Queens to Check, Dragon to Mate

by dracone

Some Happy Moments Before the Headache

Author's Note:

I felt like the story needed a slight tone shift for a bit, and due to the holiday season I felt a desire to do something Christmas themed. For those you who read the bonus chapter from Queen Takes Dragon you will recognize the scenes which are mentioned quite briefly.

As always, enjoy and you know my policies.

Things were simultaneously more interesting and boring than Lucent thought they would be. Her father, Discord, had managed to build up a much better tolerance than her in terms of boredom but he had had also been keeping busy messing with all the hidden changelings around the castle. These queens were all massive headaches, which they would still have to deal with for a few more days. Things would have definitely been more amusing on the airship with the younger foals, Lucent was seriously regretting her decision to turn down the opportunities to avoid this whole meeting.

Why couldn’t it be fun like they used to? Lucent thought back to the first time she met Chrysalis’s girls, they were all so cute in their adorably oversized nightgowns. The dancing, the laughing, the shared time around gifts and family. That made her think back to Chrysalis’s wedding to Spike, that was a nightmarish media frenzy that even her parents had reservations getting involved with. Lucent herself had stirred up a controversy when she came along, being the daughter of a former member of Equestria’s least liked and one of Equestria’s beloved rulers did that, but it all died down after the third week of her being in the world. The wedding of her parents was talked about up to four months after the event, they even kept framed copies of all the papers they liked most that also had the event as a front page story in the throne room and their private quarters. Chrysalis’s wedding with Spike was talked about much more in the papers, most of which were making a go at trying to make it all some sinister plot from the mind of Chrysalis, and their time in the papers was much longer. The worst of it came when the girls, which there were only three at the time, were the target of slander when they were only a few months old, a few of the extremely fictional articles had even managed to come close to tainting the Hearth’s Warming season with the very opposites sentiments the season usually did its best to cultivate.

Lucent really wished to back to those days, they were happier and more stimulating to her. Lucent blinked a bit, she looked around and found herself floating in Velvet’s kitchen. She wanted to say something but it all stopped in her throat before sound could even form, she was watching Chrysalis dance and hum some sort of tune in the kitchen. She quickly realized she couldn’t hear anything, turning her attention to elsewhere in the room she spotted the Chrys’s oldest three at the age they had been when she first met them. The three fillies were dancing in the adorably awkward way she remembered, she really wished she had a camera (preferably without something that makes a flash, just because they couldn’t hear or see her didn’t mean they would notice a bright flash from seemingly nowhere) and suddenly she was holding what looked and felt like a really light brick in her hands. Looking down at the item it said “Sparkle Industries Disposable Magic Camera V. 4.6”, a further look at it showed the device had a feature that made the flash optional or varying intensities. She flicked the tab to “no flash” mode and took three pictures, making sure to show they were all when the three were facing here (usually independent of each other) at different times, they were utterly adorable in how they were dancing as they ate. She was so caught up in enjoying seeing images on the small screen-like crystal on the back of the camera she didn’t notice she had missed a lot. When she looked up she saw the adorable sight of Novel stopping mid-chew to think, she knew it would be a waste to not get a few shots of that with her new camera and quickly took five shots of the scene. She wanted to get more but felt herself get pulled back into the present, with the image crystal on the back of the camera but not the camera itself.

Blinking a few times to reacclimate herself to her surroundings Lucent silent pulled her parents and Twilight to her. She quickly, and silently, explained her experience to all of them, omitting the part about the camera’s manufacturer and design with just a statement about how it was smaller than current cameras and had some extra features. All of them were surprised when she showed them the imaging crystal, none of them had any idea what to do with it. Discord decided to just magic up something read it from the future, Celestia stopped that immediately with a statement about ruining how the course of events is supposed to flow. Twilight suggested just magically pulling the images out of the crystal, a very delicate process, and placing them blank sheets of paper. Discord magicked up the paper with Twilight and Celestia working together to transfer the images onto said paper.

It took a moment for the images to come into focus on the paper, something to work on, with Chrysalis, Cadance, and Skyla coming over to see what the congregation was about. When the images came into focus Chrysalis, along with Cadance and Skyla, gasped at what they were seeing. It was literally seeing images out of the past, perfectly captured in photos, from that first Hearth’s Warming five years ago. The girls were just as cute as remembered, possibly more so.

Then the moment was ruined, by Arachne of all ponies, “And what are you looking at? One of you just stares off into the abyss for few seconds and the next you start doing some sort of pointless crafting project that has you all acting like idiots.”

“I’m still getting used to some of my magic,” said Lucent, “my mind literally took me back to a time I was thinking about from a few years ago, the ‘crafting project’ as you put it was us pulling images from a storage crystal I brought back on my return trip.”

