Dark Spectrum: Public Enemy

by Bootsy Slickmane

Chapter 10: The Plan

Rainbow plopped down on the floor pillow Fluttershy had brought in from the library's main floor. She was still confused and felt pretty awful, but maybe the changeling's story would help put an end to both problems. The others had gathered around as well, with the Cutie Mark Crusaders in their own little cluster nearby. Scootaloo hadn't spoken since Rainbow had finished her story, and she seemed to be avoiding the mare's gaze.

"First question," Twilight started, "how did you know what we wanted you to tell us without us asking?"

The second changeling spoke in a monotone, just like the first. "Changelings share a mental link with other changelings when they are close. Thoughts and ideas flow freely between us. The changeling next to me informed me of what you wanted."

Spike interjected, "I don't like the sound of that. Can you shut off the flow? Like, keep secrets?"

"It's possible, but none of us have anything to hide. Only rogue changelings who abandon the hive would shut their minds."

Twilight raised an eyebrow. "There are rogue changelings?"

"We are not mindless slaves to our queen's will. We are connected together, but not bound. Not all of us want to serve the hive."

"Come on already," Rainbow groaned.

"Yeah," Pinkie agreed, "get on with the story."

The changeling did as it was told. "We quietly entered Ponyville disguised as six foreign ponies five weeks ago. We studied each of you for the week preceding your trip to Canterlot. One of us disabled Rainbow Dash's alarm clock and this one," the changeling nodded at the one next to it, "went to the train station in her place. The rest of us stayed behind and disguised ourselves as the rest of you. We told everypony that the trip had been canceled, and our mission officially began.

"Our plan was simply to disarm the Elements of Harmony by breaking up the friendships that the bearers had with one another. We couldn't just kill one or more of you because that would raise too much attention and our forces might be discovered. Our goal in this particular mission was to alienate Rainbow Dash and drive her out of Ponyville. It was our job to figure out just how to do that once we got into Ponyville and then execute that plan. We developed the specifics of our plan on the fourth day of our mission. We saw how much Rainbow enjoyed being hailed as a hero after saving a foal from rolling off a cliff, and wanted to use that against her. We started by planting one of our spies in the Ponyville Retirement Village."

"Whoa, whoa, wait a minute," Applejack interrupted, "There are other changelings here in Ponyville besides you?"

"There are currently thirty-six of us operating in this city, not including the ones Rainbow Dash killed."

Everypony's jaw dropped. Rainbow was having a hard time believing any of this, and kept expecting to wake up at any moment.

Spike had a claw to his chin. "You know, this explains why Twilight and everypony else were acting so weird. What were you guys doing, anyway?"

The changeling tilted its head to one side, inquiring, "You mean when our Twilight double claimed to be working on a secret project for Celestia?" Spike nodded, and the changeling clarified, "We were meeting with our other changeling agents throughout the city to decide what to do about Rainbow."

"How did you survive her attack, anyway?" Spike asked. "It sounded pretty vicious." Rainbow's ears went flat, and she found an interesting spot on the wall to look at.

"She didn't hit me hard enough, to put it bluntly. It would seem that, despite the fact that I attacked her, she was not completely ruthless in exacting her revenge, at least when it came to putting down Fluttershy, the pony I was disguised as. We currently assume it has something to do with her being one of Rainbow's oldest friends. It really doesn't matter to us, though.

"Where was I? Right, Ponyville Retirement. One of our spies severely weakened a balcony attached to the clubhouse, and broke it off when Rainbow Dash was nearby on the sixth day of our mission. She saved the old ponies, and our spies in the crowd praised her heroism and influenced the ponies present to do the same."

"Influenced them? How so?" Twilight asked.

"Changeling infiltrators are trained to influence the minds of ponies. Only the most powerful of our kind can completely control a pony's body and mind, but the gift is present to lesser degrees in all of us. We are and were some of the best changeling infiltrators alive and we are and were quite good at influencing pony minds.

"On the ninth day, one of our spies burst its own hot air balloon to pretend they were in need of rescue. The timing was tricky, as we had to initiate the event while Rainbow was busy but still out in the open. Our opportunity came, and we introduced the city to Mare Do Well, which our spies proclaimed to be Ponyville's newest hero."

Something clicked in Rainbow's mind. "Wait, did you guys name Mare Do Well yourself?"

"Of course. What did you think the big 'M' on the costume stood for? Mighty, perhaps?" Rainbow couldn't tell whether or not it was trying to insult her, due to its lack of any real tone, but she didn't care either way.

"Holy applesauce," Rainbow exclaimed as the realization hit her, "that means you replaced the mayor!"

The changeling nodded, but then shook its head. "That isn't not correct."

"So Dashie's right then?" Pinkie asked. The changeling was shifting in its seat as if uncomfortable.

