The beginning of the end
Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.
Time was running short. There was a certain margin of error, of course, when it came to the schedule—there always was, when working with unreliable agents in the mix. That fact, however, did nothing to soothe Antenna's nerves. After all, what changeling wouldn't be afraid of Her?
Five minutes. Only five more minutes before the risk would outweigh the benefits. Antenna paced back and forth, heedless of the occasional stares thrown her way by other ponies. This was an important mission—no, a crucial one—and the best they could do was rely on luck? It was infuriating. It was miserable. It was an indignity that no proper changeling would stand for.
And yet, here they were. Thanks to Chrysalis.
Antenna didn't really like Chrysalis. She was a fine leader—no, a good one—but... She was rash. She was impatient. Her transformations were par none, but she had not the eye for detail. She wasn't good at deep infiltration, and she knew it—but she had pushed forward with her plan anyway.
Four minutes. Antenna stopped pacing to look around. Everything seemed fine still. Thunderlane buying flowers from a stall. A couple walking by, lost in each other's eyes. Lyra with her instrument, reclining on a bench. Nothing suspicious. No guards, in disguise or out. No magic lasers flying her way. And, most importantly, no mailmare that was supposed to be here ten minutes ago.
The plan in itself hadn’t been bad. However, the details of it certainly were. In particular, the fact that Chrysalis would be the one to take Cadance's place. Everyling had known it was not a good idea, but none dared voice the sentiment. They knew, and Chrysalis did too. That she had made it a part of the plan anyway, spoke volumes of her position on the matter.
Antenna was not surprised when the plan had failed. No, indeed, she had been half-expecting it. Thankfully, her job in Canterlot had been done weeks before the invasion, and as one of the best infiltrators, it was decided by the hive to keep her away, and hidden.
Three minutes. She started pacing once again.
The Canterlot fiasco by itself had been bad enough, certainly. Not only were many an established disguise burned—and even more changelings lost—now the ponies had a certainty of changeling's continued existence, they knew what to look out for. Changelings were being discovered one by one, singled out flawlessly by Her creation.
A spell, one so simple a foal could learn it, that could see through a changeling's lie, exploiting weaknesses in their disguise magic that they themselves knew not of.
Two minutes. Antenna surveyed her surroundings, making sure her path of retreat was still clear. She intended to wait out the window of time that she had to the last second, but that didn't mean she was going to be sloppy about it. She adjusted her tinkling saddlebags—full of all kinds of alchemical produce—and fluttered her wings to make sure she could fly at a moment’s notice.
She didn't need to check the watch hanging from her neck to know how much time she had left—she could hear it ticking, counting seconds down, but she lightly tugged at it nonetheless, playing with it with her hoof for a couple of seconds.
Indeed, their situation was dire, but it was surmountable as well. Changelings might not be the best at combat, but they were passable—certainly better than the average pony. More importantly, they knew how to run. They knew very well how to run away, and no one short of a professional would be able to catch a changeling on the run in any meaningful way.
More than that, they could always withdraw from Equestria altogether. It would be a terrible blow, one that would take decades to recover from, but it was preferable to extinction or capture. With time, they would be able to work out those imperfections that Her spellwork abused, and then they would be free to roam Equestria once more.
Provided She didn't create something worse.
A minute left. Antenna was now standing near the alley that she was going to retreat through. She scoffed. While she was hesitant to use the pre-planned path—seeing how close she was cutting it now—there wasn't really any space for improvisation, short of flying away at full speed.
No, everything up until recently wasn't a grave problem. That changed, however, about a week ago. That was the first time a changeling had gone missing. Not killed, no—his presence could still be felt in the hivemind. And not captured—all attempts at communication failed.
Missing. There, but also not. Within a thought's reach, yet inaccessible.
Ponies could've managed to block the connection, proposed one.
Impossible, chorused the Hive.
It was indeed impossible—but so was thought a spell which could reveal changelings.
A deserter, ventured another.
Impossible, chorused the Hive once again.
While indeed they were individuals—not a single organism, but rather many separate parts of a greater whole—it was practically impossible to hide something like a betrayal.
