They're home.

by Nameless Narrator

A puzzling morning: 3

“What the-” in the time it takes 99 to jump away from the table and gather herself after the 99012’s sudden appearance and drop from the ceiling, 156 and 387 recover from the surprise and are already standing next to the dazed and groaning drone.

“Explain!” 387 pulls the fallen drone up.

“Ughhh, splain what?” 99012 blinks out of sync, softly swaying from side to side, its current brain damage being the only reason why it’s even remotely calm in this situation, “Heee, you’re wobbly…”

“387, stop crowding the guy,” 156 pushes the warrior’s forelegs off of 99012 and takes about a minute to slowly pour love its way. No matter what the drone said it just dropped like a rock from a height that would leave a pony paraplegic for life in the best case scenario and it shows on its fragmented carapace, “Everything’s okay, everyone’s okay. No need to freak out.”

“It was just dumb luck that it didn't drop in here while Chrysalis was asleep. She’d probably think the drones are trying to assassinate her- no, stop looking at me like that! She literally said that to me once,” 387 crosses his forelegs on his chest and huffs when faced with the skeptical looks of 99 and 156.

“Let me handle this,” says 156, facing the recovering and now slightly nervous drone as it’s realized that it’s in the company of the hive’s top three changelings, with the exception of the Queen herself, “You, 99012.”

“Yes, umm, 156?” the drone gulps.

“How did you get up there?”

“Umm, I was experimenting with a new skip we found two days ago, 156. I had no idea it would lead here.”

“What’s-?” asks 387, immediately shut up by 156 slapping a hoof into his mouth and nudging him sideways with her head afterwards.

“Shush.”

“What’s a skip?” asks 156, not even needing to look at 387 to know his eye just twitched because that’s obviously what he wanted to ask.

“Uhh,” 99012 rubs its head, “I don’t really know what it is, but it’s an invisible thingy that, if you do the right thing, lets you skip walking through a whole bunch of tunnels. You just go ‘whoosh!’ and appear somewhere else.”

“Some kind of teleportation magic, maybe?” ponders 99, “Is that your special talent?”

“Nu uh!” 99012 shakes its head, “That’s the best part about quicktrotting - anyone can do it! We just sweep the tunnels -only during breaky time, of course!- with the whoomer 10000 brought from its shippy trip and when it starts whooming in the right way we know we found a skip and that’s where the tricky part comes in - figuring out what to do to get whooshed.”

“Slow down. What’s quicktrotting?” asks 156, “Like, running extra fast or…?”

“Oh… oh?” 99012 looks taken aback, “I thought you high ranks knew everything.”

“We have our own duties to take care of,” says 156, “As long as you drones keep fulfilling yours we don’t need to know every nons- new thing you make up. Now get to explaining.”

99012 beams with visible excitement at being able to talk about a subject near and dear to it.

“Quicktrotting is awesome! It started some two months ago with me and two of my buddies, 99066 and 99971, arguing about how to move eggs from x115-s77e to 66as7-eex12 the quickest. We each had a different idea so we did an egg each and compared times, but then we realized that you can run with an egg on your back in one of the longer tunnels, so we started trying that and we made a much better time even though the distance was longer. Long story short, we kept doing this until we shortened the time by a full fifteen minutes!”

“And how does teleportation fit into that?” asks 156.

“What’s telly-potion?” 99012 tilts its head.

“The whooshing, the skip,” 387 corrects her. When 99012’s eyes light up as it understands, 387 shoots 156 a smug smirk of a certified drone communication expert.

“Righty!” 99012 rubs its hooves with an excited smile, “So, 99111 figured something out about the whoomer, I can’t really understand what, and it found the first skip in cavern 225x49-2. That was maybe half a year ago,” 99012 scratches its head, “Few weeks ago, it figured out that if you do the right things at the skip, like jerky movements, jumps into the wall, or up-downs, you can whoosh to an entirely different place! So me and my buddies tested it and modern quicktrotting was hatched! We cut the egg carrying time from x115-s77e to 66as7-eex12 by thirteen minutes and twenty-four seconds! 99066 holds the current hive record at one minute and fifty-two seconds, but I’m coming for it!” 99012 ends its explanation with a determined smile.

