Girls, Crushes, and Milkshakes
“So, Silverstream? Do you have a crush on Gallus?”
Smolder’s comment had caused Silverstream to spit out the milkshake she had been drinking into Ocellus’ face much to the changelings annoyance. After giving an apologetic smile, the blushing hippogriff turned to the smirking dragon. “W-What kind of question is that?!”
“I think an obvious one?” Smolder snorted as she handed Ocellus some napkins to wipe herself. “So? Do you have a crush on bird boy or not? Yes or no?”
“I...I don’t...well...” Silverstream’s beak was scrunched up as all three of her girlfriends stared at her with raised eyebrows. She tired to hide herself behind her glass, but this only made her get some whipped cream on her crest. “I don’t know! How do you even have a crush?! How do you know you’re in love?!”
“Woah, hold on there seabird,” Smolder said, raising her claws. “I just said crush. There is a difference between having affection and being in love. Right, Yona?”
“Why friend Smolder ask me? Would it not be better to ask friend changeling due to love eating ability?” Yona asked, tilting her head.
“She means to ask about you with your relationship with Sandbar,” Ocellus said, wiping the last of the strawberry ice cream off her forehead. “After all, out of the six of us, you two are dating.”
“W-Well, Yona like being with Sandbar. Yona like kissing Sandbar. Yona like when Sandbar call Yona his ‘fuzzy wuzzy’...” Yona went on with her cheeks getting redder and redder while occasionally sipping her chocolate milkshake. The others couldn’t help but snort at Sandbar’s pet name for her. “But...Yona not sure if she ready to make Sandbar mate.”
“Uh, wait a few years before you get that far,” Ocellus said, shaking her head. “It sounds like you two really are close to each other. Have either of you said ‘I love you’?”
“No, should Yona do so?” The Yak asked.
“Only when you feel it's right,” Smolder said, sipping her aquamarine gem flavored milkshake. “At least that’s what my parents tell me. Besides, turtle butt might say it first.”
“Sandbar’s rump not that of turtle, but of pony,” Yona pointed out which caused Smolder to facepalm.
“Anyway,” Ocellus interrupted as she leaned forward. “I can definitely say that Sandbar and you are both very close to each other ever since the dance. It’s a changeling's nature to know when you feel affections around you after all.”
“Oooh, anypony else we know has special feelings for each other?” Silverstream asked with glee.
“Let’s just say Professor Applejack and Rainbow Dash have been spending a lot of time together ever since we turned the terrible trio into a toilet for pigeons,” Ocellus whispered which made the girls giggle at the gossip.
“Anyway, back to the real question at hand,” Smolder said, putting her fist down before pointing at Silverstream. “Do you have feelings for Gallus?”
“What brought this on? Wait, you're not jealous we’ve been spending more time together, are you?” Silverstream asked, grinning.
“Tch, please,” Smolder said, rolling her eyes. “I ain’t interested in either of you. No offense, but I find non-dragons ugly. I’m waiting for a few years down the road before trying to make a grab at Spike.”
“Spike?!” The three shouted which nearly spooked a passing Mr. Carrot Cake into dropping his tray of cupcakes, but he managed to find his balance.
“But...Spike’s so young?! He’s practically a child!” Ocellus shouted before leaning away. “Uh, you’re not a crib grabber are you?”
“What? No! Ew!” Smolder said, sticking her tongue out. “It’s not like that! Dragons live long lives, right? Spike and I are going to be around way after everyone else is gone. I got a good feeling that in fifty to a hundred years or so he’s going to be quite a looker. So I’m biding my time. And if I find some other dragon more interesting then I’ll take him instead.”
“Take him? Are dragons a bit...competitive over their special creatures?” Silverstream asked, nervously.
“Oh yeah,” Smolder said, grinning. “It’s just part of the dragon species nature to take what they want. It’s nothing sexual, mind you. It's all about getting your partner to like you by showing them how tough and alpha you are. Dragons are either dominant partners or submissive partners. Some just want to be in control and others just want to be controlled. My brothers the latter. Boy, I can’t wait for some dragon to take him off his feet and make him submit to his every whim.”
“I didn’t know your brother was gay," Ocellus said, pausing in her drink.
“Eh, he came out last year. Despite what you hear from others we dragons don’t care about your preference for gender. Heck, Dragon Lord Torch was bi-sexual and was rumored to have many lovers, both male and female, before he married Lord Ember’s mom,” Smolder said, before finishing her milkshake with a satisfied burp.
“Well, at least your kind are okay with it,” Silverstream said, resting her head on her palm while sighing. She began to play with her stray while continuing, “It’s still illegal for same gender couples to marry back at home. I mean, it's not like the old days when we fed them to sharks eight hundred years ago, but a lot of hippogriffs, including members of my family, still don’t allow them to get married like straight couples.”
