Pearl's Travels 1: Hollow Shades

by Makitk

04

It was a long day of being taught about all the different reasons why 'we' should remain as covert as possible, why we needed love to survive, and how ponies were better prey to target for obtaining it than random animals. There were some repeats in the lecture thanks to some new arrivals from some late-bloomers from our 'batch', allowing me ample time to stuff this new knowledge into my brain.

After the teacher was done, we were quickly ushered out into the next room; one bigger than the classroom had been, but still smaller than the cavernous hatching room. Several mirrors were set along the walls, with an equal number of ponies sat next to them.

The ponies were chained to the floor and looked utterly dismayed; their coats barely shining as vibrant as those of the two who had captured me, the matron of the pod room, or the filly example of the teacher in the previous room.

It was clear these were prisoners as much as we were, but clearly for different reasons than those for which we had been sent here.

A sudden flash sparked from a dark corner of the room and one of my brothers (or sister? I still could not clearly distinguish between us) yelped in pain, rolling on the floor while nursing their right forehoof with which they had attempted to undo one of the ponies' chains a moment ago.

"Theze poniez are not to be freed; they are your ztudy materialz," a painfully high-pitched voice called out, and a long-legged tall pony walked out of the darkness.

She looked much like one of the Alicorn princesses; having both a horn and wings, but was as thin as she could come; her bone structure was showing clear through the thin skin laid over them.

Her coat was a sickly white with a green hue to it, her slitted eyes a sharp green which appeared lit from within. She set them upon each of us "hatchlings" in turn, reaching out a spindly forehoof to motion us toward a mirror and pony pairing.

"You, there. You, to there," she pointed out in this fashion, and I walked on over to the Earthpony stallion I was assigned to.

The stallion's caramel-coloured coat was almost fully faded to grey, his eyes had dark rings under them, and he barely looked up as I approached.

"Hey," I spoke as I drew near, but the only response I received was that he set his auburn eyes upon me from under the overhang of his reddish-grey mane.

"How many of us have you seen, since you got here?" I asked softly, glancing at the tall alicorn via the mirror. She reminded me more and more of one of the horses of the apocalypse as I watched her.

"Too many," he whispered, pushing up from his seated position to stand in a faux-proud pose. "And every one of you acts like you give a damn about our situation... but none of you return to do something about it. Damn the lot of you."

"I'll hold off on making empty promises then," I sighed. "I wish it was different."

"You and me both. Now do that thing you do where you look like me and make that tyrant happy so you can move on and I can get a few minutes of sleep in," he grumbled.

I thought back at the teacher from the previous room and the theory he had taught us, and looked the stallion over. He really looked like he had been here a while, and I could not help but feel sorrow and guilt well up in me.

"Now, tranzform!" the high-pitched voice from the faux alicorn rang out, but I just couldn't. I felt too guilty for being one of these Changelings myself, now. One of the race who had captured these ponies.

I looked around myself and saw the other hatchlings look around as well. None had transformed into a copy of the ponies they had been assigned to.

The alicorn mare had walked up to the center of the room and was looking around at us as well, but I realized she was smiling - no, grinning.

"Zo, you cannot tranzform, can you? You hatchlingz feel too much emotion for theze poniez, do you?" she mocked us, and I caught a flash of green from my peripheral vision as well as throughout the room. "Look again at theze poniez."

I already saw what I did not want to see right now, but as I turned back for the 'stallion' who had stood beside the mirror moments ago, I was greeted with the face of a Changeling like me. Just like every other hatchling had found their assigned ponies to have shown their true selves to them.

"Every one of you iz the zame," the mare laughed evilly. "You feel too much for what iz our prey. You muzt let go of theze feelingz and realize what it iz you need from them. Why you need to look like them. Becauze you will die if you don't learn to blend in."

The Changeling before me grinned their fangs bare, and I just stared at them in disbelief. "Why?"

"Because you need to feed," they responded in a surprisingly feminine voice, reaching out with a forehoof to touch my right cheek. "You may hate our methods, now, but they are effective. Normally we are taught these things while we sleep in our pods, while we grow into nymphs, and work our way into adulthood."

I fell back on my rear end and shook my head a little, faintly hearing similar conversations around me.

