Chapter 1
Way Back Home
Queen Chrysalis awoke with a start as something metal smacked against her horn. She jerked her head back in surprise, and banged it against the ceiling of the very narrow crawlspace she found herself in. The air smelled of burning plastic, and she could hear the far-off crackling of a fire somewhere. An odd cylindrical gizmo of some unknown purpose lay before her, gently spinning around as if gloating over the success of its attack.
Her head was absolutely throbbing, and her entire midsection lay buried under the mass of wires and plastic hoses spilling out of various broken wall panels. All her joints were stiff, and if she had bones she’d have sworn she’d broken some of them. But the worst of her condition was not the pain she could feel, but something she couldn’t.
Her connection to the collective voice of the changeling hive mind, the endless chittering of thousands of individual voices all sharing thoughts and experiences as a single entity, was silent. She could no longer hear them, and they could not hear her. They were leaderless, deafened to the guiding voice of their queen, while she herself was truly alone for the first time in her life.
It made sense that she’d not be able to hear them anymore, after what had happened, but her subjects could very well die if left alone for long enough without their queen. She had to get back to them… but she had to find them first. And there was no sense wasting time here, in the suffocating tightness of a crawlspace that was slowly filling up with smoke.
Chrysalis shoved aside the bits of debris that covered her and reached out to drag herself free, but her chitinous hoof slid uselessly along the slick metal floor without offering any real traction. The walls were just barely larger than her crouching body anyway, offering no room to stand or use her wings, and Chrysalis reluctantly accepted that there was no way an oversized horse-shaped insect was getting out of there.
Before she could shapeshift into something smaller, the floor of the crawlspace collapsed, and Chrysalis fell, limbs flailing in surprise, to land in the dusty soil beneath. She coughed, the impact having knocked the air from her lungs, and tried to pick herself up. Her limbs were already sore enough from… whatever had happened, and any physical effort at all was nothing short of torture.
The ruined underside of the odd saucer-shaped thing that had brought her here loomed directly overhead, its hull marred with harsh black scoring and countless dents and folds clearly visible despite the darkness of the night. Chrysalis merely had to turn around to figure out what had happened—the thing had come in way too hot and crashed into the hillside, obliterating a two-story house and cutting a long, wide trench into the landscape before getting pinned between two huge boulders. Along the way, the crashing hulk had set fire to a few dead trees, and several columns of smoke stretched skywards from them, the pile of sticks that was once a house, and the ugly metal wreck itself. Clearly, things had not gone well.
The battered monarch couldn’t stop herself from smirking a bit, even despite the pain. It hadn’t been that long ago that she’d stood triumphant over Canterlot with Princess Celestia before her on bended knees, and this was where she’d ended up. The humor of the situation wasn’t lost on her, even though the sense of defeat stung nearly as much as her headache.
“What was that?” a voice called from somewhere nearby. Chrysalis froze.
“What was what?” another voice asked. There were two of them, then. Somewhere to her right, above the trench.
Perhaps they were with the pilot, and had come to look for survivors. Or maybe they were the ones who’d shot the saucer down. They could even be simple scavengers, come to pick through the crash for valuables and dash off before either of the other parties showed up. None of those possibilities were the sort of people who’d just leave a wounded changeling queen alone if they found her, and she was in no condition to be fighting them off.
“I heard a crash. Came from down there.”
There was a pause. Chrysalis leaned back into the shadow of the wreck in case they could see underneath it, hoping the moonlight wouldn’t be enough to spot her black body against the dark soil.
“It’s probably nothing. This thing’s coming apart. Piece of the hull fell off, maybe.”
“Yeah…” the first voice agreed, although he didn’t sound convinced. “Probably nothing… let’s head back.”
Chrysalis waited a few seconds, then chanced stepping forward a bit from her place beneath the saucer. The voices had come from the side of the wreck, up above her on the rim of the trench. Nothing was there now but a few rocks and burnt sticks of trees. Some footsteps, heavy-sounding as if weighed down with armor, moved slowly off towards the wreck’s front end. Chrysalis breathed a sigh of relief, and contemplated her next move.
The saucer was a lost cause, and she’d gain nothing by trying to fight off whoever was investigating the wreck. At best, she’d wind up every bit as magically exhausted as she already was physically, and with nothing to show for it except a broken machine she couldn’t hope to get working again even if she knew how to operate it. At worst, she could get herself killed or captured. She couldn’t take that risk. Without her, the hive would die. Changelings would vanish from the world forever. The luxury of brash decision-making was no longer hers, and she had to reluctantly part with the wreck and find somewhere safe to hide.
