For the umpteenth night I’m sitting in the tree outside of Pumpkin’s place, wondering why I’m here instead of at home. I know I’ve strained my relationship with North, and all for something that I’m completely sure of…but have no absolute proof in regards to. I know that there’s a changeling out there that’s been preying on people for as long as I’ve been here, if not longer…but at the same time, if there’s one thing I’ve learned, either on Earth or Equus, is that there’s no such thing as a sure bet.
Still, I sit in the tree, watching her front yard, waiting for a sign of her coming home. Sure enough, a few minutes later I see her car drive up. She seems okay with a tight smile on her face, but I can’t discount that – that could simply be a slasher’s smile or a Stepford smile, or a Pan-Am smile, or….
I really gotta lay off TV Tropes when I’m bored.
As she gets out of her car, I hear her muttering something. It’s low enough that I can’t completely make it out, but from the sound it has to be Czett’ryn. My heart breaks as I realize that one of my closest friends since I’ve moved here is one of those emotion-sucking parasites. Maybe I’m not seeing the full picture – I may be a goddess, but even deities are prone to mistakes – but the fact that Pumpkin is one of those…things cuts worse than a wound.
I watch as she suddenly stands stock still. And without warning, she says to no one in particular, “C’mon out, I know you’re there.” I don’t make a move, but the fact that she knows I’m here clinches it for me. Plus, how the hell did she hear me? I’m an expert at hiding in the night and whatnot – it’s one of those things that I’m naturally good at.
So it’s to my surprise when Pumpkin pulls out a gun from her purse – where did she get a gun? – and calls out, “I know you’re there. Don’t make me use this!”
I’m more worried about her than the gun. What would possess her to carry one of those? Granted, we have one at home, but that was more because it’s an old keepsake North inherited from his grandfather, who was in one of the human wars ages ago. I’m not even sure it really works. But as I see the shiny and well-polished one in Pumpkin’s hands, two things are clear: that it’s well tended for, and that she knows how to use it.
“Last chance!” she shouts. “I know where you are and these are frangible rounds – they might not hurt anything else, but they’ll certainly hurt you!”
I might be able to get around them, but I don’t know the first thing about bullets, and all it’s going to take is some innocent walking around. I could zap her gun from there or a million other things, but I don’t know what else she’s carrying and then there’s the fact that a round could go off; life isn’t like videogames.
Alighting from the tree I was in, I slide into the shadows and dart through them to about a couple of blocks away. Then, because apparently I’m not above using dea ex machina, I summon my car then get in, then drive up all casual-like. As I approach her driveway, I honk. She flinches, and the look in her eyes is wild – that’s worrisome if I ever saw a look like that before…because the last time I saw it was on North.
As I roll down my window, she sees me and gasps. “Oh, God don’t do that, Moon!” she calls out at me. “Nearly gave me a heart attack!”
“I can imagine!” I call out to her. She doesn’t know it, but I’m casting a spell that lets me look at her vitals. In the past, we could only get one or two readings at a time from it, but it’s amazing how adaptive modern technology can be. What I’m seeing, in an overlay of sorts in front of my eyes, is a UI, giving me her heart rate, depth of breathing, perspiration levels and general body heatmap. I wonder if Celestia/that bitch/my sister/my sister? has developed something similar for her ponies in the time since.
“What’s with the gun?” I ask her.
An awkward smile comes onto her face, the kind that lets me know that she’s calming down. “Don’t worry; it’s a fake – airsoft. You think I’d carry a real gun?” she tells me. Unfortunately for her, I’ve played enough FPSes that I can identify an MP-448 Skyph when I see one. Those aren’t exactly common, certainly not common enough to make an airsoft replica from, I’m pretty sure. But I’m going to let that pass.
“So what brings you out here?” she asks me as she finally realizes that I’m sitting in my car.
“Well, was in the area for some stuff, and thought I’d come by and visit, if you didn’t mind. Why are you out here with a gun – even if it’s fake?” I ask her. Hopefully she’s got some sort of answer, even if I already know the truth.
