“Attention, Ponyville!” Spike's voice rang out through the town as it emerged from the magical megaphone in front of his mouth. Though apparently, 'megaphone' wasn't an accurate term, as it only made the sound marginally louder, with the focus instead being on making it carry further. At its highest setting, whether you had your ear right next to it or were miles away, you would hear it at precisely the same volume. As such, Twilight had insisted that it required a different prefix than 'mega' – something to indicate a long distance travelled or transmitted – but the term 'telephone' hadn't caught on for some reason.
“Her Royal Highness the Princess Twilight will shortly be testing a magical device,” Spike continued, “a device which carries absolutely no danger and is no cause for alarm.”
Watching her assistant on the screen, Twilight shifted uncomfortably at both the use of her full title and the fact that the second part needed to be said. After a moment, Pinkie put a comforting hoof around her – she knew how little Twilight liked throwing her status around, but it was necessary to be believable. As for the rest... well, it couldn't be denied that Twilight had a reputation and, while Pinkie personally thought it was massively overblown and distorted by memory and retellings, it still had to be addressed.
The two leaned into each other as Spike continued. “This device will, in approximately ten minutes, send out a pulse that will extend over a ten-mile radius and... mo... moment-arr-ay-ly... oh, briefly disrupt any trans-mut-a-tion magic.” He explained slowly, following the phonetically written word on the scroll with his finger. “It will not affect the functions of whatever they were trans-muted into, it will simply show whatever lies beneath the trans-mut-a-tion. If you have any questions or concerns, please come to the town square within the next ten minutes and address them to Spike and he will answer... oh, wait, that's me! …and I will answer them... yep, I will... to the best of his ability.”
Pinkie looked down at the genius she was still hugging. “You're sure you'll be able to track her if she just amscrays with her ailtay between her eglay olehays?” Pinkie asked, allowing a little of her normal humour to slip out from her still-firmly-restrained thoughts, hoping to lighten the atmosphere and make Twilight feel better.
For a moment, Pinkie was worried, as Twilight's face fell into a frown. A moment later, though, it faded as she nodded, having untangled the pig pegaso-polatin, and let out a small laugh. “Quite sure – whether she runs, flies or teleports, anything that would get her outside the blast radius quickly enough would leave a magical signature that I should easily be able to detect it. And since, if she does, the hebetation field will fade, we should have plenty of time to find and track it to its source before she comes back, if she ever does. Either way, it'll give us plenty to go on. What I'm worried about is if she calls our bluff. What if she knows it won't do anything?”
Pinkie gave her a reassuring squeeze. “But that's the beauty of the whole thing – even if she thinks that, she'll still have to do something about it, just cause she can't afford to take the chance that it will work. Sure, she might think it's almost certainly not going to reveal her, but if it does, her whole... whatever-she's-doing will be ruined. So, she'll either need to stop it going off or get out of there. Plus, it's not like it's that unbelievable, is it? I mean, it's totally a thing that could be, right?”
Twilight hummed. “Well... it's definitely theoretically possible and not... unbelievable that someone could have figured it out.”
“Which means somepony as smart as you could have made it, easy-peasy-play-parcheesi.”
Twilight blushed as she ducked her head down, though made no further efforts to escape the hug. “Well... I don't know about... though, it's not like I've had the chance to do much research and studying recently... but, yeah, it's a perfectly plausible bluff.”
“Exactly, so she has three choices,” Pinkie explained, holding her free hoof up, “one: she risks getting revealed in front of everyone, which she can't afford to do,” she took her hoof off of Twilight's shoulder, though made sure to keep the rest of her foreleg around her, “two: she escapes, which we'll be able to track,” and finally, suppressing her instinct of using a third forehoof to indicate her third point, she just held up her first one again, “or three: she sabotages it so it won't go off in the first place. And even if she doesn't do it herself...”
“She won't, I'm sure of it.” Twilight sighed. “Someone as smart and manipulative as her? She'll find some way to do it indirectly but,” a small but solid smile poked its way onto Twilight's face, “that'll still give us something to go on – whoever or whatever gets used to do it, we can talk to or examine or... something that should give us a clue. It probably won't get us an immediate answer, but it'll give us a start.”
“And with you on the job, a start's all we'll need.” Pinkie gave Twilight a brief nuzzle, though Twilight hesitated for a moment to return it. To judge by her face, she was about to try and convince Pinkie she'd be just as valuable again. Fortunately, though, she was pre-empted by a voice coming from the screen.
“Are you sure it's safe?”
Looking up, they saw a small crowd had gathered around Spike, who was currently flipping through the pages Twilight had written for him, looking for the answer to Sea Swirl's question. After a few moments, he nodded. “Absolutely – the effect itself has been thoroughly tested and poses no danger to anypony – nothing that is not under a trans-mut-a-tion effect will be affected at all and anything that is will simply show what is beneath it.”
