I was carried off through the tunnel behind the stage, still completely out of it. My vision was blurred, my mouth felt dry, and I had no idea what was going on around me. Even as I was set down in a much smaller room, I was unable to do much else but lay there.
A pink shape moved up to me and I felt her hoof stroke gently over the top of my head, from a spot on the right of the base of my horn to down in my neck. She repeated this a few times before a grey shape placed a bowl in front of my face with green liquid in it.
"Drink, Pearl," Pinkie Pie's voice suggested, and she moved my head a bit with her forehooves to put my snout practically in the resin.
I stuck my tongue out into the green resin, and lapped it up as good as I could. For some reason I felt compelled to do all that was asked of me. I was entirely open to suggestion. Pinkie said drink, so I drank.
The resin washed through my dry mouth and into my throat, and I swallowed it even while I was starting to feel dizzy and nauseated. The feeling slowly but surely subsided as I drank, and I slowly managed to get more control of my own movements as I emptied the bowl.
It was taken from me, and a new full one was put in its place. Pinkie did not have to tell me to drink from it; I felt famished! I licked it clean before sitting up, and realized I was actually feeling pretty darn good right now.
The dry mouth, blurred vision, dizziness, even the fog in my head had all gone! Looking around, I realized we were in a fairly small room considering the contents; a throne set in the center on an elevation with some stairs leading up to it. More lamps with glow worms were set all around the walls, but there was barely enough space between the throne and the walls for three of us to stand.
It gave the impression as if the room had a throne put in it 'because any outpost our Queen may visit needs a throne room, no matter how small'. There was no other use for the room beyond that.
I must have had a pretty dumb look on my face, because as I looked over to my right and my eyes met Pinkie's blue ones, she giggled and gave me a hug. "Oh, you scared me there, silly."
"It's the pheromones, she said," Starlight Glimmer offered up, sitting a little farther away from me, near to the throne on which Queen Chrysalis had sat herself down.
The Queen grinned in my direction and gave a slow nod. "Yes, my pheromones do have that effect on my children."
"Even when they weren't yours to begin with?" Starlight Glimmer asked directly. "Pearl told me she was from a different world originally."
Chrysalis narrowed her eyes at the Unicorn. "What else has she told you? Is she the reason for you ponyfolk to come here?"
I hugged myself to Pinkie Pie who showed no signs of wanting to let go, and shook my head. "Not just me, my Queen."
I saw the anger flare up in Chrysalis' green eyes. "You should not have even been able to get in contact with the outside. Who helped you?"
"Don't blame them," Starlight Glimmer stated. "there are a lot of your Changelings who worry about their queen. From what I've heard; they have every reason to."
"What does a pony know about me or my children?" the Queen hissed, turning her attention back to Starlight. "All you do is hoard all your love and shun us. You could share it freely with us, but you instead make up stories about how bad we are, how much we should be avoided."
"No we don't," Pinkie Pie decided, finally breaking away from me. I let my forelegs fall down so I could sit with my forehooves placed on the ground in front of me.
Pinkie walked up to the throne and looked up at Chrysalis with a troubled look. "You know what I do back home? I go about welcoming everypony new who comes to my town. I welcome them and try to be their friend. I have friends all over Equestria, and even among your Changelings here."
Chrysalis snorted at that and frowned at the Earthpony before her. "You're kidding, right?"
"Oh, no, she's genuine," I spoke up, walking over to the left of Pinkie Pie and giving the Earthpony a soft nuzzle. "She was my first feed, actually. She gives her love freely to any who are friendly to her."
"It was interesting to see how Pearl's face pulled into this look of pure bliss," Starlight Glimmer chuckled weakly. "I had never seen a Changeling before today, or seen how you feed on others. I expected something more gruesome."
"You are not kidding?" Chrysalis wondered, trying to wrap her head around the concept.
I let myself sink through my forelegs, and bowed my head toward Chrysalis. "My Queen, you are more magnificent and beautiful than I had ever depicted you even in my wildest dreams and fantasies. We know about you in my world, and I had never once thought I would meet you, let alone be one of your Hatchlings."
"You are no longer a Hatchling, considering you have fed," Chrysalis decided. "I had intended to have you share that experience with the others down in the chambers."
"You have been starving them, Queen Chrysalis," Starlight Glimmer mentioned, with no small amount of disgust to her voice. "Please let us come to a solution that will benefit both our races?"
"How many ponies know of my plans, I wonder? There are two of you here, and my daughter tells me there are other children of mine who feel like her," Chrysalis pointed out, licking her tongue around her lips. "Don't tell me I am going to be facing off against all the armies of Equestria?"
"Would saying that you are stop you from invading our lands, just long enough for me to try and help you understand we are not your enemy?" Starlight asked.
I closed my eyes and let myself drop down to the ground fully. "She can use her pheromones to get any information out of me, Starlight. I can't fight those. And I know now what my sisters meant when they said they could not fight our Queen even as they thought the Canterlot invasion was a bad idea."