“Uh…coyotes!” she says, a little too quickly to be believable. “We, uh, have a problem with them occasionally in this neighborhood. Got out of my car and thought I heard one.”
“And you think an airsoft is really going to stop it?” I ask her. Even if I wasn’t, well, me, I’d find that a little dumb. A BB gun might do some damage, as would a pellet gun. But all a small wad of plastic, unless you manage to aim for and hit both eyes, is going to do nothing more than really piss off an already aggressive, feral animal.
She sighs. “Fine, it’s a real gun, okay? You’d laugh if I told you why I carry it.”
“You’d be surprised. Besides, I came to visit you.”
“Well, yeah, thanks.” I watch as she holsters the gun with a practiced air that makes it clear that she’s not only familiar with its use, but that it gets used very regularly. And as I park my car behind hers, I realize that’s incredibly worrisome: if she really is what I think she is, then that means she’s armed and dangerous, and it’s going to be that much harder to corral her without one of us getting hurt…and I have/we have/Luna has walked away from worse.
I’ve really got to figure out how to deal with that mental and mathematical tense in my head before it drives me up the wall.
As I sit down on her couch, the place is nothing like I imagined, certainly nothing at all like I imagined Pumpkin’s house. In addition to her gaming rig, which takes up most of her living room, there’s a lot of Russian and Soviet art. A lot of it. I’m not familiar with most of it, but I do recall seeing things like this from a few videogames I’ve played and some movies I’ve seen with North.
I then see something that catches my eye, and I go look at it. It’s her diploma. She told me once that she graduated early from Cal Poly, and sure enough here it is, a Master’s Degree in Mathematics, awarded to….
Huh?
“Yeah, you’re reading that right,” a voice behind me says. I turn to see her, holding a tray with drinks and chips. “Sorry.”
“I thought your name was Pumpkin Spice,” I comment.
In turn, she gives me an awkward smile as she sets down the tray on the coffee table. “It is; I legally changed it last year to the name I’ve pretty much used all my life. Same thing with my sister, though I think she still kept her legal birth name.”
“So,” I begin, sitting down on the love seat across from her. “Okay, so, Ms. Nadezhda Tykva Pryanost,” I say, a little harder than I intend. But I’m still surprised that her name really isn’t Pumpkin Spice – or wasn’t, if I heard her right.
The look I receive from her is one of anger; I wasn’t expecting that. “How long have you and your counterparts at the CIA been following me? I thought you were a friend!”
“Huh?” Of all the things that I expected to come out of her mouth, that was not one of them. Why do I feel like I just got caught up in that superspy MMO that Silvergold Interactive wants me to qualtest for them?
“Look, don’t play dumb with me, okay? I told you guys, I have nothing to do with my birth parents or sister! I’ve only met them once! Why can’t you guys leave me alone?” To my horror, she starts bawling and she looks genuinely distraught. I blink my eyes to cast a spell, looking at her again. Nothing’s changed, and I don’t know enough about changeling physiology to tell if she’s one or if there’s merely something weird going on.
Yeah, “merely” something weird. FML, as North often says.
In any case, I’d better fix this. Pumpkin’s clearly bothered by something – still can’t believe she mentioned the CIA – and she’s one of my two best friends. Moving to her side and putting an arm around her, I say in the gentlest voice I can manage, “Pumpkin, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Part of me is internally recoiling, because I know exactly where I’m pulling this maternal act from; after all, it was the same way that she treated me/we/L—
Not now, brain!
Anyway, she turns to cry on me, soaking my shirt with her tears as I hug her close and let her just cut loose. Finally, after about ten minutes or so of this, I hear her mumble something. When I ask again, she lifts her head up from my chest and asks, “You’re really not CIA?”
“No! If I were CIA, I certainly wouldn’t be driving a Kia,” I tell her, which is kind of funny, because I have enough magic to have my own fleet of Mercedez Benzes, and with North’s money we could probably do the same anyway. But North loves his Honda Civic and isn’t really one for fancy cars, and I guess I took my cue from that. “Plus, if I remember from really bad Hollywood films, doesn’t the FBI catch spies in the US?”