"Oh crap. Hang on a second." Twilight charged up her magic and blasted the changeling. It shrieked and struggled against its restraints for a second, but then settled down. "Sorry, everypony, but my spell was starting to slip for a second there."

The changeling seemed calm again. "Yes, I was almost free of it. I don't want to tell you any of this, and I'm trying very hard to resist her magic. I'm not doing very well, it seems. To be perfectly clear, we have indeed replaced the mayor."

"Spike, write a letter to Celestia. We have to tell her about this right away."

"I'm already on it, Twilight." Spike's quill was scratching away on a piece of paper, and he said to himself as he finished, "I'll tell you more when we have the whole story. Watch out. Done." He rolled up the paper and sent it out of sight in a flash of green flame.

"May I continue now?" Everypony nodded, and the changeling went on with its story. "Over the next five days, we created more disasters around the city. Each time, Mare Do Well was there to save the day instead of Rainbow Dash."

"How did you stop the busload of tourists?" Rainbow interrupted to ask. "Are you all that much stronger than me?"

"The changeling riding on the bus used weight-altering magic. First, we made it heavier so you couldn't stop it. Then, we made it lighter so Mare Do Well could. After that, we sabotaged a crane at a construction site. Then we blew apart the dam west of the city. We were honestly a little surprised that nopony questioned the fact that Mare Do Well was apparently an alicorn. Not all of us were sure it would be a good idea to outclass Rainbow in every way possible, but it didn't become an issue."

"Am I the only one getting more than a little creeped out by all this?" Spike asked worriedly.

"This explains something, actually," Rainbow commented. "I always wondered how Mare Do Well was able to be right there whenever there was a disaster. I thought she must be faster than me or something."

The changeling turned to Rainbow. "Frankly, I'm not sure anything is faster than you, Dash. Even our queen is impressed by your sonic rainboom. And Mare Do Well was already at each location, waiting for the others to signal her. Or it, rather, as there weren't actually any mares in that costume."

Twilight actually looked a little excited as she asked. "You keep referring to yourselves as 'it,' and 'they.' Do you not have genders?"

"Not as you ponies know them. The kings and queens are males and females, respectively. The workers, infiltrators, soldiers, and every other type of changeling, however, are unable to mate and effectively have no gender."

"Kinda like bees?" Fluttershy asked, finally saying something.

The changeling nodded, and was about to continue when Rainbow posed another question. "Wait, does this mean that you can copy Pinkie Pie's Pinkie Sense?"

The changeling shook its head. "We don't have an explanation for Pinkie Sense, and cannot recreate it without using time spells, which are very difficult to perform and usually end up causing more trouble than they solve."

"Time spells?" Twilight asked, leaning forward with a hungry look in her eyes.

"Precognition spells, to be exact, as in looking forward through time. Very few changelings throughout history have been able to perform them, and none of them met with much success when they did. But those are other stories entirely. As I was saying, we can't emulate Pinkie Sense. We simply had a changeling watching and telling our Mare Do Well agent what was happening around them at the construction site via our mental links."

"Hmm... You know, that makes a lot more sense than Pinkie Sense does," Twilight said as she turned to look at her pink friend. Everypony slowly turned toward Pinkie Pie.

Pinkie slouched a little, eyes darting around at her friends. "Hey, wait, I'm not a changeling!"

"That's what a changeling would say!" Rainbow pointed out. Finally, Rainbow had an explanation for why Pinkie was so weird.

"She's not a changeling," said one of the bound creatures.

"See? What'd I just say?" Rainbow said, pointing at the changeling.

Twilight leaned back from Pinkie a little and put her hoof in front of Rainbow. "Rainbow, my truth spells are still active; they can't lie right now."

"How can you be so sure they're working right?"

The cluster of ponies argued for a few minutes, but they settled down and finally decided that Pinkie was really a pony. She was a weird and random pony, but a pony nonetheless. Rainbow was both a little disappointed and a little proud that she knew somepony so unique.

After things calmed down, the changeling that had been Fluttershy continued. "We could tell that Rainbow was nearing her breaking point on the fifteenth day of our mission, when we all mocked her for being unable to keep up with Mare Do Well. We had hoped she would create a disaster herself in her desperation for attention, but she only started doing that recently and apparently for different reasons.

"We decided to make one last push to drive Rainbow over the edge and get her to do something that would make Ponyville hate her. We threw a parade in Mare Do Well's honor. We hoped she would be so enraged by the fact that she only got fan club meetings in a tree house and one meet-and-greet that she would crash the parade and wreck the event entirely. We would have had Mare Do Well run Rainbow out of town for being a menace, but that didn't happen.

