My dearest Twilight,
You must come to Canterlot at once.
A place thought long forgotten has surfaced once more in Equestria. For over a thousand years, it has been hidden from us, but a Royal Scout Division has brought us news of its return.
It is here that you will face a most grave task, one that falls upon your shoulders to take. I... probably shouldn't give it to you, but hey, you've been sitting around in Ponyville long enough learning friendship lessons for now. What I want to see from you is exactly how you handle the situation that I will further explain upon your arrival.
If you like, you can consider this a test of sorts--one that you cannot afford to fail. If you do, Luna and I will need to step in and fix the problem, but only if it is absolutely necessary.
Remember, Twilight: this test is meant for you, and it is here I suspect you will learn a very hard lesson. It won't be comfortable to learn, but you must learn it all the same.
You will get further details on what exactly this test is as soon as you get here. Trust me, this is something far too big to thoroughly explain in this letter. You will want to hear it directly from me.
I await your arrival, and don't keep me waiting long.
I mean it. I have things to do to clean up the remnants and damages still left over from the wedding, including tending to a slew of Missing Pony reports. Luna and I are particularly troubled by this since Cuppa Joe seemed to have disappeared, but that's not why we're troubled.
As it turns out, Pony Joe doesn't remember having a brother. In fact, upon checking our citizen records, Cuppa doesn't exist. We haven't had much need to check them until now. But with this information, there's a few conclusions that can be drawn from this, and none of them are pretty.
Given he's the Royally Designated Brewmaster, we cannot leave this sit idle. We will find him--we must. Otherwise, we have to visit Brown Bean's Barista Bar for our morning fix, and that guy never gets our orders right. I think he even screws up our names on purpose. Seriously, Saladia and Gouda? Is he four?
I sidetracked a bit. Anyway, come as soon as you can. I'll be waiting.
Love,
Princess Celestia
Luna, please tell me you found Cuppa. He's not dead, is he?
Oh, thank goodness, I feared he was--aaaand you still don't seem happy. Is he injured, or...?
He's... one of them? Huh. Well, now I feel like a prick for buying him a bug bomb after he complained about bitterbeetles getting into his coffee beans. No wonder he gave me the stink eye.
No no, we won't throw him in prison. We'll talk with him first, and it'll be a nice talk. No Brutus, just us in a room while we sort this situation out. Let's not jump to conclusions yet.
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>He's... one of them? Huh.
Took her long enough to figure out.
Cuppa's a bug, eh? Well, how sad.
They won't touch him if he agrees to still make their "morning fix," I bet.
5768343
Free coffee for life.
Well ah'm pretty sure she screws up my name on purpose too! "Applesack"? "Appleback"? Can you believe her?
Sorrynotimetotalkbigtestcomingup!!
...Okay then.
5765071
You do realize that it was a surprise invasion and mind control can be quite subtle? Chrysalis waited until all her pieces were in place before knocking the Cake Queen off the board and breaking the shield. At that point she's disabled the two ponies who could be a threat to her.
Frankly, the only reason Canterlot survived was because Chrysalis made a single mistake: Placing Twilight in prison near Cadence.
Hell, even letting them know about a threat was clever. They put up a bubble that had relied utterly on a single point and focused their attention on the outside.
Chrysalis essentially used Celestia and Shining like hoof puppets.
5766242
It's Dimmet. He's from Bizarro World or something.
and I became Spike the Great Honorable Brave and Glorious
Swelled headed dragon
precious scales
Spikey
Spike I need you to clean this up
scaley dude
You ARE GOING TO LOVE ME !
Well horse apples
Movie reference!
I have to wonder how many changelings there are in Equestria that live a 'normal' life?
Aw, Cuppa's one of the changelings.
5768375
I've rolled back my plausible explanation on the invasion, and have since changed the chapter to reflect a better interpretation of the events as they are.