“So that’s why the report stated we were done so quickly,” 156 nods, “And what do you do with all the saved time? Rest?”

“It’s still worky time,” 99012 looks at her as if she’s gone crazy, “We’re rebuilding all the old tunnels like 10000 said. It’s super slow work but a whole bunch of guys said it saved their carapaces! Plus, they’re much easier to gallop through, so we’re bound to shave the quicktrotting records even more.”

“So, that’s what the direct red lines on the hive map are?” asks 99.

“Yup!” 99012 nods, “We’ve found three so far-” it pauses and looks at the ceiling, “No, four. Can you please update the map? I can’t do it with 99380 busy all the way in the High Score cavern. The skip is here,” it pings a location on the hive map that’s over twenty levels down and hundreds of pony lengths away, “And the code is - press against the wall, jump, jump, push head into the ceiling, jump, and then walk directly into the wall. It looks like this in scribbles-” the hive links of the trio of high ranks receive a short sequence of arrows and symbols. Upon examination of the red arrows on the hive map, each origin seems to have such a line of scribbles next to it.

“Hmmm, do those ‘skips’ work in reverse? Let’s say if I wanted to get quickly down to the tunnels from here, could I just fly to the ceiling and do… something?” asks 99.

“Nope!” 99012 shakes its head, “We tried, but the whoomer doesn’t even whoom where you land,” 99012 simply waits for more questions, but it seems like the high ranks are tapped out, so it asks, “Uhh, can I go now? I think I gotta ask 57999 for some healing goop because breathing kinda hurts. Kinda a lot.”

99, 156, and 387 exchange shrugs before 156 nods and says:

“Off you go, and thank you for the information. Oh, one final thing - no one is to use this skip ever again unless it’s a life or death situation. If you startle the Queen even by accident she might not be as understanding as we are.”

“Oooooh, you’re right! I’ll tell 99380 to mark that one as a no go,” 99012 nods and gallops out of the throne room.

“Weird,” says 156 as she returns to the table and to her now cold drink.

“I’ll go test some of those skips out,” 99 stretches her legs, “An emergency set of one-way teleports accessible only to someone with the right knowledge sounds beyond useful. 387, take care of 65536 when it arrives, please.”

“Will do,” he nods.

“No, I’ll do it,” 156 shakes her head, “387, how about you gather some information on this… ‘whoomer’ thing from the drones?”

“I’ll go down later anyway when we know what 65536 has in store this year and whose help it’ll need. Two birds with one stone and all that.”

“Sounds good,” admits 156, “Let’s prepare to welcome our esteemed guest then, shall we?”

Author's Note:

Accidentally uploaded the entire rest of chapter 2 earlier. Sorry if you got some weird notifications.
Still going with the super short, one-scene updates, but it's either that or longer time between chapters.

Comments

[Skarsnik]

Drone doing quicktrotting now x)

[CharonX]

Hmmmmm....

Reality's physics-engine is glitching out due to some (adorable) bugs. Lets hope they don't accidentally turn off gravity or something

[Booster Spice]

the Drones have found what appear to be related to Super Mario World magic hack codes, which means they could have fa worse things to worry about than bity wibbler swarms etc, as the Skips run through that which is outside local reality, and you have to be carefyl what you bump into there.

Discords Realm and Pinke are the two safest. Or even Sunsets Isekai toilets.

[The Wind King]

And that's how the Drone's ended up taking ovcer the Back-Rooms

[Scyphi]

“Uhh,” 99012 rubs its head, “I don’t really know what it is, but it’s an invisible thingy that, if you do the right thing, lets you skip walking through a whole bunch of tunnels. You just go ‘whoosh!’ and appear somewhere else.”

So what you're saying is...they've been thinking with portals.

