Chapter 18 - An Audience
Party Popper opened her eyes just a little as the cage she was in thumped against the floor.
Cage…? she thought groggily. They've captured me…
"What's this?" asked a harsh voice, familiar yet unfamiliar through the haze.
"Your Highness," said somepony just above her, a more genuinely familiar voice that Party Popper couldn't place, "We are under attack!"
Highness… That's right… They've captured me, and now Twilight is going to kill me…
"WAIT!" a third voice shouted behind her. Clypeus? "It's all a misunderstanding, Your Highness."
Party Popper opened her eyes the rest of the way as everything came back to her. She was in a large room in the changeling hive, held in a cage made of Cuticle's lower body. In the middle of the room sat an enormous throne, upon which a tall changeling stood. Between her size, stature, slitted eyes and weblike mane and the way she was being addressed, Party Popper didn't need Pinkie Pie's knowledge of the mare to know who she was.
Queen Chrysalis.
"What?" Cuticle said to Clypeus. "Are you saying this pony was telling the truth when she said she came with you?"
"Explain yourself, Clypeus," Chrysalis demanded.
"Sh-she's not a pony—" Clypeus began stammering.
"I found her," Mandible said as the rest of the squad followed Clypeus into the throne room. Chrysalis turned her gaze to him. "This is… Proboscis, Your Highness. I found her while draining love in Manehattan, with her form frozen as Pinkie Pie. She was going to give away our presence, looking like that, so I brought her back to the squad."
Party Popper winced as the Queen's slitted eyes turned to her. "Um… hiya. Your Highness."
"We decided it would be best to bring her with us on our return to the hive," Frons said, "so that she could request your help to unfreeze her form."
Chrysalis frowned and was about to say something when a growl came from Popper's right. Gena.
"You are all buzzing idiots!" she said, looking towards Mandible, Clypeus and Frons.
Labrum, in the back, stopped laughing. Why had he been laughing to begin with? Nothing about this was funny.
"She's not a changeling!" Gena asserted. "No changeling I've ever met could ever be that incompetent! Spiracle is a more believable changeling than this pink maggot."
Clypeus winced.
"She can't shapeshift, she can't act, she can barely lie. She almost sabotaged us multiple times, probably on purpose. She didn't even buzzing know where the hive was, let alone how to navigate it! And Proboscis is almost as obviously a fake name as buzzing Valvula!"
"Hey, I used to know a Val—" Frons interjected, but Gena cut him off.
"Your Highness, I don't know why Pinkie Pie decided to tag along with us, but the way I see it, all she did was give us the chance to hoof her over to you."
Welp.
Silence reigned as everypony in the room looked between Gena and Party Popper, except for Clypeus, who looked down at the floor. Chrysalis' gaze remained steady on Party Popper, and Popper thought she could see a small smile on her mouth. A sinister smile.
The Queen raised her insectoid wings and flew off her throne, landing a short distance in front of Cuticle and Party Popper. "Move out of the way, but keep her from running," she told Cuticle.
The bars of the cage morphed into hooves and Cuticle withdrew to guard the main entrance. There was no need. Party Popper was frozen to the spot under the Queen's gaze, shivering.
She didn't even move as Chrysalis' horn lit up with sickly green magic. The magic washed over Party Popper, tearing at every fiber of her being as though attempting to force her to reveal everything, every hidden nook and cranny and vein and nerve of her body.
The magic faded. Nothing had happened.
Yet Chrysalis' smile broadened into the creepiest grin Party Popper had ever seen. "You were right," she said, still looking at Party Popper. "This is the real Pinkie Pie."
"P-Pinkie Pie? Who's that?" Party Popper tried. It was worth a shot, even if it had never worked.
Chrysalis laughed. It was a sinister, but genuine laughter, the kind somepony let out after not laughing for a very long time and then getting the best news of the year. "Cuticle, cocoon her!"
Party Popper tried to scramble to her hooves, but Cuticle was too quick for her. Before she knew it, Popper was being pushed down to the floor again – though thankfully not by a bear this time – as Cuticle began producing a slimy green substance from somewhere. Though she had never learned it, Popper knew the substance was used to hold prisoners and hang them from the ceiling.
Squad 833 were watching, quietly. Frons and Mandible looked mildly shocked, and even Labrum had a serious look on his face. By comparison, Gena's smug smile at the sight felt like a bear's baton to the face.
Clypeus was the only one who looked worried about her.