But I will say one thing: Placing Twilight near Cadance wasn't a mistake on Chrysalis's part. More than likely, Cadance had made enough progress escaping in the caves to happen to be there when Twilight broke the wall, which makes their meeting a coincidence so huge it's as big as the caves themselves.
Remember, Cadance was down in those caves for two days at least. So if where Twilight met Cadance is where Cadance started out, that means Cadance made zero progress in escaping after that much time. That's rather hard to swallow for a girl who cares for her hubby so much.
Uh no princess, the invasion was as much a shock to me as it was for you. I w-was an exile for over a decade your highness. I want nothing more than to go on making your coffee and have this whole unfortunate affair forgotten.
"The fate of an entire empire and a good sized chunk of the world is at stake! Quickly, let's send a teenager to deal with it while we deal with the utterly important work of patching holes in our walls and finding our Coffee Maker!"
I think Celestia needs a professional life coach to help her with prioritization. And maybe help her get her saggy cheeks off the throne and into a gym. Maybe even put on some muscles, to keep everything and its mother from pushing her down and stealing her lunch money.
I do like how they're all for going after changelings until their coffee is threatened.
Although if we're being honest, I can totally understand that particular stance because a good cup of coffee — I mean, a really good cup of coffee — is not easy to make, and if you find someone who can make one, you should do whatever you can (within reason!) to make sure they continue to make that coffee.
See? Not all of us are colossal dicks. Some of us make realy good coffee and mediocre doughnuts. Or excellent doughnuts if we frost them using... Well it sound grosser then it is. You know how red food coloring is made from insect's shells? It's like that, but not as bad. More like frosting made from a milk which is basically jelled love which we didn't digest. It's tasty.
'Ling got the princesses coffee hostage.. not quite on purpose.. probably. Unless he really LOVE making coffee and being a 'ling it afffect the taste in a good way.
Anyway, i fnd it funny that Celly and Luna are very willing to negociate where their coffee is concerned.
5769111 If you don't mind me asking how exactly do you "eat" love?
That sidetrack was amazing.
5768774 To be fair, the teenager who's drastically better at solving critical problems and stopping armageddi (plural of armageddon) than practically everypony and everyone in Equestria. With her friends close seconds.
I mean, this is the pony who wanders into the deadliest forest with only her friends for company looking to save Celestia and Luna, and leaves the "highly trained and seasoned" royal guards to hide in Canterlot. That says a whole lot of how she rolls.
This is one of the reasons why I don't really like fanfics where Twilight has to do standard princess duties. She's the Princess of Getting Shit Done, for crying out loud. Celestia can sign documents and parley with nobles and boring stuff like that; it's what she's used to. Twilight's too busy rockin' with her six-pony army (and Spike) to deal with that junk.
5768697
Have you ever seen this video?
Great story, by the way; I'm especially liking the interactions of Celestia and Luna.
5768697 I've always leaned towards Cheese-Legs trying to get Twilight to kill Cadance. And, if it hadn't been for the Ladybug Dance, she would have succeeded.
5769111
Fact: honey is pretty much bee vomit.
5770652 Yeah we got a similar thing. It's basically honey cute with pure love... So... Liquid ecstasy? Possibly narcotic aside, it's a good frosting.
5769788 Exactly? Well ok, you asked for this, hold onto your butt, its science time!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1QeWIf3puQ
You are likely aware of mater-energy equivalence, the fact that manger and energy can be exchanged for one another under certain conditions. Information and energy can also be exchanged back and forth in the same fashion. Hilariously enough this is known as "Maxwell's Demon" named after the thought experiment which proposed it could be real when it was finally proven. Anyways, it turns out that one bit of information allows an amount of work equal to kTln2. Where k is Boltzmann's constant and T is the thermodynamic temperature.
That may take a bit to wrap your head around, but think about it. You are reading this text, which originated when a piece of plastic was pushed using kinetic energy, and transformed into specific information, which is recorded as a series of electrical energy, and then transmitted and stored to be resolved back into information later which is used to create this text on your screen which appear as photons. Information can become energy, and energy can become information. Information has a semi-physical presence in the universe. Now that you understand that, we can move on.
