Chapter 5 — Smells Like Fish
NOW
Nymph
“Hey you! Get on the ground!” I snarled, glaring at the stallion in the alleyway.
The thug took one look back at me and my charged horn before immediately bolting in the other direction, his hooves a blur.
My eye twitched. I fired off my stun bolt, sending it streaming down after him, but he was already turning the corner, and it fizzled out on the brick behind him.
“You scumbag, get back here!” I shouted as I flew out of my apartment after him, leaving my door hanging open behind me. I leapt over the downed green pony, who was groaning pitifully in a heap of cardboard boxes to the side, and turned sharply at the T-intersection after the mysterious pony, skidding across the ground as I changed direction.
He hadn’t gone far, but he was still a considerable distance away. There were too few long stretches of space between and behind the apartments for me to line up a good shot if he kept weaving into the little side paths, so I kept galloping after him.
He was fast, probably faster than I was. Every time I turned a corner, he was already turning the next one, but I knew he was going to run out of space eventually. Either that, or the commotion was going to attract other guards to help chase him down. Already, ponies were peeking out of their windows to see what all the noise was.
I felt a pain in my chest, and I was already losing my breath quickly, much faster than I should have with a chase like this. I couldn’t have been that out of shape even with everything that happened, could I?
Panting heavily, I made a hard right and caught him scaling the brick wall that composed the outer perimeter of the apartment complex. I was sluggish as I readied up another shot, widening my stance to help steady my aim, but while I had inherited many things from myself, my aim under pressure or exhaustion still wasn’t quite up to my former self’s pinpoint accuracy. I clipped his leg with a stun bolt just as he passed over the wall, and he fell on the other side with a heavy thud.
I scowled, before galloping over to the wall after him. He may have been shocked for a moment, but earth ponies were known to shrug off a stun spell if they were only hit on an extremity. He’d be limping away if he recovered though, so I might be able to catch up to him.
My hooves scrabbled at the brick as I tried to scale the wall, and I barely managed to get a hoof hanging on the edge. I swung my other foreleg up and gritted my teeth as I pulled myself up over the ledge.
He was… gone.
Impossible. The alleyway led straight out into the street, which lunch rush had already filled with hungry bodies, but it was further than I expected him to go if I tagged him with a stun spell. I strained to get my back hooves up on the wall and hopped down to the ground, stumbling forward as my weaker left foreleg threatened to crumple under me.
I took in a deep breath, but found that I couldn’t quite catch it. Now that I had stopped racing forwards, the full extent of my exhaustion caught up to me, and I all but stumbled over to the alleyway opening. That was barely even worth being called a chase, yet my body disagreed, only half-listening to my demands.
I finally reached the end of the alley, and I craned my neck so I could sweep my eyes over the crowds. No disturbances. The crowd showed no signs of having been parted for a rushing body to slip through.
A shadow fell over me, and I jumped back with a sharp breath when Steel Blade came in for a sudden landing at my side. “What happened?” he said with a look of serious concern. “I heard you yelling and came over to investigate.”
I relaxed my posture and tried to slow my breathing. My body was still winded, but I had mostly recovered, even if it felt like little more than a tenuous reprieve. “Somepony got slugged right outside my condo. Looked pretty bad too. I was in pursuit, but I lost him here.”
Steel Blade’s brow furrowed. “Well, I didn’t spot him from the air. He might have just gotten away.”
I slipped into my empathy sense, staring blankly into the crowd. In a sea of apathetic minds, the one tasting strongly of anxiety and panic stood in sharp contrast. He was moving, but slowly, trying to make himself scarce in the river of moving bodies.
“Not quite yet,” I murmured, turning to follow my mental map. I maneuvered my way through the crowd, bumping into ponies left and right as I tried to navigate with only my empathy sense.
“Where’re you headed, Overwatch?” Steel Blade said as he pushed up after me. “You know where he went? I thought you lost him.”
He was nearby. I had managed to close the distance on him, but he was still ahead of me, and I couldn’t tell which pony was him.
“It’s just a feeling,” I replied, roughly bumping another pony as I slipped out of my empathy sense and scanned the crowd. “Call it a… mare’s intuition.”
