Starlight Glimmer was looking at me intently, while Blaze finally gave herself a moment to relax.
There was a green flash to my right side, and Breeze took a step forward to Starlight. "You already know what we are, and our sister Pearl told me something about you ponies; is it true you know one of the princesses?"
"Of course! Twilight Sparkle is my friend! She's been my friend even since before she became a princess, actually," Pinkie Pie answered before Starlight Glimmer could. "I can remember the first day I saw her in Ponyville. It was the day of the summer sun celebration, and I was walking down the street to visit my good friend Colgate, who lives in the house next to my good friend..."
"Pinkie, I don't think we need to know all that," I interrupted, letting my own guise drop after Breeze's example.
Two more flashes of green passed before my eyes as Blaze and Oval changed back to their regular looks, and I saw Starlight's eyes move as she looked at each of us in turn.
"Wow, you... look really similar," she realized. "How do you keep each other apart?"
"That's what I've been wondering ever since I hatched," I mumbled quietly to myself.
"Oh, that's easy; Oval is the only one wearing pants," Blaze chuckled.
"Is that his name?" Starlight wondered, while watching as Oval worked to get out of her clothes. They were ill-fitting now her body's size had changed considerably, and would only get in the way.
"It's a joke at my expense," Oval explained. "The five of us here are all female. I just pose as stallions more often than not."
"I... see," Starlight muttered, her brain clearly trying to grasp at how that worked exactly.
I looked sideways at Pinkie Pie, who was just looking at us all with a big grin. "You're not at all fazed by having us around, are you Pinkie?"
"Why would I be?" Pinkie asked back, turning her attention on me.
"I... I don't know? I mean, I guess I heard enough stories so far that ponies will freak out about us," I stammered. "I just expected more of a shock, is all."
"You Pinkie promised you were friendly, silly," Pinkie returned merrily. "That makes us as good as best friends."
"Don't," Blaze interjected, "trust the rest of our family with that. They won't hold themselves to such a promise."
"Oh, but you can't break a Pinkie promise," I explained quickly to Blaze. "Trust me; this pink pony is much more dangerous than she looks."
Blaze raised an eyebrow at that as if she could not see it, and I did not blame her at all; she did not know Pinkie Pie as well as I had over the years of watching the show back on Earth.
That innocence could turn on you in a second if you tried to harm her friends or broke a promise with her.
"The stories I have heard about you have not painted the best picture," Starlight spoke up, while sitting herself down next to the statuefied Moonshine. "Scores of Changelings supposedly swarmed Canterlot a few years back, supposedly taking Celestia herself hostage, and supposedly only being thrown back out thanks to the efforts of Twilight Sparkle. If I didn't know the princess myself, I would not have believed any of it."
"Oh, it was true; I was there!" Pinkie Pie chimed in.
"So were we," Oval sighed, dropping down on the floor near to Starlight Glimmer. "I mostly just stood on the sidelines, but Blaze fought for our side. I'm not that good of a fighter myself."
I realized there was the opportunity for the group as a whole to form a circle to talk in, and walked up past Blaze and Breeze to sit down on Oval's left side, somewhat opposite to the petrified Moonshine.
Breeze flopped down as well, and Pinkie hopped on over to sit to the right of Moonshine, leaving the spot between her and Breeze open for Blaze.
Blaze had turned to face us, but stared through the circle at Starlight. "We could have won that," she told Starlight. "We could have had Equestria in our grasp. Canterlot had fallen. We were victorious before that sudden blast of magic sent us flying."
"It was a powerful spell," Breeze agreed. "I've never felt another power quite like it, before or since."
Blaze walked over and sat down in the gap left for her. "I blame our Queen's hotheadedness. We could have lived among them openly if only she had struck a deal with the ponies after having taken their capital. Brokered peace. Instead she wanted full domination."
Starlight winced and her ears drooped a bit. "Power is a terrible thing. It can sway you to take actions you know may be wrong, but they feel so good when you do it. Like the actions themselves fill a void left by past hurt."
"It never lasts, does it?" Oval suggested, straightening her right foreleg out in front of her. "Look at us, miss pony; Our holes are there because we need to feed on love. Pony love. I don't get why, but it's our fate. We start off as whole as you or Pearl here, but the hunger grows and the holes start to dig through our bodies. They never fill again after. No matter how much we feed."
Starlight looked mildly perturbed at the very idea of it, and I looked down at my own forelegs. They were still smooth and hole-less. I had not felt the hunger yet, even if they had warned me I would start to feel it by now.