“I’m not a spy!” she shouts, looking at me with a mixture of anger and fear.
“I didn’t say you were…but something’s really bothering you, and I’m guessing it’s something you want to talk about?”
She was quiet for the longest time, and during that time, she was clearly doing some soul searching before she finally started with, “Okay, because I need to tell someone I can trust, someone who’s not my parents or my sister.”
I feel grateful for hearing that – always nice to know that I’m trusted – before Pumpkin launches into the weirdest story I have ever heard – and being a formerly-evil alicorn goddess trapped in another dimension, trust me I know weird; I’m practically intimate friends with the concept. The long and short of it, and I’m still trying to wrap my brain around the fact that Pumpkin’s life story is that of a spy novel. Seriously. I am not telling North. He’ll get ideas in his head of writing some epic spy novel series.
Apparently Nadezhda and her sister Vanil – “Means vanilla in Russian,” she helpfully explains – were born in Washington DC to Ratmir and Avtonoma Ottenok, Russian refuseniks who tried to escape the country because of their ethnic Jewish background. They settled in DC towards the end of the Cold War and got decent jobs. But it wasn’t until after their twin daughters had turned five that they’d actually been exposed as deep cover Russian spies. The parents, having only had the children just for their cover, gave them up to child services workers in Maryland. A few months later, they were fostered, and eventually adopted by Donald and Leslie Spice, both nice and normal college professors. When they were ten, the family moved from DC to here.
“Mom was the one who Americanized Nilla’s name, since they’re practically the same. But she didn’t care for my name – and I really didn’t like it either – but she found out my middle name means ‘pumpkin’ and there we go. I had my legal name on all my documents growing up, but I grew up as Pumpkin Spice; it helped that my Russian last name translates to ‘spice’, so there’s that. But after I graduated from college, I decided to legally change my name to that, both to honor my parents and to say that, well, I’m me.”
Well, that makes sense, but what’s with the CIA bit? “Okay, want to t—” I start, but she cuts me off as a blush pretty much invades her cheeks.
“Apparently after my biologicals were punted back to Moscow, they immediately had another kid, and that one they loved. So much so, in fact, that she went to all the best schools in Russia and then joined the KGB, or whatever it’s called nowadays. And that’s when the CIA got involved: they wanted to know if we had any contact with them – and we don’t. Heck, I didn’t even know I had a second sister until they mentioned it! Anyway, they kept hounded my parents and Nilla and her girlfriend; that’s why they were in town, so they could get away from that. But me, they hounded the most, probably because I collect Russian art. It probably didn’t help my case that unlike my sister, I actually kept up with the Russian I learned as a kid – comes in handy when talking to modders in the RU.”
“I was wondering about that,” I tell her.
“Yeah. Nilla and I have different coping mechanisms; mine just involves more money and less shameless nudity.” She looks at me and finishes with, “And that’s my deep dark secret. You know, I actually feel a little better now. Thanks!”
I give her a smile and say that “You know, you’re not the only one with a big secret.” I wonder if I should tell her mine. It’s taking a bigger risk than she did, by far, but then again risks are relative – she risked losing her friendship with me (or so she thought) by confessing; could I have that same courage?
“You have one, too?” she asks.
I nod. “It’s a big one, bigger than yours,” I begin, and butterflies start swarming in my stomach. How will she react? Is anyone watching the place? To cover my tracks there, I snap my fingers behind my back and cast a silencing and distraction spell, which should cover my tracks. But the truth of the matter is that I really don’t know how any of this is going to play out, other than that I’m about to admit to the first person aside from my boyfriend that aliens exist…and that I’m one of them.
I play the words through my mind: “Pumpkin, did you know that aliens exist – because I’m one of them?” Or what about, “Hey, guess what? I’m a jet black winged unicorn with eyes like a dragon and a mane like the night sky!” Okay, that sounds stupid, even if I show her what I really look like. I suppose I could give a pithy speech to start off, but the last time I did that, I ended up being used as target practice for the Elements of Harmony, not that I/we—
Not now, brain!
Guess I’m just going to have to wing this one. Looking intently at my friend, I open my mouth to speak.