So, when a creature feels an emotion, electrical impulses are transmitted along neurons in the brain which create the emotion depending on the type of chemicals used and the architecture of the creature's limbic system (the part of the brain which controls emotion). The active emotions are chemicals levels and neuron activity, we can't eat that. But there is information which results from the creature feeling that emotion. The information isn't "what emotion they were feeling" or "why they were feeling such and such emotions" the information we are interested in is the state of the chemical levels and neural activity within the limbic system during a certain piriod of time which has already passed.
That's what we realy eat, that information which has been generated by simple fact that a creature felt an emotion. But how do we do that? Isn't that information lost? No. It's actually not, it is stored in the form of entropy. When I say entropy, it is important to know that I mean the scientific definition of the term, namely: the number of specific ways in which a thermodynamic system may be arranged. Since entropy is a state function, the change in the entropy of a system is the same for any process that goes from a given initial state to a given final state, whether the process is reversible or irreversible.
When a changeling eats, what we are doing is reading the entropy resulting from a creature's emotional state from the past few minutes. We then convert this information into a form energy, which is ionized so it flows from our prey to us. This energy is then converted into chemical energy to fuel or metabolisms (A given type of energy is freely exchangeable into any other type of energy.) Now, because you asked for exactly how we eat love, we are only half way done.
We can read entropy, convert it into information, and feed on that information through barrier we can see, hear, or smell around or through, at a distance of up to 5 meters. The rate of energy transfer is decided by the changeling, the amount of time spent feeding on a “victim” factors into how much risk of injury tot he victim is present. We of course don't want to hurt anyone while eating, but the flow of energy can be damaging if it is not managed properly (feeding without harming is a basic part of our hunting classes). The amount of energy taken is also a factor in determining if any damage will come to the “victim” the more energy taken, the greater the risk to the “victim”. Individual creatures which have been fed on before have less risk of being harmed by feeding, and can reduce the chance of injury to being nearly impossible.
The equation which determines the risk to a victim is:
R = ( (⅓ V3) / (.5√S) ) (.1∛N)
where R is the risk to the victim, S is the rate of transfer in seconds, V is the total amount of energy taken in kilohugs and N is the number of times the individual has been fed on previously. R is expressed a one in R chance the victim will be harmed by the feeding. (A hug is the base unit of measure of emotional energy and is defined as the amount of positive energy created by a single hug between identical twins after 12 hours of separation. Standard SI prefixes apply.)
All changelings keep a reserve of emotional energy which fuels our metabolic processes and is also drawn upon when we use our other abilities. The exact amount is different for each Changeling but is typically enough to hold three days worth of food, or forty minutes of intense spell casting (Our flight is nonmagical, and therefore docent burn our reserves). The average changeling requires 8.2 kilohugs of energy per day, and any excess energy is stored within their reserves. Should a changeling not eat enough the reserves are drawn upon. If the reserves are empty we begin a very nasty process of starvation.
I will spare you the details, but all you need to know is it involves constant growing pain, our body begins to digest itself for nourishment putting holes in our exoskeletons (casting a spell while starving burns away part of our body too), and int he last stage we are constantly plagued with suicidal urges to escape the pain. Without love we will die within a maximum of two weeks, and it takes an equal amount of time eating right as was spent starving to return to a healthy state.
I hope I answered your questions :3
5771295
So let me see if I follow you on this equation on the risk equation, stating that there's a 1 in R chance of risk for the victim being injured.
R = ( (⅓ V3) / (.5√S) ) (.1∛N)
Well, that first bit with the V seems to cancel out the other numbers, but I doubt that's what you meant to happen and that the '3' is actually an exponent of V. With that in mind, let's say that it's the victim's first time and, oh, three kilohugs of energy was absorbed over the course of a second, just to make the numbers nice to follow for the most part.