Starlight looked grim. "That explains why you roam among us."
"There is no other source for the love we need to survive," Breeze spoke up. "We've tried to find other ways to get our fill, but only ponies share their love in the quantities to sustain us without having to drain them of it."
"Moonshine has been studying at some magic academy to figure out if there is a pony magic which can help us with this," Oval brought up, using her extended foreleg to motion toward the silent observer.
"I think she's mad at me because Matron forced her to teach me, and I'm not the fastest at understanding this stuff," I sighed.
"Or because you're the one who figured out how to make a pearl out of our resin," Breeze commented dryly, moving her backpack off of her back and taking the pearl out. She levitated it to the center of the circle for all to see. "I don't think anyone has ever spun a gemstone like this before."
I looked over at the perfectly smooth, perfectly rounded, slightly translucent green marble hanging in mid-air between us and smirked at it.
"To be fair; I still don't know what I did exactly," I revealed.
"It's pretty," Pinkie Pie breathed out in admiration.
"Can you place it on the floor, er... whoever you are?" Starlight wondered.
"I'm Breeze," Breeze chuckled, laying the gemstone down on the floor as asked. "Blaze is to my left, and Pearl and Oval respectively are to my right."
"If we ever meet again after today, maybe you can wear nametags?" Starlight suggested, but focused on the pearl on the ground after. "You say one of you made this out of a resin?"
Blaze spat a ball of hard resin at the floor near her, which looked nothing like the perfectly round pearl. The blob was glinting with wetness, and had sagged in a little to form a half-round bulb on the floor, even as it was hardening quickly. The only thing the two had in common was their transparency and green colour.
Starlight looked at it with some disgust, but Blaze just stared back at her.
"This is normal for us. We built half our home with this resin," she explained. "You ponies don't even try to learn about us."
Oval closed her eyes with a sigh. "We're just old mare's tales, Blaze. There is so much going on in pony society that it's easier to just go 'Well, Canterlot was almost invaded by Changelings' and then leave the details to the ones in charge."
Starlight looked down at the floor, shaking her head. "Even so, we have long memories. Me and my friend Trixie are both still being looked at funny if we walk down the street."
"Then you know what we're fighting against," Breeze stated. "We're some of the good ones in our family, but we don't stand a chance going to a place like Manehattan or Canterlot without appearing as somepony else. We would be chased out of town or worse."
"This is more than just a friendship problem, Pinkie," Starlight offered up to her pink companion, who looked almost uncharacteristically thoughtful.
"Yeah, we'd need a very big party to fix this," she agreed. "There's not nearly enough sprinkles in town to make that many cakes."
"That's not what I meant," Starlight sighed, shaking her head. "We can, at most, help out with the issue existing between you four and the statue here. But we can't exactly fix the way Changelings are treated. You're going to need to fix that yourselves, and it will take a lot of time."
"We don't have time," Oval sighed out, drooping her head down until it rested on the floor. "Our Queen may be planning to ruin everything yet again and there's nothing we can do to stop it."
Starlight Glimmer perked up at that. "Come again?"
"There are rumours among our family that our Queen Chrysalis is preparing to invade Equestria again," Breeze spoke up, while Blaze gave Oval one of her trademarked deathglares. "None of us want to have a war with Equestria; we have been infiltrating pony society and have productive lives there. But if our Queen commands us to, we won't have a choice."
Pinkie gasped in shock. "That... that... meanie-meanie face!"
"Thanks to Oval spouting the news, we are going to have no choice in how to deal with you two ponies either," Blaze half-hissed in frustration. "We can't let this word spread through the pony lands. You're going to have to come with us back to the hive."
Faces fell as they realized the truth in Blaze's words.
Starlight Glimmer was clearly outmatched by the five Changelings sitting near her, even if one was a statue right now. If we wanted to overpower her, we could easily do so.
Oval realized how bad she ruined things just now by speaking up, and was staring at the ground in front of her. Her few words had turned the tables on the whole situation.
Breeze was trying to figure out a way to get us all out of it without the whole thing leading into yet another fight, her eyes flitting between us.
Blaze was ready to fight already. It had been clear as day to her what had to be done as soon as Oval had finished her sentence.
The only ones who looked unperturbed by the situation were Moonshine, who was still stuck in her shocked expression thanks to being petrified by Starlight earlier, and Pinkie Pie.
The pink Earthpony sat with a big grin growing on her face, and I wondered just how her brain worked when she spoke up in a merry tone; "You know what? That actually sounds like fun!"