“I… well alright…”
One of the ponies ahead tried looking behind him, and my eyes quickly tracked the movement. He turned his head forward abruptly and began moving faster.
“There, that one. The grey stallion with the navy mane.”
Steel Blade followed my line of sight to the thug and narrowed his eyes. “I see him,” he said, picking up the pace. “Hey! You!”
The grey stallion looked back briefly before bolting into a side alley, and Steel Blade exploded into the air after him, the ponies around him letting out surprised shouts at the sudden action.
“Guard business, outta the way!” I shouted as I wove through the crowd, shoving aside distracted ponies too busy gawking to figure out what was happening. I galloped down the alley after Steel Blade, who zipped his way between the narrow walls with practiced ease, using his hooves on the bricks as necessary to make sharp turns.
But our target proved just as elusive, and after a moment, I managed to catch up to Steel Blade, who flew in circles high above. His head moved side to side as he tried to catch wind of where our stallion had gone. I shuffled to a halt and leaned against a nearby wall, panting heavily once again. My shoulder was starting to act up too.
Steel Blade landed beside me. “Damn. Lost him. Pretty fast little bugger,” he said, before turning to me concernedly. “You really shouldn’t exerting yourself, you know.”
I shot him a glare, still taking deep breaths. “You… can’t tell me… what to do,” I said automatically, slipping into my empathy sense as I trudged through the back alley. “C’mon, the scent of fear… leads this way.”
He looked at me strangely, but followed me nonetheless as I turned another corner into a packed alleyway leading to the street. There wasn’t much in this particular pathway. A decent number of trash bags were piled onto the side of the building, along with a few discarded pieces of furniture and one large dumpster.
I let out a hum as I focused on the dumpster. It was live, the air around it as tense as the pony inside it was.
Easy.
I silently trotted over to it. Steel Blade realized my intention and quietly slid over to stand in front of the dumpster, taking a well-balanced stance before crouching like an unsprung trap.
“Three… two… one…” I mouthed out, before grabbing hold of the dumpster lid with my magic and flinging it open.
The thug sprang out, wielding a pair of brass hooves as he lunged at Steelie. Even expecting it, I flinched, but Steel Blade reared back onto his rear hooves, neatly arresting the thug’s forward motion with a quick two-hooved shove and pushing him back. Our attacker recovered quickly, but I stopped his next attack by slamming the cover of the dumpster down on his head, and he slid back into the metal box, the lid closing on top of him with a loud whump.
Steel Blade and I stood there silently for a moment, prepared for any future attempts on us, but the alleyway was quiet. Slowly, I came down from my high, and the sudden fit of angry determination that had propelled me out of my condo in the first place steadily ebbed away.
“Err…” I said carefully as I stepped over to the edge of the dumpster and slowly pried it open.
“I uhh…” Steel Blade cautiously ventured, looking in at the unconscious earth pony slumped atop a bed of black trash bags. “I think you might’ve hit him a bit too hard there, Overwatch.”
“I-is he okay?” I opened the lid the rest of the way and let it settle on the wall behind the dumpster. There weren’t any emotions other than the lingering taste of shock coming out of the dumpster, but I stepped back just in case.
Steel Blade reached in, hauling the body out and dragging him to an empty spot in the alley. “Well, he’s breathing. No bleeding or real sign of trauma, but there’s no telling how much you scrambled his brains.”
My lips twisted into a grimace. My control over my magic was still imperfect. I had only meant to disrupt the stallion a bit, but a hit meant to disrupt him usually doesn’t end with a massive dent in the metal lid of a dumpster. I had a basic knowledge of the magic and spells that Overwatch regularly utilized, but the fine tuning was still off. I would have to figure out my limits before I accidentally brained somepony with a disproportionately powerful bola shot.
Steel Blade gave me a comforting smile. “Don’t worry about it. We still have to bring him back to the guardhouse since he technically resisted arrest and assaulted a city guard, so we can have somepony look at him there. Make sure you get his brasses though. Can’t leave evidence behind.”