"Instead, she attempted to unmask Mare Do Well at the parade. We did our best to rattle her nerves by giving her four Mare Do Wells to chase. It worked, but not in the way we expected. We had to improvise at that point, and came up with an idea. We allowed a Pinkie copy to be unmasked, and then revealed the others to Rainbow Dash. We claimed that all her friends had conspired against her to show Ponyville what a real hero is like. At that point, it didn't take much more to send Rainbow over the edge, and she ran away from us.

"We wanted to be sure she stayed out of Ponyville, so we began spreading rumors that Rainbow had caused several of the disasters around Ponyville. When she came back the next day, several of our agents rallied a mob at the marketplace and drove her out of the city. Unfortunately for us and our plans, she wasn't moving away, and returned the next night as a costumed villain.

"Over the next week, it became clear that Rainbow had snapped, but not in the way we intended. We attempted to stop her ourselves and have her hauled away to the dungeons in Canterlot, but even supplementing the police presence in Ponyville with changeling agents wasn't enough. Not even the Wonderbolts we contacted were able to stop her, nor did they have the psychological effect we intended. We attempted to escape the city, abandoning our mission. The only hope we had left was that the real ponies, you five, would be so shocked by what Rainbow had become that you would reject her as a friend. Whether or not that worked isn't entirely clear, but it would appear to have failed." The changeling fell quiet, apparently done with its story.

Rainbow didn't know how to react. Her mind had been slowly blown more and more over the course of the changeling's story, and now she didn't even know what to think about Ponyville at all. Even though it explained so much, she still felt like she didn't know what was going on.

"This is big," Twilight said, breaking the silence. "Really big. Spike, we have to do something. We have to tell somepony about this crazy conspiracy."

Spike was already writing another letter as the changeling spoke up again. "Going to the police in Ponyville would be a bad idea, for you. Our changeling agents control the Ponyville Police Department."

"You know," Rainbow started, "I wondered how Ponyville got so many police officers earlier. Just who have you all been pretending to be?"

"Would you like a list?" the changeling asked. Twilight nodded, and the bug-like creature started rattling off names and their associated occupations for a few minutes. Merry May, Cherry Berry, Daisy, Mayor Mare, Rose, Cloudchaser.... The list went on and on.

So many of the ponies around town had been monsters in disguise and Rainbow had no idea. She'd really blown the lid off a big conspiracy, and she hadn't even been suspicious until she'd seen the creatures right in front of her.

"Hey, there's something that's been bugging me," Rainbow started after the creature finished its list.

Pinkie burst out laughing. "Hee hee hee, bugging you, ha ha ha!"

Rainbow rolled her eyes and continued, "Why did you uh... how do I say this? When I beat you guys up, your disguises went away. Why?"

The changeling responded, "Significant trauma, like being killed or knocked unconscious, often causes a changeling's disguise spell to break. It takes some concentration to maintain the spell, even during sleep, and interrupting that focus can cause the spell to falter or even stop entirely."

"Oh." Rainbow looked over at the others. Twilight was dictating something to Spike. The others were talking amongst themselves. Scootaloo was just staring down at the floor as her two friends talked. Rainbow walked over to the filly.

She knew how much Scootaloo looked up to her. In fact, it was kind of annoying at times. But she was a good filly, and she was pretty awesome in her own way. "Hey, Scootaloo?" The filly looked up as Rainbow said her name, but immediately turned back to the floor. "Are you okay, kid?"

Scootaloo shook her head. "When I first heard about Dark Spectrum, I thought it was just Diamond Tiara making stuff up to mess with me. But then I saw a newspaper with your picture in it, and I heard things from the other school ponies. I..." She swallowed hard. "I didn't want to believe it. How could Rainbow Dash, the most awesome pony ever, become... become a...."

A monster, Rainbow finished the sentence in her head. She reached down for the filly again, hoping to stroke her mane and tell her that everything was gonna be okay now, but Scootaloo leaned away from her. Rainbow backed away, unsure of what to say or do. She was spared further thoughts of the filly when something tapped her on the back.

She turned around to find Fluttershy scratching at the floor, looking up at her from behind her mane. "Um, thank you for not trying to kill me as hard as the others," the yellow mare said barely above a whisper.

Rainbow didn't know whether to laugh or cry at that. She settled for, "Um, no problem." She felt she ought to find another topic, leaning to the side a little and asking, "So, what's gonna happen now?"

Twilight held up a hoof for a few seconds, then turned around as Spike sent a letter up in flames. "We're gonna head out and start unraveling this mess the changelings have made," she said. "If what we've heard tonight is true, the changelings practically own Ponyville. We've got to spread the word and warn everypony. Celestia has already informed me that she's sending a group of her most trusted royal guards to help us out."

Had Spike burped out a letter earlier? Rainbow hadn't noticed.

