The Roses of Success

by HypernovaBolts11

Chapter VI - Captured

Fangheart stood in a line of roughly a dozen ponies, which accounted for all of the prisoners taken in by the hive that day —nothing compared to the usual gross under his mother's leadership. Stoic Saber was standing behind him, followed by the other guard, and then a bat pony, who had been wearing a very convincing changeling costume on the trip here.

He stepped forward as the pony at the front of the line was escorted down the tunnel that he knew connected to the prisoners' city, more colloquially known as the kitchen, because it contained all of the food. All but a few of the prisoners lived there permanently, and every single prisoner at least got their start here. This was the Manehattan Harbor of the changeling world, where immigrants from all walks of life began their journey.

This was where every prisoner lived at first, with a month spent free of changeling interaction so they could adjust to their new lives, before they were provided opportunities to serve the hive, from nursing the grubs and hatchlings, to feeding the masses on a velvet cushion.

He tried not to think about it. It all reminded him of his mother, and the many hours he'd spent at her side, watching the feasts begin, observing the many habits and nuances of these activities, so that he could someday show her what he had learned. But he never would now. He would never commit to his queen, as he had always been taught to dream of.

And then there had been that one pony, that powerfully enthused terran equine, who had made him forget all about the queen, who had whisked him away on the clouds, who had come into his life as a servant of the hive, and whose destiny had been untied from his on one of the worst days of his life.

He couldn't think about it. He couldn't think about Pick. She was probably off doing her own thing with the Matriarch. There was no way the leader could overlook her. There had been reason behind his mother's decision to move her into a suite next to his, and permit her to retire from service, to serve him in the most beautiful ways.

He shook his head forcefully, trying to dispel the memories, and reminded himself that he didn't love her, because he truly never had, and she had never loved him. They had been doing what was natural, and normal by the standards of the hive. Young drones could take concubines, so he had. Even if he had only ever married that one, they had both shared multiple partners between them, and with one another.

He had never loved her. There was no love in that union, but it had been fun, and he had enjoyed it.

She had once said that he was the most tender changeling she'd ever met, and that he was free to do as he pleased with her. And oh, he had.

The spy in front of him waved a hoof in his face, and Fangheart blinked away the hearts from his eyes. Sighing, he slipped into the royal changeling language again, "I'm sorry. What?"

The matured soldier narrowed its eyes at him, and spoke in pony tongue, "Quarterling? Been here before?"

He panicked, and instantly did everything his mother and Twilight had taught him about making a good alibi.

First, don't panic.

Too late. Move on. Hurry.

Second, assess the question.

Quarterlings were the result of a disguised changeling mating with a non changeling creature of the same species as their disguise. They produced as much love energy as normal non changelings, and could learn to speak changeling from the hive mind if brought to the hive during their infancies.

He wasn't a quarterling, but knew for a fact that he did produce significantly more emotional energy than a normal disguised changeling.

Then there was the issue of having spoken in the royal tongue. Quarterlings didn't learn that on accident. He could say that he had learned parts of it from the last drone on a night spent together.

Third, don't give more information than you have to.

No one escaped the hive once they got in, unless they were serving the hive as an infiltrator or spy, or got kicked out.

Fourth, speak calmly.

"Halfling," he said cooly, "Got kicked for using the royal tongue in front of the queen."

Technically, the first part wasn't a lie, so long as one stretched the definition of halfling to fit any changeling hybrid that wasn't a quarterling, rather than just the hybrid children of undisguised soldiers.

His mother hadn't been disguised for his conception —don't ask how he knew— and his father had been an alicorn. He gave off less emotional energy than a full pony, and less than a quarterling, but could be of functional use to the hive if it ran low on able bodied workers.

The second part was basically unprovable, because the queen was dead, and all of her memories were locked away in her personal hive mind, which no one could access without her horn, which Twilight had back at home.

The spy snorted at him, and lifted his right foreleg up in front of it. It placed its horn to the brand new magic shackle around his hoof, and carefully moved the shackle around so the tip of its horn traced intricate shapes on the thick metal ring. "Name?" it scoffed at him.

"Fangheart," he said immediately. "Could it be arranged that my cell is neighboring to those of the three stallions behind me?" He glanced over his shoulder at Stoic Saber, who was looking at him in a state of bafflement. "This one looks tasty," he explained, licking his lips suggestively, causing the former guard to take a step away from him.

The spy continued to move the shackle about, inscribing its bearer's name and race on the bonds that he would bear for the entirety of his life, unless he behaved incredibly well and served the hive extremely often, in which case he would be fitted with a featherweight earring, which looked really cool.

The soldier looked up at him when it was done, and nodded as it guided the grey pegasus to be weighed and measured by a group of other spies, who then engraved his dimensions on the shackle. "Come back in a month early in the morning," one of them told him.