I nodded dumbly before levitating out the thug’s weapon. I made a face at the smell of the dumpster, closing it quickly after removing what I needed from it. “R-right,” I said, holding the horseshoes a little distance in front of me as I watched Steel Blade heft the sleeping thug onto his back. “Do these look like his size?”
He chuckled. “Seems good. C’mon, you said this guy assaulted somepony?” Steelie said, leading the way back through the labyrinthian alleys. “We should make sure everypony’s okay. Your condo’s on the way back anyways.”
“O-oh, alright then,” I said meekly. “You should get him back as quickly as possible though. Hard to say when he’ll wake up. I can get the witness report myself.”
He just nodded with a short “Mm-kay” before falling into silence. Despite the dank atmosphere clinging to my coat, retracing our steps certainly helped us avoid some of the attention we would have gotten if we had taken the streets, and any time away from crowds was time I was thankful for.
Still, we eventually had to venture out onto the main streets, and I trailed behind Steel Blade silently as he made his way through the lunch rush.
“Hey, Overwatch,” he said, and I reluctantly trotted up beside him. “How’d you get to chasing this guy anyways?”
“Oh, uhh…” I started, figuring out the best way to phrase it. “It’s not much more than what I’ve already told you. I caught him from my window whipping around to punch somepony behind him across the face, and I just kinda…”
“Started yelling and chasing after him?” Steelie said with a chuckle. “I wasn’t even two blocks away before I heard you screaming.”
I pouted. “S-sorry, I’m not usually like this.”
“Really? This is exactly the type of thing I expected from you,” he said with a wide grin. “You can get pretty intense with the right triggers.”
My ears perked up. This sounded like just the type of information I should take careful notes on. “Triggers? Like what?”
He raised an eyebrow at me. “You’re kidding, right? You have the biggest hero complex I’ve ever seen. You charge in blindly any time you think somepony’s in trouble,” Steelie said, before turning to face forward again. “I swear, that kind of stuff’s going to get you killed one of these days.”
A hacking cough immediately ripped its way out of my throat, and a startled Steel Blade erupted in a cloud of feathers as his wings beat futilely against the unconscious pony on his back.
Crystal
“Lily?”
There was a groan from the green pony lying in the pile of cardboard boxes. Her legs twitched in the air.
I sighed as well as a makeshift necklace could sigh. “Lily.”
“…Yes, luv?”
“When I told you to avoid this neighborhood because of some shadowy elements, that was not an invitation to stick your face into his hoof.”
“You didn’ tell me he was a big fat meanie face!” Lily exclaimed, raising her head out of the cardboard boxes she rested in to glare at where I lay on her chest. “Wha’ kinda jerk starts a conversation with deckin’ somepony across the schnoz?”
“The kind of jerk who does not want to be called out for watching somepony,” I replied. “Can you please get up? I would rather not draw any more attention to ourselves, especially from the Royal Guard. We still need to find a hotel. Yes, we made it to Canterlot, but I would much rather spend my time here in some semblance of comfort, and I know you do too. I may be a gemstone, but I do not need a nose to tell you that you are starting to smell.”
Her head slumped back into the boxes. “Could it wait a bit then? I still cahn’t tell which way’s up.”
“Lily, we have already spent too much time sitting around doing nothing,” I said with a groan. “I still cannot believe you stayed conscious after a hit like that.”
“Course I did! Gots me a thick skull, I do.”
“Yes, you are unbelievably thick sometimes, but at least it is working in your favor here.”
I paused.
“So can we leave now? I would like to remind you that I am incapable of moving myself, and I think that other pony should be back soon—”
I fell silent. Very slowly, the sound of hoofsteps echoing across the pavement grew louder and louder until its source finally rounded the corner.
“Oh, she’s right where I left her,” the charcoal mare said. “I almost expected her to be back on her hooves by now.”
The white pegasus shrugged. On his back was the stallion I explicitly warned Lily about. “I don’t think we were gone for too long. Maybe a couple minutes at most.”
The mare raised an eyebrow at him. “Really? Felt longer.”
One of Lily’s legs twitched in the air.
“Uhh, are you sure she’s alright?” The stallion trotted over to Lily, who was still on her back in the pile of cardboard boxes, and poked her with a hoof. “You did say she got hit pretty hard.”