Her hooves stepped gingerly into the spaces between broken planks and shattered window glass, not wanting to make unnecessary noise on the off chance others were listening. She focused on moving forward, hoping to eventually see whatever pony town this lone house was built on the outskirts of. She could take shelter there and figure out where she was, and then perhaps find some trace of where the changelings were being held. It was a long shot, sure, but she really had no other options.
Chrysalis stepped over the last of the scattered debris and into what used to be the house itself. The refrigerator still stood in the kitchen, surrounded by obliterated wall planks and half of a broken door. Chrysalis studied the appliance curiously; it looked old and rusted, as if it hadn’t seen use in a very long time. And as she looked around more, the rest of the house looked strangely similar. Wood was rotting, grimy dust was everywhere, and the general atmosphere of the place was not like a house that had been occupied at the time the saucer hit it. It had to have sat here for years… which explained why she’d never heard of the place before.
Chrysalis took another step, and saw a body. Four long, slender limbs protruded from a narrow torso, all clothed in a strange haphazard collection of bits of animal hides. Chrysalis stepped closer, examining the creature’s face. A frizzy, tangled black mane surrounded a rich chocolate-brown face, with a much smaller nose than changelings or ponies had. Two brown eyes stared lifelessly at the ceiling, with a thin trail of blood running down between them.
Thin body, no visible muscle mass, long hair, breasts... the creature was almost definitely female, but its species was unknown to her. Then again, so were the little green-skinned servants of Celestia that had acted as dungeon guards and saucer pilots, who had vaguely similar anatomy except for skin color and proportions. This particular woman was still warm and had obviously been killed recently, likely when the saucer came screaming down from the heavens and plowed through her home.
Chrysalis was not without sympathy, but the appearance of this creature only raised hundreds of new questions—now she wasn’t dealing with a remote and long-abandoned pony settlement, but an entirely new and unheard of species. She sighed, exasperated at the incessant complications. As if having total victory snatched out of her grasp right at the last moment wasn’t enough, now she’d lost her entire hive to some secret dungeon Celestia built, and lost herself to whatever unheard of country this place was. There were very few places left on the entire planet she’d not seen, either directly or through the eyes of her subjects, and yet this one defied all her understanding of the world.
“Colonel!” one of the voices from earlier shouted, loud enough to be heard even as far away as Chrysalis was. “He’s waking up!”
Chrysalis looked back towards the crash. She hadn’t really put much thought into the fate of the pilot, as she assumed he would have been killed when his glass-front cockpit slammed into the side of a small mountain, but who else could they be talking about? Surely none of a rescue party’s own would be knocked unconscious while they were searching the area for survivors. And if the pilot was alive, he could be interrogated. He could be forced to explain where he’d been, how to get back to that prison where the rest of her hive were being held. He could save Chrysalis from having to wander around an unfamiliar land for ages in the hopes of learning something useful.
Immediately, she abandoned the ruined house and the body of its inhabitant, and let her wings carry her speedily along the trench. More voices were talking, but she couldn’t make out what they were saying over the twittering of her wings and the breeze rushing past her face. When she stopped right near the elevated backside of the saucer, she heard the too-familiar unintelligible chatter of the alien pilot.
Chrysalis crept up the side of the trench, poking her way along up to where she’d heard the voices from originally, and circled around one of the enormous boulders that the saucer had wedged itself between. She carefully peeked around the side of the boulder to survey the area around the front of the wreck to see what was happening.
The bubble window at the front of the craft had shattered outwards, and the pilot now stood defensively by the ship with a group of taller creatures all around him. Four were huge, bulky monsters weighed down with the heaviest suits of full-body armor Chrysalis could even dream of; one of those suits alone probably weighed more than five changelings. Two others also wore full-body suits, but tight and white in color so as to resemble scientists’ lab coats, and opaque orange helmets. And at the center of the group stood who looked to be their leader, an intimidating figure in a long tan coat.
“Just come back with us, and get in the Vertibird,” he told the pilot. “We’ll make sure you’re comfortable.”
The pilot screeched something even more incomprehensible than usual in reply, and pulled some kind of silver object up from his belt.
“Colonel, he’s got a gun!”
Before any of the others could react, the pilot’s weapon pulsed with bluish magic, and a bolt of light shot through the air into the chestplate of his target. The soldier stumbled backwards, his body lighting up as it was consumed by azure fire. In a matter of seconds, his solid body had apparently evaporated, scattering apart with the wind and dissolving into a small pile of ash. Even Chrysalis was taken aback by the ferocity of the tiny device.