No more opinions were forthcoming. The Hive was stuck, torn between two unthinkable options.
Then, a second changeling went missing. The hivemind nearly upended itself in agitation. In the end, the Queen had to step in and bring everyone to order, having come out of her funk for the first time in weeks.
Chrysalis' proposal was reasonable—simple, and effective, and ruthless. It was not a certainty, but the Queen did not parade it as one—something that, evidently, won back a lot of respect—and it was the most practical option offered yet.
Sacrifice a single changeling—someone frail, and old, but unwaveringly loyal—send them to Ponyville in disguise, to be caught by Her. A simple thesis—if it is a spell, then she would be cut off the moment she's found out, and if the two lings truly deserted, then the communication will be maintained.
Nonetheless, despite the practicality, it warranted discussion—until a volunteer came forth. It was decided then.
The plan had been modified just before being carried out, however. New information had been acquired. The missing changelings were sighted in Canterlot, departing for Ponyville via the train.
They were being escorted, but none of their magic was restricted. The evidence was inconclusive—it was decided to carry on with the infiltration. However, it was no longer a simple binary test. The infiltrator will attempt to contact the other two, and find out more information from them.
Then, if possible and needed, she will commit it to paper and try to find a way to post it, to a specific place, at a specific time, and to a specific pony. Not impossible with pony postal service, but certainly questionable in light of being a changeling.
Worst-case scenario, they still got the simple result, and would now know which of the two impossibilities they it was. Best-case scenario, they may just receive some valuable information.
"..llo? Hello, miss? Do you hear me?" Antenna was jarred from her musings by a grey pegasus mare. She was wearing a mailmare's uniform, and had a fitting pair of saddlebags slung over her back.
"Uh-huh," muttered Antenna, then shook her head, "Sorry, I mean, yes, yes I can. You are the local mailmare, correct?" Her time had basically run out, she needed to hurry the conversation along.
"And you are..." she paused for a moment to focus her eyes on the envelope she pulled out of her saddlebags, "miss Quick Delivery, I presume?" At a nod from Antenna, she sighed tiredly, "Sorry for the delay, I got held up with another package. Anyway, please sign here, and here, and thank you. Here's your letter."
"Thank you," Antenna nodded, taking the letter and safely stowing it away in her own saddlebags. Now then, she moved to speak before the other pony could leave, "Ah, sorry, but before you go, the waiting has left me a little peckish, so if you could possibly point me towards some cafe nearby..?"
"Errm…" she had to pause for a second, "there is one not far from here, just through this alley actually, then a turn left, and a turn right, and you'll be right there."
Antenna had to stop her face from morphing into a frown, "Thank you."
The mailmare nodded once, “You’re welcome!” and flew off, swaying slightly. Now that she was gone, Antenna let her scowl show for a moment, before shaking her head to recenter herself. Afterwards, she quickly turned around and made her way into the alley.
Alright, Tenna, now’s the simple part—just get out of town, no problem, right? She was running almost two minutes late.
A unicorn stallion came out the other end, patting down his mane. He trotted with a purpose, turning right to walk down the street. He didn't look too much in a hurry—a smile on his face, humming a simple tune to himself. It was a nice day out, sun shining down on Ponyville with nary a cloud in sight.
At the intersection, he turned left, a cafe now in his sights. It was mostly empty—only a few ponies sitting around—so he walked in confidently, sitting down at one of the tables closer to the bathrooms, and waited for a server to come by.
The stallion started tapping a hoof on the table impatiently after a minute. The cafe wasn't particularly busy, and that made the delay all the more frustrating. Finally, a staff approached him.
"Good day. Would you like a menu?" A petite earth pony, small polite smile on her face.
"No, thank you. I would just like a coffee, and a pair of eclairs," the stallion paused momentarily, then smiled just barely, "chef's special."
The mare nodded, "as you wish," and promptly left with the order.
The stallion sighed contentedly. Then, he pulled out a newspaper from his saddlebags and started reading it. After a couple of minutes, he put it down on the table to mark it occupied, and went into the bathroom.