"Labrum," Chrysalis continued while Cuticle was working, "I need a skilled infiltrator for this job, one who knows laughter. I want you to travel to Canterlot and take Pinkie Pie's place among the Bearers. Do what you can to sabotage anything they might use against us at the Festival of Love."
Labrum simply nodded. No laughter, no remorse, no anything other than confident subservience to his Queen.
"Go via gateway. Our spies in Canterlot will be told to make contact."
Gateway?
"As for you," Chrysalis said in a significantly darker tone, staring straight at Clypeus. "Do you honestly think somepony can be Queen of a hive full of deceitful shapeshifters for as long as I have and not learn how to spot a liar?"
"I–" Clypeus said, but he couldn't find the words to defend himself.
"You knew what she was and attempted to deceive me. Poorly! Not only do you betray my trust, you insult your Queen by doing it so transparently that a larva would figure it out. Mandible! Cocoon him as well."
"Yes, Your Highness," said Mandible, looking very uncomfortable.
"Wait, Mandible, no!" Clypeus pleaded.
But Mandible was already on the task, strategically starting by sticking the cocoon substance to Clypeus' hooves and the floor so he would have a hard time moving.
Cuticle finished Party Popper's cocoon and lifted her up by it.
"The rest of you can go and train," Chrysalis said. "We have an invasion to prepare for."
Her laughter echoed through the throne room as Party Popper was carried away.
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The iniltrator will be very confused to find Pinkie Pie still there
Sonuvabitch. You had that sitting there staring us in the face the whole time. I'm assuming your laughter was at least as maniacal as Chrysalis' in this chapter.
10639923
Mwahaha.
Seriously, though, I never actually meant for people to think this was the end, and only recently started noticing that they might be thinking that. When I started the story, I actually intended for this to be an early development, with not much of note happening between meeting the squad and meeting Chrysalis.
But then I took a detour into the police station to get to know the cast, and realized Ponyville was along their path to where I wanted the hive to be, and it snowballed from there.
I'm very much a pantser, for better and worse, even when I've got an outline. My characters don't always obey that outline – for example, Popper wasn't supposed to be unconscious going into this chapter, but I needed her to break off and meet Cuticle, and that was how Cuticle ended up bringing her here.
Similarly, Valvula finding out about Popper wasn't part of the original plan at all, which is why I had to make it so her intel didn't make it to Chrysalis immediately and ruin this scene.
Sooo yeah. I'm a bit of a hack sometimes, but it leads to some fun places too. I personally think the chapter dealing with the Valvula issue is the best one in the story so far, so it's not all bad when stuff like that happens.
10639883
Mind, the only pony surprised that Pinkie Pie is in two places at once will be Pinkie herself.
Hold up here something doesnt make sense here. If Chrissy looked into "Poppers" memory's she should have ALSO seen that "Popper" is a clone of Pinkie, as well as the destruction of the other clones.
10640022
Yes, she would have, but that's not what that spell was. Chrysalis can do more magic than your average changeling, but I don't think it would make sense for her to have memory-reading in her arsenal. It would have helped her a lot in A Canterlot Wedding if she could do that.
What I intended was for what she used here to be the same spell she used on Thorax in To Where and Back Again, part 2, to reveal him when she realized he was disguised as Starlight. It did nothing because she's not a changeling, so Chrysalis concluded that Gena was right.
Ironically, this was also what Mandible brought Popper along for – that spell would have fixed her issue if she had been a changeling whose form was "frozen" the way Mandible thought.
I mean, tactically speaking, Chrysalis isn't out of line to order this as punishment--he had effectively endangered the hive by playing along.
But that said, I don't know if this order will be all that well received by the others...but we'll see.
Whenever do you don't, Chrysalis? And I'm sure you're positive this one will be the one that actually succeeds this time too, don't you?
Of course, what she doesn't know is that replacing Pinkie Pie is going to be a bit hard when there's already a Pinkie Pie filling that role...and that's going to be the real lynchpin in all of this, isn't it?
So marks the beginning of the mayhem, but we have yet to see what the mayhem will be. Hope it's something that would make Discord cry with joy!
Oh boy, this is going to go poorly.
Maybe if you can explain to her I'm sure she will understand party popper
Oh dear this is really not good at all I knew the truth will come out that they know that party popper is not a changeling but she's not lying that she's not the real Pinkie Pie but they don't believe her so now she got herself cocoon but not only that apparently Clypeus now it's facing the consequences as well I wonder how they're going to get themselves out of the situation