A loud crack split the air, and the pilot toppled over backwards. Green blood spurted out of his forehead as his whole body went limp, and the Colonel pocketed his own handheld weapon.
“God damn it.” An armored soldier slapped one of the scientists in the back. “So much for ‘lower your weapons so he doesn’t feel threatened,’ Anderson. We could’ve easily stopped that from happening.”
“What? You’re blaming me? We were trying to bring him in alive, Major! Sticking weapons in his face wouldn’t have gotten us anywhere!”
“Enough,” the Colonel silenced them. “We’ve still got a job to do. Anderson, get a crate from the Vertibird for the ashes. Ramirez’s family deserves that much.”
The soldiers and scientists slowly moved over to the body, and one gingerly picked up his weapon. They seemed as stunned by its power as Chrysalis was, and a few looked mournfully back at the pile of ash that still crackled with lingering bluish lightning as the breeze began to scatter it apart.
Chrysalis cursed under her breath. That pilot was her only real lead. With him dead, she had to figure out some other way of getting the information she needed, in an unfamiliar country populated by unfamiliar creatures who apparently had some kind of lethal handheld spellcasting technology. She’d have to find their settlement, take the form of one of them, and then slip in and find a niche where she could feed herself and also plug the others for information about—
“Contact, two o’clock! Behind the rocks!”
Part of the boulder exploded, flinging dust into her eyes. Chrysalis threw herself backwards, taking cover behind the rock. Another bolt of bright green magic struck the boulder, blasting away more chips and dust, followed by three more. Sooner or later they’d give up blasting away at her, and storm around the sides. With the pilot dead, she had no reason to stick around and get herself killed. Chrysalis dashed out from behind the boulder and took flight, speeding away down the edge of the trench.
“Colonel, it’s taking off!”
“Then get after it, soldier! I want it taken alive!”
Chrysalis’s wings flittered faster than they’d ever done before, but they weren’t built for speed. Her heart was pounding, but she had to push herself until she got away. She reached the house just as what few beams were still upright were struck with bolts of magic, and dropped down to her hooves. Her powerful legs pounded through the ruins and into the front yard, past a strange pile of rusting metal, and down to the roadway. She looked frantically around, scanning the valley below for any trace of civilization where she could hide.
But there was nothing; no lights, no fires, no indication that there were any buildings down there at all, inhabited or otherwise. That put her at an even greater disadvantage. She looked up the hill instead, and was relieved to see three tall factory chimneys hauntingly silhouetted against the full moon. If nothing else, it was a place to hide for the night and a good vantage point to look from in the morning.
Another bolt of magic struck the pavement near her hooves, and she panicked. Chrysalis leapt over the guardrail and took flight again, hoping they’d lose sight of her against the sky.
She beat her wings as fast as they would go, rushing over to the factory to escape. A quick glance behind her revealed that the soldiers had given up their chase and were looking stupidly all around the sky. She’d evaded them, and was free to head over to the factory for much-needed rest.
Along the way, she couldn’t help but notice the dilapidated state of the roadway, which was completely crumbling apart into gravel in the spots where it hadn’t done so already. A small bridge over a troublesome fold in the topography had collapsed, and the damage looked anything but recent. It made no sense—the paved road and factory indicated that this was, or used to be, a place of some importance. But then why was everything crumbling? The ancient refrigerator, the rusting hulk outside the house, the decaying roadway…ponies didn’t just up and abandon entire cities like this.
As she reached the top of the hill, Chrysalis realized that the factory was, in fact, an abandoned power station of some kind. High-tension cables trailed up from the grounds up over the road to connect with a tower, but then just hung limply at its sides. She could see the silhouette of another tower further on, but even if this facility was producing power—doubtful, with the total lack of noise, lights, or smoke coming from the chimneys—it wasn’t going anywhere.
Chrysalis shrugged. If worst came to worst, she could just follow the old power lines to their destination, in the hopes that some ponies still lived in the city this station used to power. Although, glancing around, she couldn’t see anything more promising than what she’d seen from the hill—for miles around, there was absolutely nothing, save a black and desolate landscape.
That thought brought another, even more depressing thought. If there was nowhere else to go around here besides the (former) house and the power station, those soldier types would probably be able to figure out where she’d gone. Maybe they’d given up the pursuit to make sure she actually stopped here for a rest instead of continuing on, and they were just going to wait her out a bit before kicking the door in and blasting spells all over the place.