“But isn't it a test?” Golden Harvest asked, prompting another riffling through papers. “What if it turns out something bad'll...”
“The base principle,” Spike read out, not seeming to notice that she was still talking, “has been tested thoroughly in both laboratory and real conditions and there is no chance it will cause harm. The only negative possibility, and what this test is for, is if it loses its potency over long distances. Which is very unlikely and would mean that it doesn't have any effect at all past a few hundred metres.”
Despite his assurance, there was a murmuring of uncertainty among the crowd. However, that just got Pinkie and Twilight to exchange a smile – such wariness was just begging for Chrysalis to manipulate it into something to thwart the 'test'. If they were lucky, she might start rabble-rousing publicly, since she had no way of knowing they were watching. Still, given how wily an adversary she'd proved, neither wanted to rely on that possibility.
On the screen, they saw Lemon Hearts raise her hoof. “What's... transmoo... transmutate... transmutilatio-”
“Transmutation,” Spike read out, “is magic that is concerned with transforming one thing into another.”
At that, Lemon Hearts let out a relieved sigh. “Oh, that's okay, then.”
“Are you sure?” Golden Harvest asked, eyeing her with a skeptical look. “What if it affects us somehow?”
“It won't – he just said that,” Lemon replied brightly. “After all, we're all ponies... and other creatures,” she pointed at Spike, “not things! If it only affects things, we'll be fine!”
A wave of agreeing hums went through the crowd even as Pinkie and Twilight winced. Poor Lemon Hearts... Pinkie thought, maybe if we figured out why she's so badly affected by the dumb-field, we could use that, but that's for later.
They watched as Spike continued to field questions, Pinkie smiling at how well Twilight had prepared the notes. Admittedly, some of the questions asked were things that were covered in the initial announcement... and also-admittedly, it took Spike depressingly long to realize that when he couldn't find them in the 'answers' section of the papers. Nevertheless, all seemed to be going as intended, as the large timer, seemingly wired into the oven-sized device Spike was next to, ticked down to its final minute.
“She's cutting it really close,” Pinkie observed as the seconds continued to get swallowed up.
“Which probably means she's been doing something particularly distant and devious.” Twilight grimaced. “With this long to work with, who knows how many levels of proxies she'll be working through? It's going to be tough to follow them to the source.”
“You'll figure it out,” Pinkie assured her as she watched the seconds tick down. Still, she wasn't worried – regardless of her intelligence, it was obvious Chrysalis had something of a flair for the dramatic, so it seemed reasonable to expect her to wait until the last moment to thwart them.
Which means something'll happen to stop it in three... two... one... wait...
Before Pinkie's confusion could get beyond a first thought and a raised eyebrow, a huge wave of energy burst from the device with a WHOOOMPH, visible only as a wobbling in the air and moving too fast to get more of a detailed view than that anyway. The wave did absolutely nothing, of course – it was a visual and auditory effect and, other than that, only produced a slight tingle through anypony in its path. In fact, judging by the looks on their faces, they could probably tell that it wouldn't do anything, even if they assumed it was supposed to. However, that was only peripherally noticed by the two in the basement.
“I don't get it!” Pinkie said, tapping her head rapidly as she tried to figure out what had gone wrong. “She'd have had to do something about it but she... she didn't. Did she... did she wait until the last moment to teleport away? Is the hebe... the herbidacious... is her mind-screwery field still up?
The two looked up to see a group gathered around the device, trying to figure out what had happened and why the wave hadn't been functional – Spike was bashing the glowing gem that had been at its centre against a rock, Sea Swirl was pulling out wires like she was playing cat's cradle and Noteworthy was experimentally licking the (thankfully not real) battery.
“Definitely,” Twilight replied, prompting Pinkie's scowling to intensify.
“Could... could she have teleported away and back quickly?”
Twilight shook her head. “No – without a receiver emplacement, it'd take time to build up the energy needed to travel that distance – we'd have seen some reduction in her field if she had. No, I think... I'm afraid the only explanation is that she... she knew we were bluffing.”
“But how?!” Pinkie threw her hooves up. “How could she be so sure that she was willing to take the risk?”
“I don't know, but... oh, this is hopeless!” Twilight slumped to the floor, her hooves and wings splayed around her. “How are we supposed to out-manipulate a master manipulator if we can't even leave this room and directly see her without making it certain she can manipulate us?”
Pinkie swallowed nervously, desperately trying to think of something to make their efforts seem less doomed. “Well... maybe if we can figure out what she's doing? I mean, yeah, she's real, real good at tricking ponies, but if we knew what she was trying to trick them for, that might give us a clue.”