R = ( (27/3) / (.5*1) ) * (.1)
R = (9/.5) * (.1)
R = 1.8
So that's, uh, 1 in 1.8, which kinda sounds like a little under 50/50 odds. But what if was the thousandth time the victim had been fed upon for the same time and energy?
R = 18 * 1 = 18, so a 1 in 18 chance the victim will be hurt. Now those look like better odds.
I'm probably citing unrealistic numbers for your species (the rate of energy taken per second doesn't seem to be specified, so I just plugged in arbitrary numbers for sake of example), but if I'm reading this formula right, it's all about efficiency in the energy drained over time. The more time spent draining, the greater the risk. The fresher the victim is to the feeding, the greater the risk. Therefore, having high intensity of the drain and going for as much energy stolen in the shortest amount of time seems paramount to reduce the risk of injury.
I'm trying to get a grasp on this because I noticed something about this formula. If a smaller amount of energy is absorbed that first time for one second, say, one kilohug for example, it guarantees injury to the victim. Doesn't that strike you as odd? It does to me.
5771590
Yes that's how it's supposed to go, sorry I could have sworn I added in he formatting to make it display as an exponent
As for your use of the equation it did indeed yield the correct results, given your numbers. Howeaver as you noticed:
This is because we can choose the rate of transfer and volume taken each time we feed. So the short equasion dosent factor that in, but still yields the risk accurately within 4 decimals.
For the record, we can take a single picohug, or all of the energy available. We can take it all at once, or as slow as we like (limited of course by the minimum of 1 picohug per planktime.). If a 'ling has had a formal education or worthwhile caretakers (we don't do parents raising children. two people cant manage 40 children at once.) we are taught methods to analyze prey before feeding to determine the safest possible vole and rates. After all we don't want to kill anyone, that would be like a pony cutting down an apple tree to get the apples.
That's true. Of coerce, you can do the reverse of that as a fairly decent from of attack by choosing the most harmful rate of transfer... but that's very taboo. I think only Chrysalis's hive still allows you to do that, it's a crime in more civilized hives.
Though I wouldn't call it "stolen". You still experienced the emotion, and if you are still feeling it our feeding wont take it... It's the fact that you did feel it which is being eaten. Though I guess other species might see that as eating your emotional past...
As for your last observation,
This oddity has plagued our species for a long time. To my shame it is one reason we haven't attempted to peacefully grating with your culture. Imagine if you fell in love with somepony, and they freely offered their love to you (Which by the way reduces the risk by a factor of 3. The equation you have is the short version. Sort of like how E=MC^2 is the short version of E² – |p̅|²c² = Mo²c^4 ).
You have loved one, who is willing to offer you food, but if you take it they stand a good chance of death. It's not something we want to subject ourselves to, which is actually why my hive has been working on these equations. We though science might have a way to make it safe, then we could propose an alliance.. or surrender if necessary. Most of us live in stage 2 starvation from nymph stage onwards.
My personal solution it to take very little energy at any given time, and therefore feed many more times per day.. Say I used a 30 second time piriod to feed and took only 200 hugs; on their first time its a 1 in ~10 chance they will be injured. (Now if the energy is willingly given that's a 1 in ~29 chance.) To me that's an acceptable amount of risk, after all how often do you roll a 20 on a 20 sided die? Pretty rarely.
The downside of this is if I cant find enough prey in one day (I require 7.9 Kh per day, meaning I need to feed 40 times at 200 hugs per feeding) I go hungry...
5771295 Thanks for the help I've always been curious about your species and their scientific and cultural habits speaking of culture how would changeling society function if it was cut from other species besides its own would they be able to feed of its own species? And I've heard rumors that a changeling mind functions as part of a hive mind is that true?
5771814 I'm totally happy to answer any questions you might have, but let's not clog up Celestia's inbox. Let's take this to PMs.
5771710
Just as a reminder, the equation you gave focused strongly on efficiency being a key factor. Therefore, extended periods of absorption are detrimental to that efficiency unless an extremely large amount is absorbed.