Antenna shed the disguise the moment she was inside the bathroom, door closed behind her. She made sure there was no one inside while she waited out there, and so felt safe in showing her true form.
The next transformation was going to be problematic—even for someone as experienced and skilled as her—and being in the natural form helped with transformations immensely.
She focused inwards, starting the transformation from the inside, first changing and compressing her innards, and then moving onto her carapace. Once finished, a flash of green fire washed over her, she now looking for all the world like a small kitten.
Antenna purred in delight. It has been a while since she last did a transformation as drastic as this—she practised before the mission, of course, but it just wasn't the same as doing it in the field—and it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that this escapade's success hinged on her being able to do it.
While Her spell truly was terrifying, it was thankfully not without a fault, either. They had figured out a couple of things over the month, through trial and error, and reasoning.
Its effects could be detected by none—bar the Queen herself—sure, but it took some time for the spell to complete its work. In addition, changing one's disguise seemed to prolong the time required—and the more extensive the changes, the greater the effect.
Thus, any changeling that had a reason to suspect danger, could make a reasonably good escape despite the spell, even if it resulted in burning the particular disguise that had come under scrutiny.
She quickly found the hole prepared for her, and jumped through it in one fluid motion. On the other side, the mare from before was waiting for her.
"Awww, you poor little thing, are you hungry again? Here, how about I give you a bit of milk, would that be alright?" She continued on and on as she carried Antenna through the kitchens and towards the backdoor.
Somewhere along the way, she picked up a small piala filled with milk. Looking around, Antenna could see that no pony spared them so much as a second glance, apparently used to seeing something like this often enough, and they made it out without trouble.
Once they were outside, the pony sat her down, looked around, and discreetly dumped the milk in a nearby bush, "There, now do run along my dear, I'm sure your mommy can't wait for you to come back," she near-whispered to the kitten, then turned around and went back inside.
Antenna quickly stretched her limbs, and set off at a brisk pace towards the edge of town, where the train station was situated. The street along which she traveled was rather crowded—seeing as a train just arrived recently—and so she had to concentrate on weaving through the forest of legs that surrounded her.
Nonetheless, as she saw the train station come into view, she let herself relax just a little. She was almost out. On the train, it would be a piece of cake to transform into some manner of bird after secluding herself in a bathroom, and then fly out of the window once it was far enough from Ponyville.
Even if her disguise were to fall apart, as long as she was alone, she could just reapply it on the spot. She sharply turned left, ducking into an alleyway between the train station and a pair of houses. There, in a hidden spot between the houses and away from prying eyes, she slowly transformed into a burly earth pony mare.
Success was within reach, Antenna knew, but dared not tempt fate with premature celebrations—if her decades of life experience had taught her anything, it was that fate could be a very cruel mistress indeed.
So lost was Antenna in her musings as she walked, that she was unable to react in time to someone suddenly stepping around the corner, the two of them both stumbling back from the impact.
Antenna shook her head, but before she could recenter herself and look at the other pony, she heard the stranger speak.
"Ah, finally," slowly, rigidly, the changeling raised her head to look, "Hello there, Antenna. It is such a pleasure to have met you at last."
Well, this was a blast to write! Not entirely satisfied with it, to be perfectly honest, and had some good feedback that I was unable to implement, but whatever.
Thanks to Mitch, Zontan, Flash, and Winternacht for giving it a quick pass 
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I suppose something happened to your computer and now there are 12 copies of said story. You could have put the other blue tags on the story description. Just saying.
9967754
They're all from different authors.
This one makes me saddest because you recently posted an extremely complimentary post on one of my stories, and I think this is the first one of your stories that I've ever commented on, and it has to be this. And I remember you posted it because I really like your screenname.
You know what, I'll leave it at that.
9967861
Ooh, you’re back!
9967867
Uh, serious post time dude: posting literally the exact same thing over and over again - say, the same YouTube video - is spam. The reason why I'm going through all this trouble of posting the idea in different ways is because of confidence that it shouldn't count as spam, no more so than the flood of Kaleidoscope stories, in any event.