"Can't we just get to the more intimate measurments now?" Fangheart whined.

It was standard policy for every prisoner to be measured before they began their services to the hive, especially their more private features, as much of the voluntary work involved some form of intimacy, from feasts to feeding individual visitors at one's doorstep. Of course, prisoners did grow older, and creatures born in captivity weren't first measured so thoroughly until they reached maturity, and then periodically after that.

His false identity would have known these things, as it would have already been through this process before, though he actually knew a lot more than it would have. For example, he knew that they told prisoners to come back in the morning so that they didn't always have to put on a show in order to do their job.

One of the infiltrators overseeing the entry process gave him a sultry look, and he smiled goofily as another changeling guided him out of the processing room, where he waited in the wide tunnel for his new neighbors.

Stoic Saber came first, followed by his partner, and then the bat pony, and they were all led through the torchlit tunnel as a single group. When they emerged into daylight, all three ponies allowed their jaws to drop, whereas Fangheart didn't give the place a second glance. Both he and his persona had been here a hundred times, and didn't behold it with as much awe as the others did.

The prisoners' city was deep underground, about a kilometer or so beneath the surface, which had been replaced by a large fake terrain made of what was basically one way glass, allowing sunlight and starlight alike to be viewed as though from the surface world, but not so much of the former as to get anyone sunburned.

The walls were made of a black stone, and formed an ellipse, which was two kilometers long and a bit more than one and a half wide, around the center the city, stretching the whole distance between the city and its great ceiling. Lined with many torches and hundreds of kilometers of stone railings tall enough to keep anyone from doing something crazy, a single platform about four meters across spiraled down from the top of the large cavern, maintaining a constant distance of five meters from the platform above it —which was actually the same one— and at an angle close enough to horizontal that no one noticed how tilted it was unless the looked out across the city, and at the platform on the other side.

At one of the sharper ends of the ellipse, the platform met the base of the cavern, and gave way to a plane of soil. From that, an earthen road stretched across the primary axis of the ellipse, splitting into circles around the school and arcade, which each sat on a different focus of the ellipse.

At the very center of the city, stood the marketplace, which the main road formed a box around and cut through. It was about half a kilometer long, and just as wide, lined with wooden stands and full of ponies —who looked tiny from half a kilometer up. It was surrounded by other stores; a salon, a bakery, et cetera.

Apple trees and grassy clearings took up almost half of the ground down there, and creatures dotted the landscape, with children of all species playing in the grass and climbing the trees to collect apples. A clean blue river flowed roughly perpendicular to the main road, cutting it between the market and the arcade, where it became a quaint wooden bridge.

Always level with the long platform, and equidistant from one another, regular hexagon shaped holes lined the wall, each two ponies in height, with a flat edge lining up with the platform. One in every eleven of them was replaced with a similarly sized archway, a torchlit tunnel leading to a different level of the spiral.

These were the homes. Each hole led to a different home, one for each person, save for the families, which lived closest to the ground so the children didn't have to walk very far to attend school, and in larger suites. The bottom two floors were dedicated to families, and a few orphanages.

Their guide paused to speak with them and take questions, most of which Fangheart ignored, before leading them up one of the nearby tunnels to their new homes, four neighboring suites, each with four rooms, kitchen, bedroom, restroom, and living room. The entrance led directly into the living room, which was a square prism, about twice as wide as the door was, with a couch, coffeetable, desk, and chair.

From the inside looking out, the entrance made up the right half of the front wall, and the left half had a cute one way window. The wall to the left was the same off black as everything else, bland, with the far right quarter cut out to connect with the bedroom. The back wall was missing its far left quarter, and then the horizontal third of its left half, which gave way for a counter between the kitchen and the living room. The right wall was blank.

From inside the bedroom, which was three fourths as wide and just as long as the living room, looking towards the living room, the front wall was blank, save for its missing far left quarter. The left wall had a circular one way window with a pair of yellow curtains, decorated with outlines of white flowers. The back wall had nothing going on, save for a small mattress and a nightstand running parallel to its left corner. The right wall was missing its left third, which contained a wooden door leading to the bathroom.

The bathroom wasn't spectacular, with its far right third being taken up by a bathtub and shower, and the sink and mirror located just next to that. It was a pretty boring room, as far as Fangheart was concerned, with the right half of the left wall being taken up by another door to the kitchen.

The kitchen was twice as wide as it was long, with a small stove and fridge located along the back wall, and then a sink and cubboards to the left of them.

Of course, not all of the suites were identical. The furniture and decorations varied from home to home, but they all had the same internal structure, and were each built for one person, and an occasional overnight guest to feed. The family suites were larger, and very different, but they were similar in design, being small enough to be cute, but large enough to live in.