Keeping that in mind, I chose what seemed like a fairly decent number for the energy absorbed while keeping the seconds of absorption very low, aiming to minimize risk. 3k absorbed, one second, first time, and my numbers gave roughly 50/50 odds running it through the basic calculations.
Your numbers are 0.2k absorbed, 30 seconds, first time. I rounded up to 36 for the seconds on this because roots are gnarly things, and my numbers seem to find odds of 11250 to 1 that pony you absorbed from is going to get injured, not 1 in 10.
Not to trip you up on your numbers or anything, but this is a pretty big eyebrow-raiser.
5771912 This may come as no surprise to you, but non-Royal changelings are actually very bad at preforming arithmetic...
5772009
tl;dr, just shut up and give me donuts with tasty love frosting.
5771295
"Science!"
Magical science and scientific magic by Meep the changeling.
Is it strange I understood the majority of your lesson?
On a different note: What's the connection between the "hugs" and "Cadenza" mesurements?
5768774
Never underestimate the Coffee Maker. Empires come and go (no pun intended), but a good barista is really hard to find this days.
Hey T.O.M., since you're still on about the whole 'changeling invasion' thing, do you want Chrysalis or a changeling to make an appearance in Season 5?
5772584
I wouldn't be opposed to that, though I have my doubts to them coming up again. They seemed largely forgotten by the end of season 2, excluding mentions in the IDW comics. We haven't even seen them get even a sniff's worth of attention in season 4, and that thing had Breezies.
So if they do appear in 5, and we're shown that not all of the hivemind are terrible leeching pricks like I'm doing here, I'll be more than satisfied at that.
If not, well, we have headcanon.
5772621 Yeah, another reason I love this site. We have so many stories and theories on the things Hasbro would rather forget.
Although, I hear they are bringing back The Smooze.
5772638
That pile of Grimer, you mean?
...wait, no, wrong series.
5768307
Technically, she never did figure it out; Luna had to tell her.
I could only think of one thing...
Star Wars: episode 5 the empire strikes back
static.comicvine.com/uploads/original/3/35521/784015-at_at005.jpg
5768307 and 5768343 Well, yeah. I'm not surprised. Then again, I know that people (or ponies, in this instance), love their coffee, so being a barista would be a very good job for a changeling. It's why I have a Changeling called Latte Love. (Because... well, I'm sure you can figure out why. XD)
5768375
No, her mistake was not KILLING Cadence after taking her place. If she'd done that, then it would not have mattered what she did with Twilight, or even if Twilight escaped on her own. Even if Shining was snapped out of his stupor, he would not have had the power to put up the shield again, and the fic where all the ponies got cocooned would be the reality.
Is is explained in some fics that changelings need ponies alive to copy them, hence why Cadance was keep alive
5794351 ...Or they're simply trying to be practical. A shapeshifter imprisons your friend and takes their place to feed on your emotions? Kinda douchey, but once they're gone, hey, everything's fine again, maybe just need a little therapy or something. When that shapeshifter kills your friend before taking their place? That's when you break out the torches and pitchforks.
5794351
Amputations, horn-botomies and ducttape all round!
Possible enemy or not, a Princess needs her morning fix.
I can easily see Twilight just seeing the word 'test' and ignoring the rest of the text.
The Changeling-Pony Peace Pact will be forged over a mutual need for one another. One race needs love, another needs their morning fix.
(It does put into question the mention many chapters earlier of Joe pissing into the coffee he was serving to some of the nobles, though)
Re: the comments. A Changeling did appear in Slice of Life. Chrysalis' plan was pretty smart, the only thing that I think she should have done better was to trap the real Cadence and then Twilight in that gel she had Celestia in.
5816099 As Fallout 4 amply demonstrates...
But is Cuppa one of Chryssi's blue hive drones or one of Carpathia's red hive drones? Out of the 7 hives only Chryssi's hive mind is driven by her craziness.
Cuppa..........this was a surprise.