"Hmmmwahaha..." Chrysalis laughed. "You are not wrong, my child."
Pinkie Pie stomped her left hoof on the ground. "But you are! Doing these things is totally wrong! You could be friends with everypony if you wanted to be!"
"Bah, you say that like it's an easy thing," Chrysalis snorted.
"No," Starlight commented. "No, it's not an easy thing. Celestia knows I've been fighting to undo the bad things I've done, get around the stares of everypony who knows me, and I've tried to run away from my friends in the past. It's not an easy thing at all to make friends when you're thought of as bad as you or I, Chrysalis."
"Hmm? What can you have done that comes even close to my legacy?" my Queen huffed. "What can a pony have done?"
"Besides enslaving an entire town, or traveling back through time to destroy this world because I let my fears get the better of me?" Starlight Glimmer spoke, looking tired as she peered up at Chrysalis. "You don't know how dark we ponies can be, Queen Chrysalis. Our own Princess of the Night was banished to the moon for a thousand years because she tried to cast eternal night upon us. Honestly, your Changelings are not even a match to that."
Chrysalis looked taken aback by this news, shaking her head in defiance of the fact. "No, there's... No, I'm being... I don't believe you."
I glanced up at her. "My Queen, she's speaking the truth; I have seen these things in my world, and in my short stay here. There are far worse things out there which the ponies are barely even aware of existing. And there is plenty of room for your family to move among them in peace."
Chrysalis' green eyes stared at me as if to find some hint that I was lying to her. I looked back in them with nothing but the genuine hope she would see reason.
"It will never work," Chrysalis sighed. "These ponies will not accept us, my child. Can't you see they are only using you to stave off our invasion of their lands?"
"Actually, I came here because the map said there was a friendship problem here," Pinkie Pie told her, then took a bite off a cupcake she had conjured up out of nowhere. "I meanf, I didnf efen kno off an infaffion."
"Where..." Chrysalis started, but I shook my head at her.
"Don't ask, my Queen. There are numerous theories about her in my world, but it's better to just accept Pinkie Pie for who she is," I sighed, pushing up from the ground again. "May I make a suggestion?"
Chrysalis shook off the antics of Pinkie Pie, then looked at me directly. "Go ahead. It can't be any stranger than this situation has already been so far."
"Stave off the invasion. Let my siblings join the family in the common room so they can learn to feed from the resin veins," I started, and my Queen narrowed her eyes at me. "Please hear me out; it gives them a chance to learn from the others how to live among the ponies without being detected, to leech off their love in smaller doses. And, in the meantime, you should go with Starlight Glimmer and Pinkie Pie, back to Ponyville."
My Queen huffed and stood up on her throne. "Nonsense! Me, following these ponies to their homestead? I would be cast in irons and thrown in the darkest dungeons! Why, pray tell, would I give them that chance?"
"Because they won't do that," I suggested, and focused on my earlier Earthpony guise. The green flash of our magic washed over me, and I stood facing my Queen as a grey Earthpony next to the pink Pinkie Pie. "Because they will take you at face value. And they will share their love with you without question. If I learned anything about this world in my short stay here, my Queen; these ponies are the real deal."
Chrysalis eyed me with a look of disgust, but at least she allowed herself to sit down again. "Did you have to change into one of them just to tell me that?"
I gave a soft nod up. "Yes, my Queen. Because I learned from my sisters how to take on a guise a few days ago. I snapped my ankle during a fight and stayed in the common room for a few days. There are more Changeling siblings of mine there than I could count, but all of them share the same worry; if you launch an attack on Equestria, their lives will end."
"I spoke with one of your children who has been living as a scribe in Canterlot. I have been to Canterlot's archives myself, and I would have never thought a Changeling was among the ponies working there," Starlight Glimmer offered up. "She's been studying our magic, and we made a promise to meet up again in the future so we can learn from one another."
"Yeah, and I already invited them to come visit me in Ponyville, so she can be my friend and we can eat cupcakes together!" Pinkie exclaimed happily.
"They've known me and my sisters for a short few hours now," I spoke. "Don't you see how they work, my Queen? They don't care if we're Changelings or taking on a guise to look like them. As long as we treat them as friends, they will share their friendship and love with us. There are so many down in the common room who have spent enough time in the pony lands that they have actual lives there. Some of my sisters and brothers are even wed out there! The worst thing that can happen right now is for us to attack them, my Queen."
"Please, please, I beg of you please," I continued, my voice breaking as tears welled up in my eyes. "Please reconsider the invasion... please?"
Chrysalis just stared at me, clearly unsure as to what to do. I just kept looking up at her through my tears, letting them well up and leak down my cheeks freely.
The look in my Queen's eyes softened slowly, and she took a few steps down from her throne to place her right hoof on my head and gently stroke over it.
"My child," she started, but then was interrupted by hoofsteps gallopping toward us and skidding to a stop.
"My Queen," a male voice behind me said. "The hive is under attack!"