Basically, you want to trail me in my responses with ones of your own, fine, that's your prerogative and right. But you might want to switch up the videos you post, at least. The site mods and admins do take spam seriously - something I learned the hard way.
Honest attempt at friendly advice here.
9967879
Thank you for your advice, friend.
9967756
Lemme go check real quick...
*Clicks Browse*
My God...
The time this story spends in Antenna’s head is great. In the opening, it does a good job of weaving together exposition, changeling worldbuilding, and Antenna’s characterization. At the end, it helps convey what’s running through her head every moment and the tension she feels.
Plot-wise, I really struggled. I’m still not clear on how the hivemind works and why the spell was necessary. I kind of wish the story had just presented Antenna’s package as a McGuffin — she’s got something important, but she’s being chased by someone with The Spell, and that’s all you need to know.
Lastly, the story’s spycraft details were fun. It makes sense that changelings would go through a bunch of forms while trying to exfiltrate, since that’d make it so much harder to track them.
9969441
Thank you for the feedback!
Yea, I'll have to admit, the actual plot, or what passes for it, isn't... that good. I noticed it too, but only towards the tail end of the contest time, basically a couple hours before it was over, so didn't exactly have the time to try and figure something out. That being said, I think I did manage to pinpoint why it is the way it is, so hopefully it'll be helpful to me in the future.
I think it was a combination of two things. First being, me going into it with a laundry list of items to use - I may not be one of those people who decided to use up the entirety of everything in the picture, but I did grab a bunch of stuff. What's of interest specifically, is the book. What I intended with calling the package a "letter", was to convey that it's a specific size, and is rectangular, and is soft (so conclusion: some kind of paperback), which is vague to the point of obscurity, now that I look back at it. So, I ended up being both overly specific (where, as you said, just some undefined McGuffin would've worked fine) and overly vague
Anyhow, the idea was something along the lines of what kind of paperback would the captured changeling care to try and ship out to the Hive? A journal, obviously!
And in hindsight, it feels kinda really dumb as well, since I intend Her in this story to be overly-competent, but a recently-caught changeling (even if they were hand-picked by the Hive for the mission) getting their hooves on something so important is kinda... ehhhh. Then again, it could be spun into the journal being a special-made fake, but that's like 300 IQ games at that point, but also the ending then doesn't make sense, and that ending was where the story started and okay, I'll stop now.
The second part, is that I had a very specific character in mind, and so I just defaulted to a setting that makes sense at the surface, and then kinda just forced a bunch of stuff to try and fit it together into something cohesive, and... yea.
As for the Hive, actually, the ideas behind it were fairly simplistic and I guess I just failed to communicate them properly.
Each changeling is individual, just like a pony, but all their thoughts and feelings are shared across the hivemind and recorded by the relevant changelings, as well as in the subconcious of the Queen, hence the sentiment of it being more or less impossible for a deserter/traitor to exist without the Hive being aware of it at least in some capacity.
They all obey the Queen practically unconditionally if she commands. In lieu of actual orders from the Queen, or when those are phrased as "suggestions" (as mentioned in the story) instead of orders, Hive as the collective holds the final say.
As far as the changelings themselves are aware, forcibly cutting one of them off from the hivemind is impossible - or at least, there certainly hasn't been a case of that happening, ever before. Even with a changeling trying to do it themselves, it was met with little sucess before, if mostly due to how alien the feeling resulting from it was, rather than it being impossible.
Something like that.
Could you please clarify? I'm not 100% certain what you're referring to in this case tbh (are you talking about the Changeling Revealing spell, or a spell to cut a changeling off from the hivemind?).
Anyhow, thank you again!
The rapid-fire disguise changing just made perfect sense to me and was one of the points I was most clear on myself, so I'm glad to hear you enjoyed it.
9970064
D’oh, I meant to say “why the letter was necessary.”
My sense was if the changeling agent is free enough to write a letter (or a whole journal), why couldn’t she just communicate her report directly to the hivemind? But that goes back to me misunderstanding how the hivemind works, it looks like.
