Probing the heart of Equestria is a true art form. Slipping into somepony else's life, sweeping the missus off her hooves, and then ending it quietly as the rest of the family is dragged to holding pods to drain all the love and energy they have, so we, the parasites, can find new hosts and live on. It's not what I was meant to do, but darn it, I'm trying my best.
I've never podded a pony for love or emotion before arriving in Ponyville, only observed. I write this, because after scouting Ponyville now for two years, I'm ready to turn in my report. In the last two years, I've watched the three other dreamers, changelings, be violently woken up and pulled from their host families. I am ever awake.
My mission parameters were simple: Do not engage the Elements, do not arouse suspicion, take whatever measures necessary to ensure that identity is not revealed, and finally, don't get caught. Every mission, quest, or task always comes with the unspoken additional objective - secure love and energy for the hive.
I happened to notice after waiting for three months from the date the agent was suppose to arrive...that he or she never arrived. I distinctly remembering the order 'Set up the alias, stock the home, wait for the infiltrator'. For the first month, I went from the living room window, to the small peep hole on the front door, staring out at the world around me. I was watching shadows of trees and houses stretch to the left in the morning, to the right in the evening, until late at night when all shadows became moot. I didn’t think to write down the details of every single pony that walked or jogged past the front of my house until my second week of waiting.
Every morning, the same trio of joggers pass by my window around the same time. Interesting enough for a changeling with nothing to do but wait, I wrote down the time and description of each pony.
By the end of that week I was venturing more and more into Ponyville, buying color coded notebooks and learning names. Soon enough, I assigned each pony I saw two pages, starting with the store owners and market stalls. Those ponies by far maintained the most predictable schedules during the day. They were even nice enough to let everypony know when they would be open or closed.
The most peculiar sounds that I will never forget in order are, ‘Click-ver! ter-scritch, scritch, scritch’ I thought somepony clicked their tongue at first, my ears perked up and swiveled towards the noise. Swinging my head around to see a family of four, the father was taking a snapshot of his family posing on a bridge. With mom in the middle, and her two kids on each side sitting on the railing, the father said, “Alright, we’ll do one more then switch. One...two...three!”
‘Click-ver!’ He wound the disposable camera in his hooves and swapped places with his wife. I’ve used cameras before, taken pictures of ponies I’ll replicate. In that small moment, I saw the happiness coming from their smiling faces, their shared family love. Adoration radiated life between those four ponies, and my hunger began crying out in need. It needed to be apart of that family, it wasn’t satisfied with absorbing emotions out of the air. I marched over to them, trying not to salivate like a dog after a treat.
“Want me to take your picture?” Calling out, the mother’s eyes lit up as she happily handed the camera to me.
“Would you? Thanks!” Mom took her spot next to Dad, reaching one leg over both of her kid’s shoulders.
Bringing the lens to my eyes, “Can everyone move a little closer?” They all squeezed together to fit in the center focal point of the frame. “Smile on three. One, two, three!” Click-ver, scritch, scritch, scritch.
“I’ll take one more, just to be sure.” Holding the camera at 90 degrees, “One, two, three.”
Oh sweet bliss. It tasted fabulous. I scoured Ponyvile for a quality camera of my own immediately after passing the disposable one back to the family so I can remember the moment I became addicted to the emotion of elation.
With these simple things binding me in place to Ponyville, I spent months watching every single event and catastrophe pass through the town. It was these great public shows of affection that opened my eyes to concepts that aren't even considered in a hive setting.
Mob mentality, as I learned, was the greatest and most powerful force a non-royal force of ponies could produce. Switching from anger, hate, disgust, only to be broken and turn over into pity, delight, or calm. Sadness is absent from most pony group settings, unless a time of mourning or sorrow comes. When a drone dies, it is simply one less voice our queen has to listen to - drones are hardly more than walking muscle. When a pony dies, their entire community, every pony whether they are expected to or not, hated or loved, they all offer a condolence to the immediate family around them. The concept I struggled to understand for the longest time was why the ponies could move on so quickly, or how when one changeling is absorbing sad emotions through close contact. For us we don't reflect back those same feelings. When a queen is sad, everyling is sad. It's a fact of life, when a queen is happy, the sentient are happy, soldiers, drones, nursemaids, everyling is happy. Everyling is given the same basic needs to live.
Three months gave me plenty of time to wonder more important things in my life such as 'when will the replacement arrive?' and 'what am I going to do for food?'
When I was forced to forage for even more supplies I realized feelings never remained mutual and their outside don't reflect their insides. Ponies were happy-ish, less than content. I'll walk by a dozen ponies all bright, smiling, and cheery, but the older mare in the middle with the blue eyes and short chopped pink mane and yellow coat. When I locked eyes with her, I ground my teeth together and bared some of the grief she didn't want the rest of Ponyville to know about. I suppose that was my first lesson in empathy - caring about somepony else. I didn't really think about it by pulling a piece, a thread of her emotion and bringing it in. I winced and coughed, trying to keep the freezing emotions down rather than spewing them across the ground and all but exposing myself as a changeling. The bitter and overbearing taste of extracted peppermint leaf was crawling across the tongue, down the throat, and chilling my stomach like suddenly waking up in the middle of hibernation for winter.
