Under the watchful gaze of the three sisters, with Breeze standing close enough by that I felt her breath upon me, I focused on designing a pony guise in my head.
As I had learned from Oval and Breeze in the training room a few days ago, as well as the new information about how to 'see' an object in three-dimensions in my mind's eye from the magic training I had just today, I pictured the pony in my head from all directions.
Considering my name was now Pearl, I thought of a light grey, bordering on white coat. Mother of pearl would be hell to try and pull off, but maybe I would eventually learn how Celestia did that flowing mane thing if I stuck around for a couple of years. Light grey was the closest I could get to it.
In order to still give a nod to the resin which gave me that name, I pondered making my mane a green tone. For some reason Lyra Heartstrings came to mind, and I opted for the light aquamarine tone of her coat.
My mane's style was shifting as I pictured it, going through several short- and long- styles for a while, with my tail doing the same thing. I realized that it was my own subconsciousness planning ahead and tried to consciously affect it in order to find a style which matched the overal feeling I got when I thought of this guise.
I was going to be Breeze's older sibling while we were out there, with Blaze as our mother and Oval as our father, but none of them had taken a guise themselves yet. I suspected they were letting me come up with something since they were all far more experienced than me, to keep me from having to adapt to their looks.
This meant I was the deciding factor in what they were going to go for, excepting Oval's intent on getting herself a moustache.
Mares generally had longer hairstyles in the show than the stallions had, and I pondered the gender issue again. I had barely had time to get over the fact I was 'reborn' as a mare in this world, while having been male back home. The drive to learn things, get pushed on to the next room, and so forth, had not given me any time to stand still and think about it before I met Oval.
Oval softened the blow considerably by showing how she, a mare herself, took on stallion guises with considerable ease, and she had even joked about how I could take on a human guise as well if I trained enough on my mimicry.
My Changeling siblings all pretty much looking the same, whether they had been male or female, also helped a lot to stave off the angst that humans seemed to have around the whole gender issue.
Now that I actually had to pick a guise though, I was forced to deal with my feelings on the subject. Did I feel overly masculine? Had I ever? Or was I happy with my new role as a sister to the three Changelings near me?
The fact we were going to a spa pushed me over to aiming for a feminine pony guise; I had seen more episodes with mares visiting the spa than with stallions. I had those episodes to base my own responses on, whereas I had never visited such a place as a male human before in the past.
The mental image of my guise took on a definite female form as I made my decision, and I took another page from Lyra's book where it concerned the length of my mane; the hairs barely hanging down the top half of my barrel, just covering my guise's left shoulder.
I chuckled a bit to myself and realized Rainbow Dash's mane was just barely longer than that, but at least I did not have to deal with the long style that Fluttershy had on her. I could only imagine how much of a pain it was to have to comb that out every day.
Thinking of Rainbow Dash helped me to style the top of my mane, and I quickly decided against being a Unicorn. I just did not know enough about my magic to be able to levitate items around without accidentally exploding them, so my guise would be that of an Earthpony. It helped me to almost directly copy Rainbow's mane overhang from my memories of the show as an example.
I threw in a few highlights in my mane, using a lighter green-bordering on grey, and then pondered about my tail. Having just a mid-length mane, I would have to go for a mid-length tail as well. It just made sense to do so. A shorter tail would make me look lopsided, and I did not want to have to drag my tail around over the ground in case of a longer one.
I winced at the thought of having to be wary of doors with as long a tail as Fluttershy had.
I went through the list of ponies from the show, and realized quite a lot of them had a fairly common tail design. Trixie, Spitfire, Lyra, all had a style similar to Rainbow Dash; mid-length, a few hairs sticking out at odd angles, but generally the same design.
I put that kind of a tail on my own guise, added the highlights from the mane, and gave a slow nod to myself. It worked. I would not stand out too much in a crowd, but that was not the idea in the first place.
"Need some help, little sister?" Oval wondered softly, but Breeze immediately shushed her.
"She's thinking. Remember when Matron first taught us about guises?" Breeze whispered back. "Give her the time she needs."
"Blaze, our foal is telling me to shut up," Oval muttered, and I heard a soft thud. "Ow, damnit. Punch my other shoulder next time, will you? This one is getting sore."
I kept my eyes closed, and focused on the most difficult part of my pony guise; the cutiemark.
I ran through the designs from the show, the OCs I had made in the past, the OCs from others, and general clipart. This was the one thing that defined a pony in Equestria. It was the one thing they were supposedly good at and often fell in right with given name.
Pearl was the name I had been given, but the only thing I could think of that I was good at was sitting around asking questions and listening to my Changeling siblings explain about this world of theirs. I had done a lot of that these past days.
A thought came to me; what animal created pearls but certain kinds of shellfish? I recalled my time spent with family at the sea when young, and the shells I found on the beach. One specific one was clearly linked to the act of listening; the modest conch shell.
In a flash of ingenuity, I pictured the guise's cutiemark as a conch shell laying on its side, with a pearl resting in front of the opening and put that image on the pony's flank. It just worked. It made sense.
I sighed out as I realized this cutiemark deal really was not that difficult to figure out. After all, I had just done it in a matter of seconds; finishing my pony guise.