“Few weeks ago, it figured out that if you do the right things at the skip, like jerky movements, jumps into the wall, or up-downs, you can whoosh to an entirely different place!"

So they pretty much literally are boundary-breaking reality, allowing them to speedrun tasks within the hive.

Next up is finding the game break that forces reality to give them all items at spawn.

“And the code is - press against the wall, jump, jump, push head into the ceiling, jump, and then walk directly into the wall. It looks like this in scribbles-”

See, they've even got cheat codes for it. Clearly, my game cheat analogy from earlier in the story was right on the money!

“An emergency set of one-way teleports accessible only to someone with the right knowledge sounds beyond useful."

That's an understatement. And the drones were the ones who uncovered it. It wasn't so long ago that such a thing happening was pretty much unheard of among the changelings, so it just goes to show how far the drones have come in so short a space of time.

Which I can see how that might cause concern for some of the high ranks, because the drones seem to be advancing exponentially. Obviously, they still aren't at the level of the high ranks just yet, but the gap between them isn't so vast anymore, and if this continues at the same rate it has been...the drones are going to catch up eventually.

So the question is...would that be a good thing, a bad thing, or just a thing in general for the changelings as a species? Guess we're gonna find out.

“387, how about you gather some information on this… ‘whoomer’ thing from the drones?”

Speaking of...surprised Chryssi let the drones hang onto that. Particularly when the whole reason she wanted it in 'ling possession in the first place was a little more for her benefit than it was the drones (even though she didn't have a clear plan for what she'd do with it, she just wanted it on hoof for when she finally came up with one).

11705066
Man, I'd imagine the drones would manage to thrive in the Backrooms, because I'm no expert myself, but I understand enough to see that, in many ways, the Backrooms wouldn't be all THAT different from what the drones regularly face day-to-day in the depths of the hive tunnels. All they'd really need to do is learn the new "rules" for what does what in the Backrooms and then they'll have it made there.

[D-F]

while i'm sure it'll all be explained in a way that makes a decent amount of sense in the later chapters, adding game mechanics/bugs - which include literal cheat codes - is just absolutely ridiculous lore wise imo. it's still funny though, dont get me wrong.

[Nameless Narrator]

11705036
The final boss is going to be dropped out of bounds.
11705041
If I'm to be lore accurate, bugponies- I mean featureponies are the only ones not responsible for the current state of reality.
11705062
- As we know from Blaze's story, Discord settles down in the Badlands in the far future.

Or even Sunsets Isekai toilets.

- I suppose that's a fanfic reference I don't know.
- So it must be Pinkie!
11705066
Random drone: "ECHOOO!"
*Echo! Echo! Echo!* *Creepy noises in the distance.*
Drone: "Ahhh, just like home."
11705179

So what you're saying is...they've been thinking with portals

Not sure how much thinking was involved.

So they pretty much literally are boundary-breaking reality, allowing them to speedrun tasks within the hive.

Carrying stuff has never easier!

Next up is finding the game break that forces reality to give them all items at spawn.

WE HAVE SO MANY SHINIES TO TRADE NOW!

[So the question is...would that be a good thing, a bad thing, or just a thing in general for the changelings as a species? Guess we're gonna find out.

As 36658 always knew - the war is coming!

Speaking of...surprised Chryssi let the drones hang onto that. Particularly when the whole reason she wanted it in 'ling possession in the first place was a little more for her benefit than it was the drones (even though she didn't have a clear plan for what she'd do with it, she just wanted it on hoof for when she finally came up with one)

Pfff, what would she do with a non-functional device that just hums? It's all just drone imagination.
11705276

adding game mechanics/bugs - which include literal cheat codes - is just absolutely ridiculous lore wise imo

See, they've even got cheat codes for it. Clearly, my game cheat analogy from earlier in the story was right on the money!

It's far from being some haha random stuff like that. There's a good explanation, easy to guess based on the known lore so far. For more clues, I have to mention two excellent games based on books.

[Thor447]

The Laws of Causality are being torn asunder

[Nameless Narrator]

11722496
They'Re more... guidelines.