Of course that was what they were doing; even the Royal Guard wouldn’t be dense enough to not figure out where she’d buggered off to, given those options. They could probably see the chimneys from the crash site, so all someone had to do was chance a gaze in their direction before something to the effect of “hey, Colonel, maybe she’s over there in the only other habitable structure in the nation” was uttered.
But the trap worked both ways, and an army that wrongly believed it had the element of surprise over its enemies was often even less prepared for surprises than an army that knew it didn’t have the element of surprise at all. She’d go in, check for supplies, move something heavy between her and the door, and then crouch down behind it and warm up the biggest, baddest, most powerful spell she could conjure. Once they came through the door, the look on their faces would be worth the failure at Canterlot and everything else involved with this detour into an unknown world.
Smiling with a bit of devious glee at her plan, Chrysalis grabbed the door with her magic and pulled it open. She stepped inside and immediately stopped—on the far side of the room, rummaging through some crates, was another one of the tall bipedal creatures like the ones that had just tried to kill her. This one had no armor or visible weapons, but wore a baggy blue jumpsuit with yellow trim, and a big gaudy number scrawled across the back, An unexpected development, but one she could still use to her advantage. With another things-turned-out-better-than-expected grin, Chrysalis lit up her horn.
“Oh, please, you’ve got to help me,” a distinctly feminine voice cried out, practically quaking with fear. The man by the crates turned around, and was surprised to see a rather attractive dark-skinned woman in ratty wasteland clothing, collapsed helplessly to her knees in the middle of the room. “There’s these men, and they’re out to kill me, and they’ll be here any second! I need your help fighting them off! Please, I’ll do anything…”
The startled expression on the jumpsuit enthusiast was everything Chrysalis was hoping to see. Even across species, the damsel-in-distress routine never ceased to work wonders. Now, he’d come to her rescue, and either die valiantly taking the first spell to the face when the soldiers kicked in the door, or he’d survive, claim his “reward,” and then point her in the direction of the nearest settlement. Perhaps he’d even follow her, and help her get her hive back together, once tempted with the promise of similar rewards along the way. So long as he didn’t find out he was essentially making love to a dead girl, having a loyal yet expendable lackey following her around could come in handy.
The jumpsuit enthusiast blinked.
“Gary?” he asked.
Chrysalis raised an eyebrow. “What?”
The blue-suited man grabbed a long, serrated knife from the crate he was poking through, and charged straight at her.
“GAAAARYYY!”
Chrysalis sidestepped, immediately abandoning the starving and physically weak body for her much more powerful true form. “Gary” swung at nothing but air, but recovered faster than Chrysalis and attempted another lunging slice. Chrysalis threw up a wall of magical energy, deflecting his charge and sidestepping again. She grabbed the knife with a levitation spell and wrestled it from Gary’s grasp. That left them on opposite ends of the room, a horse-sized, knife-wielding magical insect queen against a skinny man in a jumpsuit…and still he looked about to charge.
It was this moment that the soldiers chose to kick in the power station’s door.
“Get on the ground, now!”
Chrysalis hurled the knife in the direction of the soldiers, but it glanced harmlessly off the heavy armor plating and sailed out into the night. She charged her horn for the best blast she could manage on short notice, but Gary’s clueless bulk broadsided her at a full sprint. Her shoulder hit the floor and her horn discharged upwards, vaporizing a desk but doing no damage whatsoever to the soldiers.
Gary took one of the green spell bolts to the back and went limp, so Chrysalis flung his body towards the door to buy herself enough time to stand. The knife may not have done any damage, but a hundred and fifty pounds of Gary knocked the point soldier over backwards and toppled the spellcasters from the arms of the other two.
Queen Chrysalis stood erect, charged across the room, and swung all her forward momentum into a powerful hindleg buck aimed precisely at the left soldier’s chest. She felt the heavy plate buckle slightly, and the soldier crashed into the wall. His partner tackled her from the side just as Gary had done, but this time she’d been expecting it. She twisted her body with the tackle, flipping over onto her back so all eight hundred pounds of her landed right on the soldier’s midsection.
The shock let her break his grasp and complete the roll to land upright on all four hooves, right as the point soldier finally stood up again and took aim. He went for the trigger, but some supernatural force pushed the barrel of the plasma rifle down at the last second, forcing him to send a bolt of plasma execution-style into the back of the tackling soldier’s neck. Then the gun shot backwards and clocked him in the face, startling him enough for Chrysalis to yank it from his grasp from all the way across the room.
