Breeze was dunked under another two times before Blaze finally let go of her, and ended up hanging her forehooves over the edge of the bath while gasping for air for a few minutes after while the rest of us calmly stood in the warm water, letting it pull into our bodies.
I closed my eyes in this calm moment, trying to pull my guise up again and change my appearance back to that of the Earthpony I had been before I was unceremoniously shoved into the water.
"You missed your entire left lower leg and a sizeable spot up along your left hip and across the side of your barrel there," Oval listed in a fatherly tone of voice, and I looked down my left side at the patch of dark grey on my otherwise light grey coat.
Moving my weight to my right lower leg, I shook my left leg out while focusing on getting it changed as well, and the familiar green flash of my Changeling magic passed over it. Even if it was muted somewhat by the water surrounding it.
Satisfied that that problem had been taken care of, I looked back up at Oval with a grin. "Thanks dad. Did I miss anything else you can see?"
"Forgot your cutiemark on your right side," Blaze offered from my right side.
"Ah, yeah, it's missing from the left as well," Oval realized.
"This is why I go for foals; don't need one of those marks," Breeze suggested weakly, daring to turn halfway around so only her left foreleg was still draped over the edge of the bath.
I pushed the mental image of a brown conch and shiny pearl down to my hips and two small flashes of green from below the water's surface let me know my transformative magic had done its job. Even so, I decided to make a slow, full turn for my parents.
"Did I do good now?" I asked, getting a face full of water from Blaze's direction in return.
"You did fine, kid," she threw my way in mock annoyance.
"I'm just asking since you keep reminding me I'm new at this," I threw back. "Your constant worried looks and questions before we got here were more bothersome than having to keep up my guise, you know?"
"No, you look fine," Oval suggested. "I was more worried about your weird glances at those other ponies than anything, earlier. You were drawing attention to yourself by staring at them."
"Blaze was the one who was worried whether you could keep your appearance in check," Breeze revealed. "I was just the messenger."
"The tiny messenger who kept poking her horn into my chin while nuzzling at my chest," I remarked idly. "No, apart from the shock of being thrown into the water earlier, I'm actually fairly comfortable in this guise. I could hold it for a long time if I need to."
"Well, that's good to hear at least," Blaze sighed with some relief, but her face darkened considerably. "Which means at least one Hatchling is out of danger."
I perked up. "Out of danger?"
Oval let himself dip lower into the water until he had half his head down in it, leaving just his nostrils, eyes, and ears above the water.
Blaze gave a thoughtful nod and folded her forelegs over one another just at the break of the water's surface. "Yes, if the rumours I heard earlier today are true, the rest of your batch and all the others before or since are not as lucky."
"Get to the point already, Blazey," Breeze whined like the impatient filly she was.
"From what I've been told, the Hatchlings are all taken to chambers deep within the outpost after we finish training them," Blaze spoke darkly, closing her eyes. "Only a few Drones have seen these chambers, and only from the outside. There are Guards stationed in every tunnel leading up to them, at every entrance to them, and they're strictly off-limits unless by special exception."
I heard the sound of bubbles coming from my left side and turned to realize Oval had sank down deeper and was blowing bubbles out of his nostrils from where he hid under the surface. I took a breath and stuck my head down underwater to peer at him, but the angry look in his eyes made me stumble sideways away from him as I pulled my head back up out of the water again.
"Dad's scarier than you right now, mom," I breathed out, and received a deathglare from Blaze as my reward.
"Oval has a strong sense of justice," Breeze muttered from where she was still hanging off the edge of the bath by a single foreleg, her own face spelling doom and gloom as well.
"Okay, so do we know what happens in those rooms, mom?" I asked, trying to focus on the least angry-looking one right now which, for the first time since I met them, was Blaze.
"Only more rumours, Pearl," Blaze offered back with a light shake of her head. "From what I heard it's just the guards in charge there. The matrons can't get near it, none of us drones have been allowed in, and the only reason we know of these rooms in the first place is because one of our brothers was chatty with a Hatchling. He just walked along with them as they were led out of the last training room and was only stopped when a guard noticed him at the entrance to the chamber he was about to enter."
Oval's head appeared above the water's surface and he took in a breath of air, then moved a hoof to wipe the water from his eyes.
"This on top of the rumours about a war brewing," Oval stated darkly, more to himself than anything.
"That's why I blew my top in the common room," Blaze sighed. "This is sounding like a worse plan than the failed invasion of Canterlot."
"You're never going to let that one go, are you?" I suggested calmly, knowing full well what happened thanks to the show's episodes.
"If this plays out as the rumours suggest, we're going to have an all-out war with the pony kingdoms," Blaze stated grimly. "We were just a nuisance before, only mentioned in bedtime stories to get foals to behave."
Oval grimaced. "They would start hunting us down if we prove to be too great a threat. It won't end until we're contained."
"Like the night's princess before us," Breeze offered into the conversation, and I could hear the fear in her voice.
"I highly doubt we'd all get banished to the moon," I told her, swimming awkwardly toward her and giving her a soft nose boop.
Even knowing she was probably older than me did not matter; she looked like a filly and I was happy to treat her as my little sister for as long as it lasted.
"No, but the consequences will be dire, whatever they may be," Oval grumbled in his low voice. "We have been working for years now to try and get us put in a better light in the pony kingdoms, as I explained to Pearl before."
There was a thoughtful hum from the other two at that.
"This kind of action could not only throw our progress back to start, but could make it far worse. Far, far worse," Oval continued to spell doom and gloom for us all.
"There's not really anything the four of us can do about it, now is there?" I quipped, looking from one to the other. "I've seen hundreds of Changelings in the outpost's common room. If the Queen tells us to, we're just going to do what she says because all the rest will do it too, right?"
"It's a little more complicated than just peer pressure," Breeze corrected me, at which point Oval decided to dunk himself under water again.
"Well, I'm not getting why we're supposed to do whatever Queen Chrysalis says, no matter how stupid we think it sounds," I threw back. "Can't we get the rest of the family to band together and put a stop to this? How many of them have families or worked their ways to the top of pony society? All that will be lost if we go to war, won't it?"
Blaze closed her eyes with a sigh and looked away from me. "There are ties you haven't felt yet. We can't just say no to our Queen."
"Yet another thing I haven't felt yet," I listed. "Just like that emptiness I still have to experience. If the other Hatchlings are anything like me; they haven't felt that emptiness yet either. They don't feel any connection to Chrysalis either."
"But we do," Breeze offered up. She let go of the edge of the bath and swam over to me with her forehooves reaching out toward me. "Let me hold onto you for a bit, Pearl?"
I let her wrap her forelegs around my neck, and she settled against my back, her muzzle poking out over my left shoulder.
"Thanks, big sis, I was getting a lame leg from hanging on the wood panels," she giggled softly. "Could you walk around a bit? I like how the water flows through my coat."
I shrugged idly, taking a few careful steps around the bath with her smaller body hanging off me. "It's fine, but I still don't get why we can't make a stand against this. It seems obvious to me that it's a bad thing. Our siblings will agree, right?"
"You're so young," the little filly on my back sighed out. "We three had a similar conversation about the Canterlot attack."
"Failed invasion," Blaze and I said together, and I grinned at her while she narrowed her eyes at me.
"There was a whole group of us trying to get Queen Chrysalis to change her mind about it. It didn't last long," Breeze continued.
I glanced back over my shoulder at her. "It sounds like there's a story there."
"Keep walking and I'll tell you about it," Breeze suggested.