Twilight continued, "We're going to take one of them with us as proof, and so the guards will know what changelings look like. Once the royal guard starts their occupation, I guess we'll all meet back here."

The changeling that had been Fluttershy spoke up again as Twilight lifted it up in her magic, restraining chair and all. "I suggest you render me unconscious before transporting me, as I will resist with lethal force if your spells lose control of me."

Spike shook his head. "You know, it's kinda creepy when you say things like that."

"It's not very nice on my end, either. It's extremely uncomfortable, in fact. Every word I speak is forced out against my will. I would kill all of you right now if I could, and it wouldn't be inaccurate to describe my actions as vengeful. We changelings don't feel emotion quite like you ponies do, but this is an almost unbearable experience and I would be pleased to see Twilight Sparkle's mangled corpse at my hooves."

Twilight stared at the creature, ears flat, eyes wide, and mouth slightly open. Rainbow simply stepped in front of Twilight and punched the changeling across the face. Its head wobbled a little, then the creature fell limp.

"Um, thanks?" Twilight said as she put the creature across Applejack's back.

"No problem," Rainbow replied as the others moved toward the stairs with the creature in tow. "So, what do I do?"

Twilight paused for a while, looking at her hooves. Then she looked back up at Dash, determination plain on her face. "We'll tell everypony that this Dark Spectrum character was a changeling. We'll say it was part of their plot to break us up. Until we get everything sorted out, though, I think you should stay here."

Rainbow nodded. "Yeah, you're probably right. Ponyville probably hates my guts right now. You go on and save the town. See you when you get back."

Everypony else exchanged glances as Rainbow put on a weak smile and waved at them. They all said a brief farewell and then disappeared up the stairs. Rainbow turned from the stairs and let out a sigh. It would all be over soon, and then she could go back to her old life. All she had to do was wait. Just wait for her friends to save her rump. Just wait to be saved by the friends she'd tried to kill only hours before.

Rainbow sat down on the pillow, eyes on the floor, and waited.

Comments

[AlsoSprachOdin]

Man, Rainbow spends damn near the whole story becoming an increasingly unhinged supervillain, kills her own friends, and Twilight still comes out scarier with one little spell.
"Well, your mental damages have saved the day yet again. Well done, Rainbow, Now lets get you a therapist.
Don't think it was such a smart idea to leave Rainbow all alone at a time like this. Hell, she should probably be on suicide watch or something.

[MercyWhite]

Twilight should really use her puppet spell on dash

[Flying-Claw]

Really awesome story. I kindof expected Dash to commit suicide at some points, luckily she didnt

[Chimp]

3653425

I concur with AJ, get her some help! Or learn a memory spell to forget the past few weeks!

[Admiral Q Ponyform]

the sad thing is this would have made Mare Do Well episode good. Once again the fans can make a better story than the writers.

[Samey90]

"There are currently thirty-six of us operating in this city, not including the ones Rainbow Dash killed."

Most of them disguised as Bon Bon...

Significant trauma, like being killed or knocked unconscious, often causes a changeling's disguise spell to break.

The lack of ontological inertia? It always reminds me of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (the comic, not the movie. More exactly, that part with the Invisible Man and Hyde).

Had Spike burped out a letter earlier? Rainbow hadn't noticed.

Spike's a changeling! (or I'm paranoid)

[Zexoguy]

I know I said it was a cop-out earlier (and it still kind of is), but I'm really liking this whole changeling thing.

And, yeah, someone should probably be there to make sure Rainbow Dash doesn't do any more crazy stuff all alone.

[Flowtas]

5083457

That would explain all the Bon Bon's... Some of them weren't even the right color! Shame on you changelings. Shame.

[Dreamclaw]

When I first head about Dark Spectrum

[Darksymphony777]

5072050 true I can think of a couple of episodes that need improvement coughboastbustercough

[The Real McCoy]

Rose,

Heh. If Doctor Whooves ever finds out...well...

Hooray for the 9th and 10th (at least for a little bit where the 10th Doctor is concerned...) Doctors!

[HarmonyRapids]

Thank God Rainbow didn't actually kill her friends.

[HarmonyRapids]

Poor Scoots though.

[ferret]

"So, what's gonna happen now?"

[Nightflight406]

"It's not very nice on my end, either. It's extremely uncomfortable, in fact. Every word I speak is forced out against my will. I would kill all of you right now if I could, and it wouldn't be inaccurate to describe my actions as vengeful. We changelings don't feel emotion quite like you ponies do, but this is an almost unbearable experience and I would be pleased to see Twilight Sparkle's mangled corpse at my hooves."

In a Luis from Ant-man impersonation It is truth serum.
Oh, what if the ponies from this show watched Ant-man.