9970260
Oh! I see. Well, it all really comes back to the whole "missing changelings" thing - she physically can't report over the hivemind after having gotten caught, because she's now cut off from it, just like the previously mentioned two are, so she has to resort to more mundane methods.
I believe it's probably similar to what I commented on the draft, but I enjoyed a lot of aspects. In particular, all the transformation parts, as well as the explanations for how the hive mind works and their discussions on what action to take. I also really enjoyed how the antagonist "Her" is built up, though we don't get a reveal of who. I'd really like to see this expanded more.
9975000
Thank you for your thoughts, and the comment!
That being said, if I do expand upon this at some point, it probably won't be a direct continuation, tbh. The entire story sprang up from that last line, more or less, so this particular snippet feels very much finished and self-contained to me, if somewhat flawed.
Interesting. Certainly a creative route to take, and a captivating scenario. I also liked the bits about transforming into various forms to keep incognito, as well as the sense of time ticking. Just a couple grammar errors, but nothing major.
I also was confused regarding the plot. I think maybe the cuts between the main action, her thoughts, and the past could've been a little cleaner and tied together, because at points I wasn't exactly sure how they all related. For example, I assumed quickly that the She/Her was referring to Celestia, but then Antenna collides with this figure at the end of the story (I think?) and they don't end up playing as significant of a role as expected. Same with Antenna's opinions on Chrysalis and Chrysalis's backstory, which was explored but not brought up later. It also took me a while to grasp what exactly the time was ticking down to. Other than that, if I had to give a couple suggestions, it would be to heighten the suspense, up the stakes. Make things maybe just a little less expository.
9987609
Thank you for the feedback!
The plot is probably the one part I really regret, as I mentioned already in another comment, and if I had the chance, I think I would rehaul it almost entirely. It all vaguely makes sense - if you squint at it - but the moment you start picking at it, it starts falling apart. And the whole Chrysalis thing, yea... it was basically just used to set the background, and that's it. Whoops.
That being said, the intention behind Her - and by extension, the part about suspense, I guess - are, at the least, semi-intentional? What I mean is, this story started entirely from the last line - it was slightly different at the start, but regardless. It was supposed to have that wham line effect. From there, it more or less came to me naturally to write it with climbing tension at the start, then a slow descent with everything going just perfect, and then WHAM! And then pull the curtains there, that's the last we're hearing from Antenna.
And as for Her, she was to be very much the mystery mare that she seems to have come out as (mystery in the sense that no one started shouting the name immediately, lol), basically just this vague threat a meeting with which is a death sentence of a kind.
Oh, I should've probably mentioned it in previous comments, too, but Death of the Author and bla-bla-bla obviously applies, and when I give justification to something, I by no means am trying to ignore or brush away the problems - I just like talking about myself
This was really gripping, but I'm unfortunately at a complete loss to figure out the end. Who did she meet? What's the significance of this scene? This feels like an end of chapter rather than end of story. :/
(Also, you've got a "sharpy" in there.)
10199146
As for the ending, that's supposed to be the "Her" from earlier in the text.
There may have been an idea behind how abrupt ending is - that the viewpoint character isn't Antenna, but rather someone observing through the hivemind - so yes, indeed, the end of a chapter, Antenna's chapter, rather than the end of the story.
Or maybe it's just a rush job caused by me not thinking it through enough - so far as I recall, the whole escape sequence was written in the last couple of hours before the posting deadline, even if I have been toying with ideas on how to do it for a couple days beforehand.
Thank you for the comment!
p.s. having read through the comments again, it does seem like I did intend that, soooo, hooray for self-absorbed ranting, I suppose?
10200151
Oh. Huh. I think a last-minute rush may have negatively impacted the ending. :B
10200157
Oh, for sure. I could - already have, in fact - rant on and on about all the things I would change in a far-off, hypothetical scenario where I'm actually not lazy - but for now, unfortunately, it remains as it is.
10200170
Can't say I don't know that feeling! :V