“This is my oldest from that time,” said Chrysalis, holding up one of the images of Novel doing her adorable thinking with a sandwich in her mouth, “her name is Light Novel, she’s a Knowledge Keeper. She looks more like this now,” she pulled out an image of the girls from a week before she called for the meeting that Pinkie had insisted on, “she’s the one with a dark purple carapace, the one with a dusky look is Dusk Sentinel and the one with a pinkish tint to her is Satin Care. Dusk is a Hive Guard and Satin is a Nurse.”

“Who is the orange unicorn filly?” Nymph asked, disinterest dripping from her voice, she just wanted to prolong the meeting’s start and thought getting one of the mares to gush about their foals would do just that.

“Luminous Seeker, she’s my daughter,” said Twilight, “she sees Chrys’s girls as cousins, they even refer to each other as such.”

“Twilight is technically Spike’s sister, but Celestia is technically his mother. At least, that’s how it is legally speaking.”

“So, he’s technically my adoptive big brother,” said Lucent with a bit of excitement, “why wasn’t I told about this?”

“Mostly the drastic difference in our ages,” said Spike, “you were eight when Chrys and I got married, I was twenty-one. That means I was in my early teens when you came along. That and it’s not publicly known I’m technically your mom’s son, only a very small circle knows that. If you were told too early the discretion your mom wanted regarding the information would be ruined with you running around about how cool your ‘big brother’ is to the whole world.”

“I guess that makes sense, and also explains why mom insists on calling me her oldest daughter and not oldest in general. Still a little annoying, but now we have several changeling queens that are in all that.”

“If they didn’t know that before now then their information gathering network was atrocious,” said Chrysalis, “Your aunt Luna referred to Spike in full name in the first press release that managed to wrangle her after our wedding, his full name tells of who he is related to.”

“Not to mention I kind of signed a few official documents three years ago with my full name,” said Spike, “just the beginnings of a little business venture Chrys and I thought of working on, it’s on hold until most of our girls are a little older.”

“How much older?” Inquired Culicidae with the same disinterest as the other queens.

“We decided to not say in front of some company,” said Chrysalis diplomatically, “I guess your spies will have to let you in on that one.”

“Which is easier said than done,” said Celestia, “we knew that you would bring more than requested, this was driven home when Chrysalis made that statement about ‘visible’ members of your hive, so my husband,” she gestured to Discord, “has been subtly using his abilities to keep all non-visible changelings from learning anything of relevance to anything in the past four years.”

“They’re coming up on the wedding of Spike and Chrysalis,” said Discord with some amusement, now in a blue and indigo mock-up of Royal Guard formal attire, “They passed our wedding a short while back. No worries, everything they’re learning is factual, but none of it is stuff that was extremely private, none of us want you all knowing the exact things we do behind closed doors.”

“Except some of our hobbies,” said Spike, “did some of them come up on the ‘Guys’ Night’ activities we all did a while ago?”

“The one we had when Celly was pregnant, yep! Oh how they thought they’d come across something scandalous at the time,” said Discord with a chuckle.

Arachne, Nymph, and Culicidae all just stared unbelieving at the ponies, Discord, and Chrysalis. Lucent figured that they’d thought they would unearth some new intel, but to have it somehow have the past four years blocked from anyone not present in a genuine official capacity was both impressive and terrifying to them. When they were done with this whole thing they were likely to be determined to find a workaround such things. Lucent didn't blame them, finding workarounds her dad's magic were more likely to drive them crazy for who knows how long.

Comments

[Razzy]

8627770 It's not a potential error, just an error. Axes is the plural form of ax, axe and axis. There's not a word like axies.

[dracone]

8629299
huh, I've seen the plural form of axis spelled that a few times in some of the mathematics work books from grade school and high school, but I'm still working on getting over some of the fallacies that time imprinted on me.

Thoughts on the more recent chapters?

[Razzy]

Snrk, I now imagine the spies reporting back what they think are scandalous secrets, but in reality it's just that Spike plays OnO and they all got drunk before the wedding.

Be careful, Lucent, or you'll pop up during one of Spike's and Chryssie's private times and then you'll need a ton of brain bleach.

[dracone]

8650479
I kind of want to see an art piece of changelings spying the Guys’ Night gaming session now, the comedy that would ensue from that has me rofl.

[tredur]

Any news about a possible next chapter?

[dracone]

8869970
All stories are hiatus right now, I explain why in one of my recent blogs on this site

[DesiestChangeling]

Any idea when you can get back to this?

[dracone]

9602442
I’m working on it, but I can’t give any precise or generalities of when the next chapter will be ready yet

[DesiestChangeling]

9602450
I'm just glad you haven't forgotten it, i keep running out of good spike stories.