"You don't have the luxury of years; you have to learn this in a few short days. And it falls on us to guide you," the other spoke softly, undoing their chains. "While you remain with us, you're our sister and we all care for you. We don't have the kind of love for you that could feed you, but we do care."

The other Changeling moved to wrap her forehooves around my neck and pulled me into a cold hug - our insectoid bodies simply not producing as much heat as my human body had before.

"Are we all done with the pleazantriez?" the mock-alicorn mare demanded, and 'my' Changeling snorted.

"Back to business. Just follow my lead, okay? Call me Oval if you need a name to hold onto," she offered as she pulled back from me.

I stared in her blue eyes and then dropped mine. "I have read so much fanfiction. There are so many names there; responses to earthly names, mockup names like "anon" and the like. I don't know what name I could give you which won't lead to some kind of trouble in the future."

"Then don't give me a name, sister," Oval offered with a smile. "We use the names of the ones we mimic when we need to do so anyway. It's only a bother to try to remember one name among a million."

"So, why Oval then?" I queried, pushing up again into a standing position since Oval was standing as well and I had been prompted to follow her lead.

"I can't fully round one of my pupils, no matter how much I try," she revealed, pointing at her fully blue bug-like eyes before realizing what she was doing. A green flash passed over her and a white mare with a deep black mane stood before me, grey pupils staring at me. As said, her right pupil was slightly more oval than her left.

"It's barely noticeable," I remarked.

"Yeah, especially to ponyfolk," Oval agreed. "We have some perfectionistic family members who will notice if a single strand of hair is misaligned however. That's why I was called over to help here."

"Ah. So, I'll just try to look like you, then?" I wondered, and Oval gave a quick nod.

"It's really much easier than it sounds at first;" Oval explained, motioning her right forehoof through the air in a bit of a circular motion, "you just sorta picture your target and push that image onto your own body. The rest is sorta automatic."

I looked Oval over a bit more, tried to form a picture in my head of how she looked, and closed my eyes. In my head I could see Oval as the white-and-black pony with the grey eyes, almost like a 3D printer preview image.

"Got the picture?" Oval wondered.

"I think so. Now just put it over myself?" I replied with a nod, my eyes still closed.

"Over the representation of you in your mind, yeah," Oval agreed.

I pondered that a moment, realized I still felt like a human on the inside, and let out a sigh of resignation.

"It's just... I've been a human for thirty-odd years," I offered softly, mentally replacing the image of a human with that of Oval's pony mimicry. "Farewell life... hello life?"

Oval let out a soft chuckle at that, but hummed after. Her humming was not so much a "hmm" as a response to something, or a hum-hum-humming of a tune... but more like she got stuck halfway through letting out a hum-hum-humming kind of hum and passed on into a hmm in the way of responding to something.

I opened my eyes to watch her scrutinize me, her head moving from left to right a bit as she looked me over at different angles.

"What?" I wondered, looking past her at the mirror to see a sort of half-Changeling, half-Earthpony with patches and blotches of fur and bare skin mixing randomly across my features.

"Yeah, so, you may need to focus a bit more on that mental image of me," Oval offered with a chuckle.

"Damn. And I don't know if I wiped my human identity out just now or whatever else it was that I did," I sighed, thoroughly annoyed at myself.

"Don't worry; if you get good enough at this you'll probably be able to mimic your old human self as well," the other Changeling suggested honestly.

I held my thoughts to myself, but the idea of a Changeling coming back to Earth and posing as the human they once were struck me with fascination and fear at the same time.

Nothing about my arrest had made sense. Hasbro didn't hunt down people like that; they did what they could to let their fanbase have their fun, because it led to more sales of their toy products.

The trial had been a great big farce, and I was unsure how much my lawyer had known about this practice before it unfolded before him. Being taken to this place in the middle of nowhere which so happened to serve as some gateway into Equestria could have almost been an expected outcome after that.

Oval tilted her head at me. "Hey sister? If you don't focus on the task at hoof we're not going to get anywhere with this."

I snapped back to attention. "Sorry, I was lost in thought a moment."

"Don't apologize to me; you're the one who's going to feel it when you don't feed," Oval smirked. "I just aim to help you get the best start with this."

"Yeah, yeah, I know. Let me try again," I returned, pushing my heavy thoughts to the back of my mind and trying again to picture Oval fully.