Moving past her, I silently wished her well for my own reasons. I was feeling her mood tip back towards somber, with a few rays of sunlight breaking through the dark cloud over her head.
I'll admit that contact helped by going around town, and absorbing ambient emotions, but I was lacking the basic necessities to live. I hardly knew what starving was until a gnawing pang in the pit of my stomach refused to go away.
A pegasus fell asleep while flying today, a brown mare with orange hair and white iced tips on her feathers. Watching from my living room window through the viewfinder of my new camera, her head dipped and rolled with the rest of her body as she fought exhaustion. Wings beating out of sync, perhaps she was gliding down and ran out of energy, I speculated. Picking up my camera, and stepping into the front yard, her last ditch attempt to get closer to the jutt her wings out to their fullest length, trying to lock the muscles into place with her head nodding and dropping. Her body followed quickly in suit as she gained momentum.
Pony society places high value on helping others in their time of need, even if you were to fail in your efforts. I lulled her to sleep myself, I only wish at the time I fought my instincts that were in control and forced me to not even feel the flutter of my heart as she collided with the ground. No spiral to slow her descent, no trees, bushes, or sources of water to cushion her fall, only grass, dirt, and rocks.
What was I supposed to do or feel? Pity? Where I come from, it's a sign of disrespect to those who receive it, for they themselves could not pull themselves up. Sorrow? Changelings...we feel emotions and we don't. We know how it effects us, but we don't know what it means. Like reading a book in a foreign language, at best you might pick out familiar words, but depth of understanding is lost on us, it was lost on me.
Instead, I only observed her broken body and blood coming from the wounds where bits of bone were poking out through the skin. Her eyes were blood red, as I'm sure of it that the time that the blood vessels in her eyes popped.
And of course, the unspoken word to collect love and energy for the hive. She would die by the end of the day if I drained her love and energy, I even gauged that the collective experience of all her emotions would sustain me for three weeks. I was only a scout, not a full blown infiltrator or harvester yet, I figured.
I observed that she was going to die, and in the event that she was found later, there would be a coming of sorrow from the ponies regardless if I left her or took the body. The latter scenario of course is always the more difficult path that thousands of changelings chose and will continue to chose before and after I’ve left Ponyville.
There’s a thought process ponies go through when they can't find their missing mate. There are three presumptions of what happened in most cases. They ran away themselves, they were kidnapped by a pony, and finally, kidnapped by a changeling. Naturally this type of prejudice happens in towns with hardly any diversity, a fact worth loathing, I know. It's only then are we mentioned. In fact, most ponies refuse to think that their pony neighbor can do no harm! I was conversing the day before with a fine gentlestallion, expressing concern that his wife had yet to return from a day trip to Canterlot, and a interloper who wasn’t part of our conversation in any way had the gall to slide in the comment 'or changelings got him!' Part of me wanted to slap the colt for intruding on us like that - I was enjoying nice radiating waves of concern and sympathy for the stallion’s wife. Soaking in emotion that was freely given to any pony walking by on that particular day. My head was filled with the warmth of a summer daze. Everything seemed brighter, and I was nodding thoughtfully along. The sympathy felt cool as an ocean breeze, and I couldn’t help but wonder if they met or wed on a beach somewhere. Here this stallion was, reliving in the back of his mind one of the most emotionally touching day’s of his life because his wife was late. Then the little twerp’s comment turned the impressionable beast into a tombstone.
I found the whole ordeal insulting, the way he clammed up. The colt's lackadaisical smirk could told me that he didn't even know what a changeling was, let alone our tactics. Regardless, I let my imagination play out a scene of myself wringing the colt’s neck, and then kicking him into the dirt for good measure.
In my defense…well, I was currently moving a unconscious pegasus’s body partially on my back, while wrapping the rest of her up in my magic. My plan involved sticking her in a pod to wait and see what happens, so maybe the name drop on changelings wasn’t completely unbiased…
She crashed less than a mile from my house, skirting the western edges of the Ponyville between the dips in the rolling hills of suburban and rural neighborhoods. Each house with tall windows and a great view of the valley below or facing Canterlot. Nopony seemed to be home or interested to look outside. If it she decided to leave a little later, earlier, or any other day for her unknown destination, somepony other than myself would’ve seen the crash.
After reaching her body, I took a quick glance to see if any pony was around and was satisfied with the empty streets - leaning down to her neck and biting through the first layer of skin, she thrashed and moaned, but it only took twelve seconds for her body to fall completely limp to changeling venom. Carrying her back left my insides empty and cold. I couldn’t even muster up the courage to speak to a pony by myself, and become part of their life. So here I am, picking over the rest like a vulture.