And then I feel it – the snap of a cord in my mind – and it fills me with blind terror, because I know what that means. There’s only one thing it could mean, and though I never told him, I always feared that moment would come. And at the edges of it, I feel something else, and that shocks me out of whatever momentary stupor I felt.
No, no no! Dammit, no! I tell myself as I blast a hole through Pumpkin’s wall, transforming on the fly. How could I have been so stupid? So blind?
With the bond between us broken, I have just seconds – fractions of, maybe – to make it there before something happens to North. Because if that bug so much as touches a hair on his head…
…well, I’m a lot worse than the Orkin man, bug.
It takes me a two seconds at full speed to get from Pumpkin’s place in Long Beach – I’m going to have to repair her house, as well as tell her the truth, assuming she hasn’t completely freaked out at this point – to get to the last known spot where he was, somewhere in Westminster. As a nanosecond goes by, I see his car parked in the driveway.
A nanosecond more for me to tear down the door.
Another one for me to see him on the ground. As much as I’m terrified for his condition, I don’t dare spare an instance to check on him because…
…a split-second later, I’m wrapping my magic around the throat of the changeling that just floored him. My anger grows as I realize it’s taken the shape of Katie, my other best friend. North must have been tricked here, thinking Katie was in trouble. Well, the fucking thing is going to get trouble, in spades.
“WHERE IS KATIE?” I roar at the damn thing. If North’s in trouble, it could mean that…. No, she has to be okay. I won’t stand for any of these bugs murdering people I care about!
The creature in Katie’s shape looks at me with its solid green eyes and they grow in fear. I must have caught it off-guard, because it’s still in mid-change: there are black spots all over its body, as if it were diseased; the hair is pockmarked, the eyes are a solid, compound green as is the norm for its ilk; and its wings are splayed out, having torn their way out of the shirt it was wearing.
It gurgles something that approaches words, and after a few seconds, I realize what that is: “I’m…Katie! Don’t…hu—”
“YOU LIE!” I throw the thing against the wall, letting it collide like a ragdoll. As it slumps to the ground, I pick it up again, snarling, “You’re trying my patience, fell beast! Either tell me where she is or I will slay you where you stand, understood?”
The creature looks at me with terror. “You’re the monster! You broke into my house, hurt my friend and tri….” Horror comes over the changeling’s face as some sort of recognition dawns on her. “N-no. They said you were a myth!” It starts punching and kicking in my direction, appendages uselessly flailing as I hold it in the air well away from me. “They said you didn’t exist!”
I look at her coolly. “Oh, I can assure you I exist – which is more than you’ll be, soon enough! Now I’ll say it one last time: where is Katie Nguyen?”
The changeling glares at me. “Look, scary or not, that’s not going to change the fact that I’m Katie, you bitch!”
I hear North get up behind me, and I throw a shield around him; even though I have her pinned, I have no idea what she’s capable of. “Ugh, fuck, I feel like I just got hit by a truck,” he groans.
“Sweetie, stay back,” I tell him, though the shield should keep him safe – or maybe not; if this is a disguised queen, well, one kept Ce…a certain white alicorn busy back with its invasion of our castle in the Everfree plains once. I try not to remember the castle that had once been my home, now a crumbling, forgotten wreck.
“What’s going on?” he asks me. “Where’s Katie?” I don’t reply immediately, but instead move just a skosh so he can’t see the thing I have trapped in my magic. Also, it means he’ll stare at my ass for a while.
What? He says he likes my butt. I have that on record!
“She’s…she’s not her—”
“North, help!” the thing shouts in Katie’s voice.
I’ve already let the damn thing live too long, so instead I clamp down again with my magic on its throat. “Okay, if you’re not going to tell me what you did with her, then you can die! If you changelings have a hell,” I can’t help but seethe, “I hope you suffer endlessly for what you did to my best friend!” I’ll save you, Katie, somehow, right after I deal with this monster and any others that might be around.
To my shock, the creature looks at me again, and a look of surprise comes onto her eyes. “Wait….Moon?! Moon? Is that you?” And a second later: “What the hell’s going on? Why are you that…that…monster?”