Lily lifted her head out of the boxes again, her eyes slowly focusing on the stallion in front of her. “I’m fine, luv, don’chu worry ‘bout me. Oh, and you got him! Good show!”
The charcoal mare cleared her throat into a hoof. “Excuse me, ma’am, but uhh…” She paused, her eyes flickering over to me briefly. “We need to take a witness report from you, as the… victim.”
“Really now?” Lily said brightly. “I’ve never ‘ad somepony take a witness report from me before. Wha’ can I do you for?”
“Well first, uhh…” The mare gestured at the boxes crushed under Lily’s body, “we should probably get you off those boxes and somewhere more comfortable.”
“Oh, that’s convenient! Crystal was jus’ talkin’ about finding us a comfy place to sleep,” Lily said, and she rolled off her makeshift cardboard bed and onto her hooves. She stumbled around a bit, making me swing to and fro from where I hung around her neck.
“I-I didn’t quite mean it that way, miss uhh…” The unicorn mare kept looking down at me, and I was starting to feel particularly self-conscious. Sure, the gemstone itself was beautiful, but Lily turned me into an impromptu necklace by tying a loop of string around me and then holding it in place with a lot of masking tape.
Lily finally managed to find her balance and stand reasonably upright. “Oh, m’name’s Lilywater!” she said. “Wassyer name?”
The mare was paying way too much attention to me. Alarm bells rang in my mind, and I quickly stifled my magical signature.
Instantly, the mare’s gaze darted down to me. “Uhh… Overwatch. Corporal Overwa—”
The charcoal mare let out a tiny yelp when Lily attacked her with a hug, pressing me tightly between their bodies. I bristled at the sudden contact, surrounded on all sides by fluff and tape, but I kept silent, waiting for Lily to stop being Lily.
The stallion just laughed. “Looks like you two are getting along perfectly fine. I’ll drop this guy into one of the holding cells and start filling out the paperwork,” he said, already making his way out the front gate. “Turn in your reports at the guardhouse when you’re done! And take your break already!”
“W-wait!” Overwatch squeaked, as rigid as a board in Lily’s embrace, though thankfully, Lily let the unicorn go before too long, flashing her a wide grin.
Overwatch returned a strained smile. “S-so… my apartment’s just over there. I just need to ask you a few questions,” she said, taking a few hesitant steps away from Lily before walking back to her still-open door.
Lily followed close after, beaming. “Oh, is this t’ make sure I’m a good tenant?” she asked. “I’m a super clean pony! You don’t need t’ worry ‘bout me.”
“I-it’s not quite like that, ma’am. It’s about your incident with the stallion,” Overwatch said as she pushed the door open a bit further and trotted inside. “Here, take a seat.”
Lily’s expression quickly contorted into a frown as she carefully slid into a chair at the singular table in the room, dumping her saddlebags onto the ground with a loud chink of metal. “Oh, that icky-face. Wha’d you need t’ know ‘bout him?”
Overwatch closed the door behind her and sat in the seat opposite, her nose wrinkling as she took in Lily’s ripe scent. “Well, we can start with a few basic questions,” she said, levitating an empty sheet of paper, a quill, and a bottle of ink out of the worn saddlebags leaning against the wall. “So, tell me about the events leading up to… you getting hit, ma’am. Miss Lilywater, was it?”
Her eyes flickered down to me again.
“Yep, but’chu can call me Lily!” Lilywater replied. “So the events leadin’ up to that? Well see, I’d just arrived in Canterlot on a big steamy metal thing, and I was walkin’ down the street lookin’ for a place t’ stay when Crystal told me t’ avoid a certain neighborhood ‘cause there was some jerkfaces hiding around there.
“So I went t’ thinkin’, ‘why would somepony want t’ hide around in a neighborhood for no good reason?’ so I went up and asked him and then he did a ‘whoosh’ and hoofed me!”
Overwatch stared blankly at Lily for a moment before dipping her quill into the ink bottle and jotting a few notes down. “I see, and could you tell me who this ‘Crystal’ is?”
