I woke up to a throbbing headache. My vision was blurred but after a short bit I recovered and could see my surroundings. Before I could figure out where I was, three pony-like bug creatures walked into the room.
“I told you guys he shouldn’t be tied up, just set on the bed! Ugh, and now he’s awake.” By its voice it was a she, but I couldn’t be too sure. The two changelings on the other side of her walked behind me and untied me, then bolted back to the other side of the room and hid behind the first creature.
“I’m sorry about that. I told them not to tie you up like a prisoner, we just wanted to talk and we knew once you saw what we were, you would run away as fast as you could. I want to let you know why you’re here. Our species is called changelings, and we feed off of emotions.” I started to speak but she cut me off. “No, we don’t want to eat yours. We also are freeminds, we don’t have a ruler. Changelings need to have a sort of mon or diarchy, we can’t survive without one for too long, and we can’t gather into too big of groups. Also, you need a large amount of changeling magic to be a ruler. We have come to ask you, because if you don’t we will all die out in a few weeks, maximum.” She looked at me, begging me to accept.
“So what does it mean to be king?” I asked.
“You will be linked into the hive mind, as the highest power. You will be able to talk to any changeling under your command at any point, and significantly influence us. You won’t be able to command drones like puppets, we do have a semblance of a mind, especially since we were freeminds for a long time. You will also be able to appoint higher ranks, like generals or overseers from drones, this does take a good amount of magic though. Your responsibilities will be keeping us fed, and keeping us secret.”
“Why do I have to keep you secret? If you feed off of emotions, why not just go around to others and feed off of their emotions?”
“Are you not intimidated by this at least a little? Also, changeling drone lifespans are short, about 20 years before we die off. A higher rank can survive for longer than that, generals and overseers at about 100, and purebred kings/queens can live for thousands. Back to what I was saying though, love is the best thing to feed on, although others will do in a pinch. We’ve been disguising ourselves for awhile now, so we’ve gotten relationships set up.”
“How can you disguise yourselves so well, you have holes in your legs and kinda look like alicorns.” Her response was to engulf herself in green flames, and turn into pinkie pie. “Oh.”
“You should be able to do this if you become king. Please, we’re begging you. We need a king to survive, we can reproduce on our own until someling makes a royal, it can happen. At that point, you would need to train the king or queen as an heir, but that’s it. Please.”
“Two more questions, how do you gather emotions?”
“Either feeding pods, or directly feeding.”
“And how many of you are there? How many minds would be linked to me?”
She hesitated for a moment. “This may seem like a lot, but it’s really not.”
“How many?”
“231.”
I stared at her in shock. “You want me to put 231 other brains in my head.”
“Well, more like 231 mouths next to your ears.”
“That’s still a ton!”
She sighed. “So I guess you’re not going to help us?”
I looked at her for a few second before speaking. “Is there any way I could try it with a small number?”
“Well, you could link with us.”
“How do I do that?” as a response, all three of the changelings walked around me, and stopped to form a triangle. They put their heads down and activated their horns.
“This is how.” she said. Magic flew through the air towards me, striking me in the chest. This happen two more times. Another burst of magic went from their hooves, connecting to the next and forming a circle around me. A sound like a bee buzzing started, and got louder with each passing second. When the noise got to be defining, I was blinded by a flash of white light. A few seconds later, I realised that I was kneeling on the floor with my hands in between my legs. I tried to stand up, and did successfully, but needed to use the wall for support.
I heard the voices then, three female voices in my head. “Hello?” I thought.
“It worked!” I recognised it as the changeling who had been talking to me earlier.
“Can you hear us.”
“Well of course he can!”
“It doesn’t matter what you think, I wanna hear it from him!”
“Im so happy to be part of a hive mind again, even if it is a small one.”
Three other voices were flying around in my head. “Woah, i’m new to this, can I block it out or channel it if I need to?” I asked mentally.
The three changelings turned to me and answered in sync. “Yeah, if you imagine what job, or just try to block everything out, you should be able to channel who can talk to you.”
I focused on the changeling who was speaking to me originally, three voices speaking in sync was just plain creepy to me. I didn’t get it on the first few tries, I managed to get the other changelings out of my head temporarily. It would take a few more hours before I could change easily, and way more time before I could channel 200 voices easily.
I started asking them questions, like what jobs are there. The information I got was that changelings were divided into a few groups. There were the soldiers, who guarded the hive. They made up about 25% of the changeling’s total numbers, so they had about 50 of them. Farmers made up about 25%, but here they were more like 35% because they couldn’t farm ponies. 100 of the changelings here were farmers, and they somehow supported the whole hive. The final 25% were scholars, the ones who helped plan out attacks, devise new strategies for defense, new adaptations for magic, and other things like that. The final amount was the miscellaneous; architects, smiths, and other changelings that didn’t fall into other categories. Turns out they had a tailor for the infiltrators. Who knew changelings were into fashion.
“So can I have some time to think about this, I really need to get back to zecora so she doesn’t freak out and start a search party. It wouldn’t go well if it looked like you kidnapped a unique species and forced it to be your king.” I said.
“Not really… the problem is to get you out, you would need to be awake, and see where we are positioned, or you would probably be found knocked out somewhere and they would question you about why you were sleeping on a hill.”
“I guess that’s right… still stinks I can’t go home though. What if I were to just fight my way out?”
“We would fight to our last breath, and so would every other changeling here.” she said in a flat voice, telling me she wasn’t trying to be intimidating, she was just telling me the truth.
“So I can’t fight my way out, not realistically. I’m in a room with no windows, so no escaping, and you won’t let me leave until I tell you whether I will be your king or not.”
“Yep.”
“One more question, would I have to live here?”
“No, but if you need a place to stay, then a room would be prepared in a few minutes for your use.”
I sighed and took a deep breath. “Give me five minutes please. I need to think, alone.”
They nodded and left the room. I played with the idea, if I took control, I would be saving lives, but at the risk of trouble down the road. For all I knew, they wanted me to be ‘king’ just so they would have an easier time capturing me and turning me into food. On the other hand, they were a huge source of magic which I could master, and they could help me get stuff like potion ingredients easier. When the changelings walked back in, I had an answer.
“Please tell us your answer, if you don’t within a few minutes, we can’t get you out of here without somepony seeing us.”
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath before saying, “i’ll do it. Under one condition though.”
They immediately had a reaction, their wings started flapping at a bazillion miles an hour and flew up into my face. They all mentally screamed “what is it?!” at me in excitement.
“You have to help me in return, I want to learn all of the magic you can use.”
They started laughing, “we were going to do that anyway, it’s hard to have a leader who can’t shapeshift. We’ll do the binding ritual tomorrow, it takes a good amount of time that we don’t have tonight. We’ll lead you out, conscious this time.” I nodded and stood up. They left the room and went into a strange hallway, made of black stone and a strange glowing green goo. I followed them up a steep slope to a hole in a mountain, and waved goodbye to them before heading back to the everfree to go home.