She clubbed him upside the head with the stock for good measure, then turned the weapon on the other surviving soldier. Now that she understood the weapon’s use, it was a simple matter to manipulate the trigger with another levitation spell and fire a bolt into the gap between his helmet and chestplate as well.
Chrysalis noticed the one survivor pointing a sidearm at her face, and twisted the rifle defensively to block his shot. The rifle cracked apart, broken, and she flung the pieces at her attacker to cover a charge. Her foreleg struck him in the shoulder, knocking the secondary weapon from his hands and sending him reeling, and she lowered her stance to charge.
But before her powerful hindlegs could propel her horn-first into the soldier’s abdomen, a thrown rifle hit her in the side of the face. She stumbled, and another figure tackled her to the floor. Cold steel pressed hard against her temple.
“If you so much as think about lightin’ up that horn of yours again, then Ah promise you it will be the last thing you do on this earth.”
The Colonel had joined the fight himself. She hadn’t been expecting that. And now he had her pinned, with the same weapon that he’d used to kill the alien pilot pressed right against her head.
“Do I make myself clear?” his strangely-accented voice was dripping with barely-restrained malice, and every muscle in his body was tensed and ready for the kill. Nothing would have brought him more joy in that moment than to send a ten millimeter slug through the brain of the wretched alien thing that had just taken out two of his men.
Chrysalis considered a last, desperate gamble for freedom, but images of her subjects slowly starving to death in the cold, clinical sterility of Celestia’s dungeon forced her to give up on it. She sighed, closing her eyes and accepting defeat.
Again.
“Good.” The Colonel stood up, but the weapon and his eyes never strayed a millimeter off their target. “Major Fairlight.”
“Yes, sir,” the surviving soldier answered, his voice a mere echo of the authoritative bellow that had started off the encounter.
“Head back to the Vertibird, and have the pilot land out here in the parking lot. I’ll keep watch over our friend until then.”
“Right away, sir.” Major Fairlight jogged out of the power station, his heavy footsteps slowly fading away into silence.
“Bring in rope and a tranquilizer when you get back!”
The sound of crickets from outside reached Chrysalis’s ears, and a cool breeze blew through the open doorway. The Colonel wiped a sleeve across his brow, his heavy breaths slowly becoming more shallow as heat-of-the-moment rage softened into composed malice.
“Well,” he shrugged, “on behalf of the Enclave, let me be the first to welcome you to Earth.” His brow creased, and he crouched down to stare directly into her eyes.
“As of right now, your ugly ass is officially United States Government property.”
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Two people who like to pretend I matter suggested this story.
I'm glad they did.
~Skeeter The Lurker
Shadowflash whored for you rather hard, so coming to take a look.
It's finally here! So badass!
That giant horn in the story picture just tells me that Chrysalis was buried under those ruins, and is of titan sized proportions.
That was actually pretty bad-ass.
'gubment came and took ma baby!
Very enjoyable so far. Keep it up!
2822061 Thanks. I'll try and accomplish something resembling a weekly schedule, if at all possible.
2820530>>2820212 If an exposition-heavy chapter with an action scene I wrote at 4 in the morning qualifies as badass, then I hope I don't disappoint later on in the story when I'm actually trying for badass action. Glad you're enjoying it so far.
2819895 I'm glad they did as well! I appreciate the support.
Very good, my friend. Never really liked Chrysalis, but your depiction of the Enclave has been top-notch so far. Keep doing what you're doing.
2824107 I certainly will try. One of my goals with this is to portray villains of both MLP and Fallout in a more positive light, so perhaps with luck you'll warm up to having Chrysalis as the lead.
2827476 Got me. Sometimes the site takes a bit to catch up, but that's my best guess.
This was epic awesome! Gary# 24 approves!
2842668 Glad you enjoyed it. I'll try to keep up momentum with the second chapter.
Hey~! You actually did it! I'm Liking this... Good premise, good depiction AND it's a crossover of two of my favourite things~
2869927 Good to hear
Working on the second chapter. Hope to keep things entertaining for everyone.
2870119 If it was as good as the first, I see this being popular! Hell, with some extra encouragement, maybe you'll write up some chapters for your other story~
Productivity! Good to see another story of yours ^.^
This is an amazing concept, and it's so well written! I'm glad to have found this story, and I'm also happy you decided to focus on Chrysalis...I think this is the first Changeling/Fo:3 crossover I've seen!