Fangheart quickly shuffled the other three stallions into his designated suite, and sat them down in his bedroom. He sighed, and asked, "Okay, does anyone have any questions for me? I can tell you that I know a thing or two about this place, and how life works in the hive."

The three stallions exchanged nervous glances, before Stoic spoke up, "You called yourself a halfling back there. What does that mean?"

"My biological father was a changeling," he told him. "Halflings are the offspring of a changeling soldier and another creature, a pony, in my case. Soldier doesn't mean what you're thinking. It means one of the biological classes of changelings. Soldiers are hermaphroditic, and capable of reproducing with anything except for other changelings. And believe me, some have tried."

"Unfortunately, halflings tend to be near perfect clones of their non changeling parent, with a few changeling quirks thrown in. For example, I could easily get a nice meal if I just kissed you, a buffet if I let you mount me," he said, sticking to his new persona as best he could, as rowdy as possible without actually scaring anyone.

His case was probably helped by the hidden behavioral spells and pheromones that hung around the prisoners' city, raising the prisoners' sex drives and mildly suppressing fear reactions to changelings. They all took about a month to fully set in, which was largely why they were given a month to themselves after being captured, as opposed to say, three weeks, which was plenty of time to get used to living with a free arcade.

The changelings didn't tell their prisoners that, but he had been the queen's confidant, so, again, he knew a lot more about this place than maybe even some of the changelings guarding it did.

"How'd that happen exactly?" Stoic asked.

"It's a long story. Dad found mom after she got kidnapped and dragged all the way here from Las Pegasus. She spent a night at a feast, and someone wasn't in their right mind, if you know what I mean," he said, spinning his hoof around in a circle next to his head. "Long story short, here I am."

"Quarterlings?" the bat pony asked.

"What happens when you accidentally mate with a changeling in disguise," he said quickly. "Gimme another one."

"Queens?" the unicorn asked.

"All dead. Don't worry about it," he said.

"Drones?" Stoic asked.

"Only one left, that changeling you let out of his cell," he said.

Stoic winced at that, and asked, "How do you know it was a drone, or the last one for that matter?"

"Oh, I know him. Nice lay, that guy. Next," he said, mentally patting himself on the back for complimenting himself while leaving room for knowledge of his escape.

The bat pony asked, "I've heard that lust makes changelings drunk. That's bogus, right?"

"No, actually, though your optimism is appreciated," he said.

"Can you transform," the unicorn asked.

"Only the external changeling bits, but I wouldn't right now. There's a fungal infection going around, grows through chitin, nasty stuff," he explained. He pointed a hoof at Stoic, who he guessed was about to ask how he knew so much, and said, "I may have intoxicated that drone I talked about earlier. It's a long story."

Stoic slowly closed his mouth, and asked, "What intimate measurements were you talking about earlier?"

He grinned, and said, "Here's the thing, Stoic, in a month, you're going to wake up, go down there, and a changeling is going to do at least one of two things with you."

The pegasus shuffled his forehooves on the floor uncomfortably, and asked, "I have a feeling you want me to ask what she'll do?"

"No," Fangheart said with a shake of his head.

Stoic relaxed a bit.

"I want you to ask me what it will do," he corrected him, and smiled again. "They're all hermaphrodites, unless they're genderless. But you'll probably see a soldier of some kind when you get there. Maybe it'll give you a lap dance, but it'll definitely put a number on your dignity."

All three stallions looked at each other, and then at him, blushing madly.

"The better question, gentlecolts, is am I going to wait a month for my next meal. Because it's gonna come from one of you, or..." He paused, letting them glance at one another nervously, and smiled slyly. "Ooh, all three at once would be fun," he said, and chuckled.

He blinked, and all but one of his guests had vanished out the door, likely into their own homes, leaving the flustered bat pony to sate his hunger alone. He chuckled at the increasingly uncomfortable stallion, and said, "Let's go see if the fridge has anything you'll eat. I don't let my guests starve, and why don't we chat for a bit? Don't worry. I'm not that hungry, and have yet to make your acquaintance."

Author's Note:

Changelings: A Summary isn't done yet. Sorry. I have summer camp this week, so I won't have much time to write. I only have a few hundred words in on the next chapter of this one, so I'll do what I can.
The next chapter is going to explain Fangheart's new persona in a bit more detail, along with the situation ethics of his... newly displayed sexual appetite, so don't hate on his behavior yet.

Comments

[tsaukpaetra]

Well at least he's setting up alibi. Wonder if Twilight is searching for him yet.
Keep going! ;)

[xDHannibalxD]

If Twilight manages to find him there, I'm hoping she's gonna turn that place upside down. Because while it sounds kinda nice, to me it's the devil in disguise. Or something like that.