“Lilywater, I swear, if you throw me under the bus, I am going to—”
Lily plopped me on the table in front of her. “Oh, this is Crystal! She’s been m’ best friend ever since I swam into Baltimare.”
“Uh huh.” Overwatch wrote down a few more things. “Um, I don’t know how to say this, but uhh… you know your necklace might be… alive, right?”
“O’course she is! ’Ow else could she help me learn about the surface world?”
Overwatch blinked. “Could you…”
“Oh stop dancing around the issue, changeling.”
I felt a little smugness when she shrieked, backing away from the table so quickly that she nearly fell over her own chair. “Wh-who are you?” she stammered out, staring at me like I was an alligator. “And how did you know I was a uhh…”
“A changeling? I thought it was fairly straightforward, and you can call me Crystal, exactly as Lily told you,” I said calmly, “Judging by the lack of scrolls or scholarly material in your humble abode, I presumed you were not some powerful pony wizard in hiding, and from that, I could think of only one civilized creature that could detect my existence. Your reaction only confirmed it.”
The temperature in the room fell drastically. “Have a seat, changeling.”
She carefully obeyed, scooting her chair back into its proper place. “H-how are you in the hivemind?”
I mentally shrugged, cursing my lack of a usable physical form. “The hivemind of the changelings has always been a thing of magic, intrinsic to the race itself. As I am little more than magic at this point, it is simple for me to access and use your hivemind to communicate. Do not be too concerned, however. It is a trick that I can replicate with Lily here, and she is most certainly not a changeling, let alone a pony.”
Overwatch’s eyes turned up to Lily in horror, who was humming absentmindedly to herself and bobbing to a beat.
“She is as harmless as she is thick. The only thing she really knows how to do is poke her nose where it does not belong and vaguely follow directions. It would be best if you consider her as… another subset of the ponies.”
“I… see?”
“Just roll with it. I have found attempting to understand Lily to be unduly stressful.”
“Uhh, okay.”
“Anyways, disregarding my companion, I would like to know a bit more about you. You may dispel your disguise,” I said, my tone more akin to a command than a request. I was curious about the presence of changelings in Canterlot, to say the least. A touch of authority was generally a good way to guide the direction of a conversation and pry out the information I wanted.
Overwatch looked distinctly uncomfortable, and she crossed her forelegs. “Why?”
“I am well aware of the implications of asking a changeling to drop their disguise, but know that I do not wish any harm upon you.” I carefully let my emotional signature flow out again. Hopefully, a gesture of sincerity would help convince her. “I am merely curious. Long-time infiltrators tend to take acting like their masks to an almost subconscious level, and I find that speaking to their true selves gives a much better picture of who they are inside. We are quite safe here. For the sake of this conversation, I ask that you dispel your disguise of your own volition.”
She stayed silent, staring at me as if trying to see through whatever deception might be there, but after a lengthy period of silence, she breathed out a sigh and enveloped herself in green flames, leaving behind an unusually young female changeling. She lost about half a head’s height with her transformation, and the table was now a bit high for her, though with how she was acting, she might have been trying to sink under the table.
“Name and position?”
“Nym—” She quickly stifled the rest of her answer, but I noticed she straightened up as she was saying it, clearly well taught despite her age. Apparently responded well to authority too, though perhaps a bit too young to be properly skeptical of what authority to obey.
“You may choose to skip your name if you are uncomfortable, but I would at the very least like to know your role within the hive. I am well versed in hive hierarchy, and it would save me the trouble of deducing it myself. Of course, I could always just assume you are some talentless nymph and we can proceed from there.”
She sat just a little bit taller, though the effect was diminished by the table still being too high for her. It appeared her pride was a flaw I could potentially exploit later. “Well, you’re wrong there, ma’am. I used to be a ranger, but I’m serving in Canterlot as an infiltrator.”
“A ranger? Those relics? I thought those were all but gone. I certainly would have gotten rid of them,” I said. It was already unusual to send a changeling so young into the pony world, but to train a female in anything except love collecting or hive maintenance was even more unusual. “You said you were an infiltrator. What is your assignment here?”
