shifting ability by enveloping her form in green fire. When it died down, in her place was an exact copy of Sweetie Belle.

Joseph just regarded Chrysalis with an evil glower. They both knew that if Joseph got out, he would repeat everything that Chrysalis was telling him to Celestia, Luna, and Twilight, but she had a contingency plan for that.

"Oh and don't worry about the second entity in your head," she began to say in Sweetie's voice before shifting back to her initial form. "They were being troublesome while I was poking around so I locked them away somewhere in your head. They will be freed when you leave. In other words, when I let you go. Although 'finding' each other might prove difficult."

Chrysalis' horn lit up with an oily aura and the sludge smeared across Joseph's mouth simply dripped away to the floor, the splat not easy to ignore. "And why are you telling me this? You should know that—"

"—every villain's plans fail or get turned against them when they reveal themselves to their rival, loosely speaking in this instance."

"How did you..."

Chrysalis tapped her horn with her hoof, if gnarled branches shaped into hooves could be called that. "Memory and emotions, remember? If you’ve seen it I can find it. From the disproportionate amount of aptly named, 'motion pictures' your brain has recorded, anyone with sufficient magic to traverse memories will find everything."

A sly smirk spread across Joseph's face. "So... What else did you find, hmm?"

The corner of Chrysalis' nose curled in disgust and she turned to leave. "I will be back shortly. My consorts need attending to, and my drones need feeding."

As she turned to leave, the glow of the bioluminescent bulbs adorning the fin-crown dimmed slightly, and when she rounded the corner of the entrance to the so-called prison they switched off completely, leaving the male mare alone in darkness.