“Moon, what’s going on?” North’s noticed the barrier around him. “Why do I have a force field around me? And where’s Katie?”
“North, help!” the creature shouts again.
I turn to look at him briefly. “I found the changeling. Problem is, she won’t tell me where Katie is. I’m keeping a shield around you in case this parasite decides to prey on your emotions.”
“North!” The changeling begins pleading for her life. “Please, please tell her it’s me! Please!”
“You’re an idiot,” I tell the thing. “Do you really think he thinks you’re Katie? He knows better.”
The thing starts crying – hey, I didn’t even know those things were capable of crocodile tears – and looks right at him. “Please, North – you’re like a big brother to me. You know me.”
«Hon, are changelings mind readers?» he immediately asks me over our mental link, and once again proves why I love him so. Only he would come up with a way to prove this creature isn’t her, and to shame that thing – if it’s even capable of such a feeling – before I end it.
«No, they don’t have that capability,» I tell him, dropping the shield. «Let me know if you start feeling woozy and I’ll throw my shield up again – it means she’s trying to drain you.»
«Got it,» he says as he moves forward. I watch him cross his arms as he looks at her, a slight disgust on his face; strangely, she seems to wince at that. “Okay, changeling? If you really are who you say you are, then tell me something only she and I would know. If you don’t…then tell me where she is. She’s a friend of mine and I care about her.”
“I…care about you too, No—”
The look in his eyes even surprises me as he glares at it strong enough to practically melt steel. I know he and Katie have somewhat of a filial relationship, but geez, even…whatsername didn’t stick up for me/her/us like that!
Not now, brain!
“Talk,” he tells her in a cold voice that I could use some pointers on developing.
She sighs and looks sadly at him, then mumbles something.
“What was that?”
“Underwear valentines!” she blurts, her skin blushing a strange mixture of green and red.
As for North, I see the look on his face, and the words he speaks floors me: “Katie? Is that you?”
“That’s what I said, idiot! Now save me before this monster murders me!” she shouts.
I look at him; he’s not the only one confused. “North, honey, what the hell’s going on?”
He seems really stunned right now, but I’ll have to take care of that later; I’m not doing much better than him. “It’s her,” he says. “When she was seven, I had to babysit her on Valentine’s Day, and she wanted to give me one, too. But she didn’t have any paper, and her mother had just done her laundry, so….” He scratches the back of his head, clearly embarrassed by the memory. “I had to explain to her why that was multiple levels of wrong.”
The whole thing as I’m picturing it in my head – okay, so I’m picturing them as a filly and a teenage colt, so sue me; it’s what I’m used to – and the sheer absurdity of the whole thing is enough to make me bust a metaphorical gut. I collapse in tears, laughing my ass off as I release Katie, who, as she drops to the floor, lands on her butt. Strangely, that’s more than enough to make her spots go away, her hair fill out again, wings disappear, and her eyes go back to normal.
“North!” she hisses at him as he’s laughing; she’s in a full blush now, and the coloration is red, that of human blood. “Maybe I should’ve had you kill me….” she moans as she cradles her head in embarrassment.
Yeah, that’s Katie; you can’t fake that kind of reaction. But how? I change back to normal – well, normal as she knows me – and offer her a hand up. “So, you’re a changeling?”
She takes it. “Yes, I am, Princess,” she says…
…then slugs me across the face – hard. “I thought you were my friend!” she retorts. “How long have you and that bitch you call a sister been following me?” She then watches in surprise as the hit, strong enough to give a normal human woman a black eye, vanishes within a second.
“What are you—”
“Don’t lie to me, Moon – or should I call you Luna, since that’s clearly who you are! Princess Luna the Changeling Slayer, murderer of all!”
“Well, why are you a changeling?” I ask her.
“I’m not a changeling!” she rants. “My ancestors were, and I’m a Goddamn throwback – you think I like being some sort of freak? At least I don’t kill anyone, not like you, Princess!” She then looked around her place. “And you trashed my place, too!”