“That sucks. Wait, is that why you’re hesitant to answer? Are you gay?” Smolder asked, pointing at her friend.
“No, I’m not gay! I just...” Silverstream lowered her head and closed her eyes. “The truth is...I kinda like Gallus...I know that sometimes he acts like he doesn’t care about others and can be sarcastic at times, but...he’s very sensitive and kind. You know how hard it was for him to live without his family, right?”
The others all nodded with frowns on their faces. It still was a shock that their friend had grown up an orphan with no griffin even bothering to adopt him. Even Grandpa Gruff only gave Gallus the minimalist of attention when he had too.
“He’s had nobody his entire life until he met us,” Silverstream whispered, holding herself. “I think deep down his fear of closed spaces is really a fear of being alone. Imagine being trapped forever in a place you cannot escape to find others and nobody is able to enter and save you. I know sometimes he doesn’t act like it, but Gallus values us more than anything. Maybe deep down I have feelings for him because I feel sorry for him. And if so, is that really love or just wanting to be a good friend?”
“Well, can you picture dating him?” Ocellus asked.
“...I guess I would have to ask or wait for him to ask me to find out,” Silverstream said, before turning to Smolder. “So that’s your answer. I really don’t know, Smolder, but if he wants to give it a try then I’m for it. Otherwise, I’m fine being friends.”
“Fine, I guess my curiosity is satisfied for now,” Smolder said, leaning back with her arms behind her head. “Of course, I can safely say your brother has a huge crush on Professor Applejack’s little sister.”
“Yeah, but rumor has it that some tap dancing colt has a crush on her too. It’s going to be a very interesting moment when all three of them meet,” Silverstream said, giggling. "Of course, I'll be helping my brother win Apple Bloom over. Family has to stick together and they would be a cute couple."
“Hey, wait,” Yona said, eyes widening. “We not ask Ocellus if she has romantic crush on some creature.”
All eyes turned to Ocellus who, to her credit, remained calm as she pushed her drink to the side. “You don’t need to worry about me having a crush or not.”
“Why not? You got a boyfriend?” Smolder joked with a mirthful snort.
“No, I’m already engaged to be married.”
“...”
“...”
“...”
“WHAT THE BUCK?!” All three friends shouted as Mr and Mrs. Cake told the three to be quiet before a set of crying babies was heard above. The three nervously apologized as a glaring Mrs. Cake went to check on her foals.
“You...How...I...Huh?!” Silverstream asked, her mouth wide open. “You’re engaged?! Since when?!”
“When I was born. He’s not that bad of a guy,” Ocellus said, like it was no big deal. “I’ve been trying to get him to come meet you guys, but his job always keeps him busy as a communication bug between our changeling hive and others.”
“Are you saying that changelings engage their children without any choice? That’s a bit... well...old fashioned,” Smolder said, scratching her head.
“Eh, it’s a tradition that’s been around for ages. Besides, it's not like I’m just limited to him,” Ocellus said, shrugging.
“What do you mean?” Yona asked.
“We’re polygamists. We pretty much can marry as many times as we want provided our current spouses are okay with adding them to the family. It's rare to find a changeling with just one mate. I think the record is one hundred and thirty-seven,” Ocellus answered, quickly signalling to Mr. Cake for a refill while Smolder gave a low whistle in awe. “Only the ruler of a hive gets to choose their own mate and chances are he’s going to choose Pharynx if the rumors are true.”
“...but Pharynx is his brother...”
“Yeah, so? My dad is married to his sister along with my mom and five others,” Ocellus answered before tilting her head. “Why is that a surprise?”
The other three looked at each other before raising their limbs and shouting, “Check!”
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Actually if you do out the math (and I have a friend who did to see if the Sparity ship had a chance) than Spike is probably 17 or 18 as of Season 8. Which...I dunno how to reconcile that with the fact that the teenage dragons are definitively teenage dragons, other than just assuming that Spike has some draconic equivalent of dwarfism that eventually gives way to a heck of a growth spurt.
The age is further supported by the comics. Last year IDW had a 20-year anniversary thing that saw every one of their properties have an issue published that time slipped either 20 years into the past or the future. MLP went with the past and told a story about the Mane-6 around Season 7/the movie accidentally traveling back in time to the Sonic Rainboom and meeting their past selves, which necessarily means Spike is 20.
If anything, basically, Spike might actually be older than Smolder.
10215119
Huh, never thought of it that way
Smolder might have forgotten about Spike relationship with Gabby.
10215179
By the time she goes for him Gabby is going to be long dead
10215195
Griffins' life span?
10215119
My memory of the minutiae can be a bit sloppy at times, so forgive me if I have the wrong information, but I can't really recall off the top of my head a time a dragon explicitly referred to itself as a teenager. I always just kinda assumed the ponies were scaling the dragons' lifespans to their own.