I rotated her in my mind's eye and scrutinized every little inch of her in an attempt to figure out if I forgot anything. I had set her up as a teenage mare, slightly shorter than an adult one, with a light grey coat, light aquamarine mane and tail, with some lighter green highlights set through them.
Her cutiemark was a brown conch laying on its side, with a shiny pearl in front of it.
I thought I was done, until I looked at the front of her; her eyes were just blank spots on her face. The pupils were yet to be filled in!
With my memories of the show, I knew that most background ponies' eye colour had some relation to their cutiemark, but there were rule-breaking ponies in the show as well. I tried the brown from the conch shell on my guise as pupils, but I just did not see it. It looked bad.
I tried a dark yellow instead, bordering on light-brown, and felt that worked better. To keep the link with her cutiemark, I led the lighter yellow tone to a darker brown in a few short steps, just like I had remembered from the show.
With my guise finally feeling finished, I took a deep breath and pushed it to my core, letting my magic overwrite my Changeling identity with my new one.
I felt the flow of my Changeling magic passing over me, and waited for the tingle to finish before I opened my eyes and turned my head to look back at me.
The expected light-grey colour of my flank, with the conch cutiemark, and the light aquamarine tail with lighter highlights came into my view, and I let out a sigh of contentment.
"I think I can hold this form," I mused, trying out flicking my tail a bit and watching it move through the air. It felt a little weird to have a more expressive tail now, but the feeling of the wind going through the collection of hairs was kinda nice.
I turned my head back to look at the rest, noticing the big grin on Breeze's face, the thoughtful look on Blaze's, and the curious one on Oval.
"Let me see your eyes?" Oval asked, taking a step closer and staring me right in the face. I blinked a bit while staring back at her fully blue Changeling eyes, until she smiled up. "Yeah, they're nice and round. Good job."
"Those are some good colours as well," Blaze remarked. "I have used silver and green in a few of my guises before."
"I like her cutiemark," Breeze decided. "We can keep calling her Pearl now."
"What's with the shell?" Oval wondered, moving past me to get a better look at my flank.
"Well," I started, "I thought about how pony cutiemarks are usually related to the thing they're good at, right? But I can't exactly say I'm good at anything right now; I mean, I stumbled through most of the training you guys gave me in my short stay here."
"You did fairly well on your guises," Oval commented.
"Yeah, but I can't exactly tell the ponies that, now can I?" I offered back. "So I thought about what else I did; and I listened a lot to what you all had to tell me. Not just during the training, but also about this world, our Changeling family, and how we all work together to keep the family going strong."
Blaze smiled up weakly. "It's a conch. You can hear the sea through them."
"Yeah," I agreed.
"I've been to the beach before, and have held these shells to my own ears in the past," Blaze explained.
"I've only seen them in stores," Oval stated. "Usually marketed as some sort of decorative item. My mare is the one who decorates the house; I just keep the money coming in."
Breeze giggled at that. "Yeah, you're not the best at decorations, mane design, or anything that requires artistic thought."
A green flash spread over Breeze until a young Unicorn filly stood in her place. She had opted for a light green coat herself, with a yellow mane and tail. Her flank was lacking a cutiemark, and her backpack was starting to slide off of her back thanks to the loose straps around her smaller form.
While Breeze redid the straps with her Unicorn magic, which made her horn glow yellow, a green flash moved over Blaze as well.
I looked over to see her having taken a silver coat for herself, with her mane a shamrock green, darker than my own. Her Unicorn horn peeked out from her overhanging mane, and it glowed a silver tone with her magic as she lifted a few of her dresses out of the suitcases again.
"I think I have just the outfit to complement this guise's colours," she mused in a soft motherly voice, turning away from us to focus on her dresses. As she turned, I noticed a picture of a beam of light aimed on an empty stage on her flank.
"Bah, mare clothes," Oval huffed in a low baritone.
I looked on over to see a sturdy Earthpony stallion to my right, his mane, tail, and bristly moustache a yellow tone with some grey streaks through them. His coat was a dark moss green, and there was a hammer hitting a nail on his flank.
I raised an eyebrow at Oval. "Not your thing, 'dad'?"
Oval rolled his brown eyes at me. "No, I'll just find some overalls and a pipe in the supplement storage room instead."
"No pipe," Blaze decided calmly while deciding between two outfits, and Oval stomped one of his forehooves down with a deep frown.
"Do you have to ride my tail about every little detail?!?" he decried! "I would have thought after... wait, how long are we supposedly married for?"
Little Breeze pointed her right forehoof at me. "Considering her supposed age, you should have been married for at least fifteen years."
"Round it up to twenty," Blaze stated, deciding on a relatively simple summer dress and moving to pull it over her head.
"Shouldn't we be nicer to one another after twenty years of marriage?" Oval wondered. "I mean, I already have grey hairs in my mane; You don't have to push me into my grave."
I shook my head at it all. "I think this is going to be an interesting outing, if you two keep this up."
Breeze moved to stand on my left side and leaned into me, her smaller form allowing her to nuzzle her head at my chest. Her small horn bumped into my chin a bit at her nuzzling, but it was not a bother to me.
"Don't worry, big sis," Breeze chuckled. "They'll settle into their roles before long. Just roll with it."
"I might squash you if I roll with it right now," I muttered down at her, giving a slight nudge sideways, and received a merry laughter in return.