Overwatch paused, fidgeting with the scarf around her neck, now much too oversized for her smaller body. She could literally bury her head in it if she wished. “I’m… not too sure about that. I was simply told that I had taken the place of one of the ponies they were planning to replace since I cast a memory spell, and that I was working with them now. They still haven’t told me what my purpose is.”
If I was not interested before, I certainly was now. Too many things were not adding up, and there was too much being left unspoken. She was being vague, and I suspected she knew little more than she was already revealing. I would have to get the exact circumstances around her reassignment later.
The memory spell she mentioned disturbed me. I had a feeling Canterlot was going to be important even when I sat at the bottom of Horseshoe Bay back in Baltimare, and something about this was starting to smell very fishy.
Something other than Lily.
“Cor, you ‘ave two bedrooms?” a cheerful voice called out from the adjacent hallway. “Who else is sleepin’ here?”
Overwatch let out another yelp, twisting around to look at the green pony. “J-just me, but you’re not supposed to… How did…” Her head swiveled back and forth between the merpony and the empty chair across from her.
“Ahh, so you have an extra room, do you?” I plowed forward. “How much to rent it out?”
“Wha? But i-it’s not for rent!”
“Money is not an issue,” I reassured. “Lily! Get back here and throw our saddlebags on the table so that I may better state my point.”
“Awww, but have you seen the bathtub here? It’s huuuge!” Lily whined, but she came back anyways, lifting up her bags with her mouth and tossing them onto the table, very nearly missing me. It fell with the same rattling metal chink as before, and I watched with amusement as Overwatch’s eyes widened in sudden realization.
“Yes, I mentioned earlier that Lily is very good at following instructions. Turns out, there are quite a few gamblers in the casinos all too eager to take advantage of a poor, ignorant mare like Lily. Rather unfortunate that they are so unpracticed at keeping their own excitement under check, so I gave Lily a few pointers, and well… Their emotions were very easy to read, enough that a changeling like you could theoretically do just the same.”
“Whoa whoa, hold on,” Overwatch said. “I never said anything about how the room was for rent. It used to be my parents’, and—”
“Lily will not move a single thing in that room, believe me.”
“B-but—”
“You have nothing to fear from us, and we will try not to get in your way too much. I would very much like to have this room without having to resort to more underhooved tactics.”
“I uhh, well…” She finally let out a groan, mumbling into her scarf. “Fine, I guess you can…”
“Excellent! I can start laying down our payment plan. Now, you needed to turn in a witness report for Lily’s accident with that stallion, did you not? I can speak with Lily about our arrangement in the meantime.”
“Well, okay then.” Overwatch pouted, but trotted over to the bathroom before reapplying her disguise. I noticed it took her a few tries to completely remove all traces of her being a changeling.
When she trudged out again, I called to her. “Overwatch.”
She looked at me, a hint of a slouch in her posture, but she straightened up a bit as she approached me.
“I realize that I may have been very forceful in pushing for my extended stay here, but I must emphasize that I will not hurt you or your hive. I have… a personal interest in Canterlot, and while I cannot tell you exactly what it is, I believe your room here will provide me a unique vantage point with which to observe it. I wish for nothing else but to get along with you, Overwatch, and I hope you can try to relax around me and Lily.”
A little diplomacy can go a long way, and I did not wish to deal with the potential problems Overwatch’s trepidation could present. Best to endear myself and Lily to her now before she is tempted to act against my cause, whatever it may happen to be. I pushed her into agreeing to let me stay, but if I wanted to cement my residency, I needed to tread carefully.
I noted with some satisfaction as she gave me a wan smile. “I’ll try, Crystal,” Overwatch said as she trotted over to her door and opened it. “I’ll try to be back soon after I get all the paperwork done. It shouldn’t take too long, but reports sometimes take up more time than anypony expects. See ya soon!”
“Farewell then, Overwatch.”
The door closed behind her, and there was a soft click of the lock. Now, I had to deal with the other issue.
“Lily, get your head out of the refrigerator and take a bath already.”
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Hah. Merpony taking a bath. Pfffft.