In the late afternoon, I was truly exposed in my actions, yet no pony was in sight. There was a chilling silence that enveloped the streets I walked through, as if my evil actions were killing off the bright and happy sounds of winds calmly blowing across the hills of Ponyville, and the good-neighbor attitude of everyone here.
I carried my tripod and camera in my teeth, and split the weight the pegasus between my back and magic. I was focusing more energy and mental strain with using my magic to keep all her bones and gooey bits from moving at all while calmly moving through the quiet streets of town, as if nothing were out of the ordinary. Checking both ways as I crossed the street, I peered for anypony coming or going. Taking steps across the dirt road and onto the curb. I strode the length of my white painted, knee-high fence, to the path leading up to the front door. I set the Pegasus down on the porch for a moment as I caught my breath, and nearly dropped my camera equipment to the ground as I tried to search for my key. A small gurgle came through her lips, a struggled, painful breathing that was getting worse. I kicked the door open and picked the Pegasus up again, making sure she didn’t hit her lopsided and frayed wings against the door frame. When she was clear, I took her to the basement door, doing the same, and brought her downstairs. The candles I used down there were all dark, after relighting two of them near the first of three pods, the Pegasus was finally set onto her stomach.
fun part, the emotions. Whatever her name was, where ever she was going, I could feel the pain crying out in her heart of wanting to live. I stoked that desire with just a brush of magic, and felt the response immediately. On command, I digested the emotion and used it to fill the pod with green resin mucus. The swirl of emotions within me gave a calming high. Digesting them further would give me enough energ to live for weeks. Instead, I let the drool fill my pony’s pod. Adding my own changeling magic to the Pegasus’ emotions. When I was finished, she was completely submerged in her own burning will-to-live and membrane bubble to hold her still. Positive emotions are directly related to the recovery of any creature, sentient and non-sentient. If they think they can survive, then they will. That’s why some ponies when stranded in the middle of the desert, surrounded by a hive of scorpio scorpions keep believing until well beyond the moment they can successfully communicate their disbelief.
Podded ponies become very detached from their bodies, changelings feel it from a very early moment on when part of a hive. Communicating with their mother, and their queen, and the changeling that would be their nursemaid, all before ever drawing their first breath. For ponies, they let the pods breathe for them, a pony without the ability to use their lungs or maintain a steady heartbeat could be lulled into a stasis for weeks.
As she was right now, I thought, she could barely survive. In fact, she’s even closer to death now than before I used venom on her. Her heart rate was so faint and distant, it’s like the heart itself needed to remind itself after every beat that it needed to push and pull again, and that it was still alive. As I was right now, the holes in my body were much more prominent, so much so that I could pass the tip of one hoof through my other leg.
Now came the painful part, not for me, but for her. Well, it’s kind of painful for me, my legs were sore after stretching and resetting the bones in the Pegasus’ limbs. I noticed within minutes of fitting the shin and ankle bones into place, the swelling in her legs went down. I gently rotated her wing outwards, pushing down through the humerus with one leg and pressing into her shoulder blade with the other. I popped the wing back into her socket. I went up and down her body, every square inch, trying to reposition her so I could snap fractures into place.
The last portion was her neck, and face. Marred, unrecognizable, would her parents recognize her? Some part of me was scared that she would never walk again, or fly, open her eyes, or know what happened to her. I wanted to tell her, and let her understand, I wanted to see her eyes open with lively grace and make sure she knew that what happened. The one thing I didn’t want to see were eyes that didn’t have any life, or to hear her voice with an intelligence that couldn’t understand.
My concern went to her as I stepped away. This was a slow process, bringing something on the verge of death back to life. It takes time, energy, to reignite a living creature’s desire to live. Resin came from digesting emotions that I used through my hooves for building pods or reinforcing structures and roofs. My other options were spitting it back out to fill her pod, with a lot more mucus involved, or storing it in a jar for later.
Resin hardening over her chocolate brown fur and orange hair like a membrane turned everything darker shades of green. More emotions, more energy would speed the healing process, all I needed was a non-diminishing source, two actually. One for her, and one for me...hers and his.
I was full for a moment, so utterly full with her happiness and desperation reaching out for a new future. It tasted like hope, every gland was salivating with its warm tingling sensation in the pit of your heart. Heat was spreading across my chest like a smooth sipping hard alcohol. As I returned upstairs, my disguise burned away. Breathing deeply my head was spinning from exhaustion. trying to stop the room from spinning. In out, another breath, in out.
I must’ve laid there for twenty minutes, eyes glazing over, all my senses telling me different things until I unconsciously filtered all but one noise out. I could no longer hear the ticking of my clock from the kitchen wall, or even register the thoughts that were scattered and random, coursing through my brain. I could hear my own heart beat when it was higher, but now, I couldn’t even tell if my own heart was beating. Maybe I died right there, and didn’t want to hear, see, talk, or feel anything or anyone. The last sound I heard, the one that grew from beneath the floorboards. A slow, steady lub-dub. Internally, I smiled, the venom was wearing off and she was successfully podded.