Point being, for all we know Smolder might already be in her triple digits and it would still only count as being "teenaged" relative to the pony standard of growth.
10215211
Same as a humans.
I agree on that last line.
The things you don't know about your friends can sometimes be astounding, even if you have known them for a long time.
Great now I have an image of Thorax and Pharynx cuddling in my head. Not that it's a bad thing...
10215119
I don't really bother with that short of thing anymore. It's hopeless... The series plays fast and loose with it's timeline. It's inevitable with so many writers.
That was a fun story. I don’t support all of the pairings that were discussed here but it was still just enjoyable to have the girls gossip. Though that ending was unexpected and surprising. I agree with them, check please!
For a moment I thought Silverstream was going to say something like, "Crush? Of course not! Gallus is a wonderful griffon, I would never do anything to hurt him like that! What kind of question is that?"
She would think "crush" as in "hitting, collapsing, demolishing".
This was enjoyable, though this still stings:
Check please!
"sweet home alabama"
"where the skies are so blue"
Would explain why all the Changelings pre-reformation looked remarkably similar. Wonder how long it will take before the hive falls due to a lack of genetic diversity or an over abundance of recessive traits.
10215796
To be fair, their metamorphic ability seems to have very little limit. Maybe they're like Trek Changelings and they don't mate for breeding purposes and can just pop out a little larva on their own, just using the 'personality' of the other one to help mold the new mind work into being.
10215812
I don’t think there’d be arranged marriages if they didn’t need each other to breed.
10215817
The asari had arranged marriages and they technically didn't need partners for breeding...I think. Mass Effect was very unclear about how their biology worked because space magic.
10215833
No they needed each other to breed, though admittedly the breeding is psychic in nature. It just became taboo to breed with other asari as the race wouldn’t benefit from the inclusion of additional strengths of other races and pureblooded asari could lead to terrible monsters.
Check please
Oh, Changelings are nasty.
10215119
It's possible. I was was only 5'1" at sixteen then by seventeen I got a huge growth spurt and shot up to 5"9'
incestual!
All the while, Sandbar and Gallus are getting hayfries while discussing the meaning of life and philosophy via grunts, belches, and arm gestures.
The changeling stuff i was like "Yeah, that was expected" realy insects. Also really enjoyed reading the girks gossiping.
A very nice and very fun read.
10215119
Most people equate spike’s shortness with a lack of hoard or him being raised with pony magic. I go with the lack of a hoard because dragons need to grow bigger to defend their hoard. Spike is older than he looks considering he was hatched be a filly Twilight.
10215119
). I mean, you wouldn't think a ten-year-old dog to be of the same maturity as a ten-year-old kid, would you? Hence why Spike was referred to as a "baby" in the early seasons--in dragon years, he might as well still have been.
What 10215212 said--those numbers are in pony years, but for dragons, it'd be very different, seeing it's pretty well established at this point that they age at a waaaay slower rate than, presumably, most anything else in the MLP world (at least I can't think of another example off-hand to compare them with outside of Celestia and Luna...and they're obviously more the exception than the rule
With that in mind, I figure Spike's age in terms of number of years passed since his hatching is not a good figure to go by, and that it's better to instead view it by his apparent mental/physical maturity. That being said, I place him around late pre-teens to early teens, as of getting his wings. 13-14-ish in human years, if you want a more exact number. Probably a little older than the CMC, but also probably not by especially much. By similar logic, I'd place Smolder around her mid teens to late teens, so from a maturity viewpoint, not THAT much older than Spike.
Actually, one of the reasons I'm rather glad Smolder was introduced to the show was for that added frame of reference to show just how young Spike is in comparison to the other dragons. It helped to settle some lingering questions on the subject.
10216953 10215212
Spike is the one who specifically identified Garble and his crew as "teenage" dragons. Obviously he was raised among ponies and so isn't exactly the best source of information on dragons (but then again all we have is the word of a pony that he was merely a "baby"), but the fact that we're never given a strong reason to doubt it makes me inclined to accept it as fact.
When you, as 10216502 and the video I pointed out, add in the fact that dragons certifiably get larger based on their greed but Spike is actively pushing against that by denying his greed and acting more pony-like then dragon-like, then it just feels like you have to jump through less hoops by accepting that Spike is just short, not "young". As DagaYemar pointed out (if not in that video then to me personally when I was speaking with him about it yesterday), Spike's initial greed growth made him about the same size as Garble and his gang, it was only after his greed was allowed to run out of control that he kept growing. If Spike had been around other dragons, they'd probably be less shy about beating him down and stopping him from taking their stuff, and so he would have "stabilized" at what should be a proper size for him.