Overwatch, er, Nymph, er, whatever is in trouble with Crystal basically taking over. Maintaining her cover is one thing, dealing with another authority figure is way beyond her experience (personally meeting Celestia would probably be even worse). Her handlers aren't going to be happy. I never had much interest in Twiny, but a prequel about this character interests me, so just read up on all the chapters. Inexperienced changeling with a head full of pony memories and now a new roommate, so many ways this could go.
Crystal calls Overwatch "Nymph" near the end, even though she never finished saying her real name. Not sure if that's an accident or not.
7334731
Oh shit. Fixed.
Yeah, now I really wonder what the purpose was for Nymph being out in the field like she was. I know that it's because she's young, but she really is kind of a pushover. She just doesn't seem like she was actually as ready as being put on the mission makes her seem.
Also, I really wanted to see Lily's reaction to Nymph.
7334259
I've never been near one, but I've heard from several people that out of the water, dolphins reek. Maybe Lily has that in common with them.
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Lily is eternally distracted. I considered the idea that she might have seen Nymph as a nymph, but then it just completely disappeared by the time I got back onto a computer. Awk. I'll probably have to set that up later and say that Lily was more interested in the giant bathtub than the adorable ling. It wouldn't be quite out of character.
Nymph is a pretty big pushover at the moment. I'm not sure if you're familiar with the Twiny continuity at all, but one of my goals with this was to build her up into how she was at the beginning of that storyline, which means basically trying to turn her from a scared, subserviant child to a confident independent adult. With a few life experiences and some guidance from the other characters in here, I think I can make it happen convincingly. Key word is "think" though. I'll probably just end up writing and seeing what happens.
Also, I'm surprised not more people have tried to guess who/what Crystal is yet. Here, I was worried I made it too obvious
7334769
Since this is from Crystal’s POV, you might need to change this as well.
Oh, and
7335291
Hmm… as to who Crystal is, it looks like she’s a former changeling queen, imprisoned for… an incident related to the sirens? Or maybe she was already imprisoned when the siren fiasco occurred. I’unno, I’m not the author!
7335766
Excellent. Always need more fuel for the theorists.
Ooh, thanks for the catches, by the way. Got through those. The more recent scene had a fairly decent overhaul, and I must have missed a bunch of those slips.
An interesting character.
It's an enjoyable read so far.
Edit: And I've got a pretty good idea of who Crystal is, but that's only because, much like Overwatch in Twiny, the few hints you've included are solid enough groundwork to pick it up.
I'm not saying though; I don't want to spoil it for the others or give you ideas if I'm wrong.
Umm. A thick skulled airhead? And an entity bent on revenge. Reading a chapter a week doesnt give me the incentive to put things together. Neither do I have the time to reread the chapter at the moment. Sorry,
A glorious one. Loving both Nymph and
TracerLily so far, by the way.Well, I guess you can say that I'm hooked regarding all this fishy stuff. Let's just hope that Overwatch doesn't get caught by the other changelings. *waggles eyebrows for emphasis*
But seriously, I really enjoyed the story so far, can't wait for more. Also sorry not sorry about the terrible puns.
7361287
. Even then, I feel fairly good in saying that this story would still be mostly canon even taking into account any plot twists I decide to pull. You're right that this story works well as a stand alone, and it's honestly what I'm hoping for, if only so people don't get turned away just because they think they need to read through that story before they read this one. (There's a reason I didn't put any references to Twiny here :P)
The story is mostly canon with the Twiny continuity until I decide to do a silly and go completely sideways
This story was conceived way after those events were written, so I'm not surprised that there may be some roadbumps. Looking back at those two spots you mentioned, I don't think it's entirely unfeasible that they could have happened with this fic in mind. By the time NMM showed up, Overwatch has gotten fairly good at remaining unnoticed when she wanted to, so avoiding Redheart wouldn't be entirely out of the picture, and everything Steelie said in the Everfree would still work in a setting where he remembered the incident.
As for when Nymph became so casual with her metaphors, half of the reason why this fic exists is to build her up into that type of changeling
EDIT: Nearly forgot. This is about fifteen years before NMM. Might also help explain some stuff.
Splish Splash I was taking a bath!
Fish sticks!
Well, Crystal certainly knows how to get shit done.