To my relief, North steps between us. “Katie, look: We’re all a bit frazzled right now. For starters, you never told me why you wanted me to come over.”
“That’s because I lost control of my power and drained you by accident,” she says, another blush coming onto her face. “Sorry.” She then looks at him and asks, “So, want to tell me why you’re dating the Lunar Tyrant?”
“I’m not Princess Luna,” I tell her, hoping that she doesn’t want an explanation – and that my brain decides not to go into autistic mode.
“Oh, sure!” she growls. “Yeah, because alicorns are so damn common in pony world! I mean, c’mon – your butt tattoo says you’re Luna! What, do you think I was born yesterday?”
North tries to plead for calm. “Look, we’re all more than a little wound right now,” he tells both of us, “and you both need to calm down right now. Moon, hon, I think Katie thinks you’re that princess. Katie, I can assure you, she’s not Princess Luna or whatever her name is – Moon is her own alicorn and if anything is a refugee from…Equestra?”
“Equestria,” I correct, then wince. Knowing the correct name isn’t going to help.
But to my relief, Katie calms down a little. “Look, I’m going to put on some coffee; I think I need an Irish like no tomorrow, especially after all this.” She then points at me and says, “And you have to clean up! You’ve been here enough times; you know how everything looks.”
“Fine,” I grunt, starting to cast spells to repair everything. I’m also going to have to fix the door an—
Oh, shit – there’s Pumpkin’s place, too. I can practically feel my jaw hit the floor as that realization sinks in.
I look at the clock; it’s two in the morning and me, Pumpkin, Katie and North are sitting at a nearby Denny’s. Katie’s still looking at me hesitantly, and I notice that Pumpkin’s wearing a light jacket for the time of year, a clear sign she brought her gun. Right now I don’t know if I’ve just pissed away the two closest friends I’ve had since, well, since I got here, maybe before that.
Thankfully, the place is practically empty, and I cast a silencing spell. To my surprise, Katie knows what it was.
“Yeah,” she admits, stirring her coffee for the how-manyth time in the past few minutes. “Being a throwback really does have its ups and downs. I mean, I can use magic and all that, but only when I’m ‘charged’, and that depends on how much I’ve drained from people – and I generally I don’t like that; it makes me ill.”
“But how were you charged?”
She sighs, and I get the feeling I’m not going to like this story. “Okay, you probably heard about the guy who attacked you, and how he was ‘grayed out’? That was my fault. I…I got angry that he did that and I wanted to get revenge. So I….” She blushes and I wince as I realize what she did. Changelings generally steal the emotion from their victims via their licorne – their horn, to use the layman’s term. But Katie doesn’t have a horn and that means a more direct approach.
“You didn’t….” North says. Guess he picked that up as well.
“Yeah; that’s why I called you. My boyfriend found out somehow; I’m betting it was the HIVE that told him. He called it quits earlier today, and that’s why I asked North to come – because I needed someone I trusted completely and you weren’t available.”
I wince as I realize I could have put this to ease much easier instead of throwing my friend around like a rag doll. Still, I’m curious about what she had to say: “You mentioned a hive?”
“Not that kind of hive. The Hampstead Institute for Vitalizing Education; it was started by one of my ancestors back in the 1700s.”
I pull out my phone and do a quick Google. “Uh, the Hampstead Institute is a Dublin-based charity focusing on education for the poor. According to this, they mainly operate out of Ireland and the UK.”
“Yeah, and if you keep reading down, you’ll notice there are international chapters – there’s about sixteen of us throwbacks known to the HIVE, and I’m the only one who lives in the US. Thus, the US branch was headquartered in Santa Monica and founded the same year I was born,” Katie tells me, the tone in her voice clearly bitter. “Yes, the HIVE’s public focus is on public education, but their real reason for existence is to watch over me and the others – apparently to our grand family, we’re ticking time bombs.” She’s no longer even trying to hide the anger and disgust she feels, and for probably the first time tonight, it has nothing to do with me.
“Want to talk about it?” I ask her.
“Not really, but…I guess I don’t have a choice,” she tells me, and I can see the pain in her voice as she begins.