10217009
Except when the subject of greed-growths came up during Spike's molt, Smolder stated that was "totally different" from normal growth or maturation, and established that the molt was a normal stage of growing, regardless of greed. As the addition of wings would thusly indicate whether or not a dragon's undergone a molt, then since Smolder's already has hers, that suggest she's at least a little older than Spike, and as Garble's Smolder's elder brother, he's older than her, and on up the chain from there. And as the show was clearly using the molt as a form of draconic puberty, that does suggest a comparable age range for a dragon undergoing it, so...I admit I don't totally buy the "greed growth" argument anymore, not after "Molt Down" at least.
I feel I also should point out that the later seasons did seem to suggest enough passage of time from the earlier seasons for characters to be considered notably "older" than they were at the start of the show, so it's possible that Garble was of "teenager-age" at his initial introduction, but could then be considered "older" than that by the time Smolder was introduced.
Or it's as you suggested and Spike, going off the pony scale of age, misjudged him as teenager.
Or that even by Garble's age, that's still considered "teenager" for dragons, possibly not being considered "adult" until they reach the ginormous sizes we see older still dragons at, or there was some as-yet not established age group for dragons that sits between the two.
Really, there's a lot of different ways we could explain it and still have a valid argument for it to fit clear canon.
So when we really get down to it, I suppose we have to admit that, no matter how we take it, it all veers into headcanon territories where nothing's really set in stone anyway. Thus, seeing the show (and related media) chose to never clarify the matter and instead left it open to interpretation, I suppose what it really boils down to is what one's personal preference is for a possible answer...and I'm content enough with that.
10217087
Broadly I agree with that, but the specific thing that annoys me is treating Spike as being much younger than even a cursory attempt at analyzing the series suggests. I mean, even if we grossly underestimate Twilight’s age to be around 15 at the start of the series, that would still mean that Spike realistically can’t be much younger than 10 at the start. But he isn’t really treated much like a 10-year-old (Twilight’s “you are a baby dragon” comment notwithstanding - later episodes make it clear that she doesn’t actually know anything about dragons herself). He’s trusted to stay at home without adult supervision for days at a time, for example.
10217118
Hence my 13-14-ish estimate, which is usually old enough to start being entrusted with such duties, but still within a reasonable range when compared to Twilight's probable age at time of hatching (around CMC age, likely). Older than the CMC, younger than Smolder, so whatever age range that leaves him at, I guess.
But really, when you get right down to it, I guess so long as he's not "adult" (because both the show and the show's staff made that abundantly clear), I suppose Spike can be whatever age we want him to be at this point.
Whatever his age is though, he's still gotta be younger than Smolder. He bears this noteworthy child-like mentality that Smolder (and her peers) distinctly lack.
10215857
I mean, if pairs are mostly arranged, they're probably mostly a matter of hive politicsnand the Queen's plans.
In before Ocellus learns the hard way that Chryssi was just a kinky bitch.
This is such a masterpiece! The way you made this gossip sound was way beyond amazing, that's for sure! It's believable, well written, and absolutely enjoyable! I hope ya didn't mind, but I had to make a reading on this!
Audio Thinger!: https://youtu.be/3-01P-n_Ta0
(I don't mean to offend anyone with this comment!)
Insect is just an anagram for incest.
This was a lot of fun to read. I was surprised by the whole changeling situation. I mean, after we saw Ocellus's family for the first time, it was pretty much confirmed that Queen Chrysalis didn't give birth to every single changeling herself like in a regular insect hive, but them having such extremely primitive mating traditions was a major surprise.
At the same time, you also confirmed exactly what I would expect from dragon dating. Challenging dragons they like for dominance in the relationship sounds just like them.
10218165
i feel terrible for not noticing that before, i begrudgingly give you an upvote.
10215474
I do not like that ending of The Terrible Trio. I do not like it here or there. I will not like it anywhere.
10218165
Good point.
I wonder if the Changelings' courtship extends to other species? Could Ocellus marry the other five if it came to it?
Everybody's referencing Spaceballs but we forgetting the other 'Check Please'
https://m.These are gold.
10219282
The question is, who would wear tuxes and who would wear dresses to their six way wedding?
10219459
Thought about this a bit, but really, the girls would come in dresses and the boys in tuxes. Even the ones we might think to be outliers, Smolder for example, loves dresses. I bet Garble wouldn't let her live it down if she refused to come to her own wedding in a nice dress; Yona loves dresses too, so much so that she ends up running Rarity's boutique.
Also, it would be at least seven ways. There's this additional Changeling dude, remember?
10221065
Ah yes of course, an additional changeling none of them know. Perfect candidate for marriage.
Well that was a shocker
!!!
You just had to make it weird Ocellus.
Nice read very cute and funny.
Wow thats pretty heavy stuff there
Wow thats pretty heavy stuff there
Bruh
nice story R. I still think you should give slice of life a bit more of a shot now and then, you do a real great job writing interesting dialogues for the characters in them.