“But how?” Twilight let out a whinny that felt like it tore Pinkie's heart in two. “She could be doing anything! We have no way of knowing what her game is!”
Pinkie closed her eyes tight for a moment, until an old saying popped into her head. “Well, then maybe we should play the pony, not the game... or play the changeling, I guess.” She thought for a moment, believing that the saying could prove helpful, even if she wasn't sure how yet. “Like, let's think about what she's done before. Like when she was disguised as Cadance, she was tricking us into... er... tricking you... tricking everyone into... wait, what was her plan again?”
Twilight blinked, considering this before answering. “I... I think she was trying to get me ostracized from my friends so we couldn't use the elements... probably?”
“By not acting like Cadance and instead acting like... well...?”
“Like herself, yes.”
“Okay, but... but why, though?” Pinkie asked, squinting as if trying to visually search for an answer. “I mean, we know her big goal was to marry Shining Armor... for some reason.”
Twilight nodded. “I'd assume it was to maximize the amount of love she could drain from him and, subsequently, the power she could wield when she got him to drop the shield later and catch Canterlot unawares.”
“Yeah, that makes sense,” Pinkie said, starting to pace as her thoughts tumbled through the logic involved. “But if that was her goal, wouldn't it be a lot safer to just... act like Cadance? Not raise any suspicion, get through the wedding and then take you out if she needed to? Like, if she'd been able to catch us properly by surprise, it wouldn't have been hard to capture us before we could even think of the elements. And acting like the person you're pretending to be just seems like the best way of doing that.”
Twilight let out a hum as her head nodded along absently with Pinkie's words, her mind focused on analyzing them. “Well, maybe she was worried I'd see through the deception anyway?”
“But you didn't,” Pinkie pointed out. “Like you said, you just thought she was evil and nasty, not that she was a faker. And why would everypony else, lots of them almost definitely ponies who'd been around her a bit before then, not notice something was wrong, but you would when... I didn't think you'd seen her much since you were a filly? Even you're not that sharp, Twi. Besides, if she was that worried about it or the elements... why wouldn't she just use that brainwashy dope-zap on you? Or if not you, one of us – not like it'd be that hard to get one or more of us alone long enough. Heck, she could have even replaced you with a changeling before we even went to Canterlot.”
“Well, she... she might not have... maybe you would have seen through...” Twilight started tapping a hoof in agitation, as Pinkie could see her mind was racing with possibilities. “Then again, it's possible that she's just... not a very good actress and didn't want to rely on her hebetation field making me not notice things. Maybe she noticed I wasn't as badly affected due to my emotional state and decided to make lemonade out of lemons by tricking me into making a scene and cutting me off from everypony.”
“Mmmmm...” Pinkie rubbed her chin, trying to make the idea fit into reality in her head. But however she tried, something caught or got stuck, like a jigsaw piece in the wrong place. “Maybe, but... well, you were always unhappy with her but... I thought the tipping point was when you saw her hit Shining with a mind-zap. Would you have made a stink like that if you hadn't seen that?”
“I... I might have,” Twilight answered, not sounding convinced in a single syllable. “But... probably not as big a one. So, she'd have had to intentionally let me see that, but...”
“But that's an even bigger risk!” Pinkie threw her hooves out wide in a combination of illustrating the enormity of it and sheer exasperation. “Like, you said she can't control how ponies act around her, dumb or not, so you could just as easily have gone to Princess Celestia in private or talked to us or looked up stuff about that kind of magic or... well, anything except what you did... which wasn't your fault, you were being dumbified and...”
“I know, Pinkie,” Twilight replied, her thoughts far too occupied with the problem she was trying to crack to consider being hurt or offended. “Well, she is a master manipulator,” she stated, though she didn't sound nearly as certain as the last time she'd said it. “Maybe she just knew that was what I'd do.”
“Nnnng, I...” Pinkie winced, both at the idea and at feeling the need to repeatedly contradict Twilight. “I don't think anypony... anyone is that good. And if she was able to see and control what you were going to do like that, there'd be so many easier and safer things to do. And if that was what she went with, it'd have to be that reaction exactly to make it not look pretty sus that you vanished after she sent you away and to... Cadance... which... er...”
Twilight sighed. “I... I think her plan was to get me to kill her thinking she was... well, the evil Cadance...”
“Something the real Cadance was able to prove wasn't true super easy – it's not like her knowing something that proved it was her and she was different was that hard to see coming. And... I mean, I hate to keep asking this, but... why?” Pinkie let out a slightly helpless laugh at the repetition. “I mean, it's not like Cadance was a threat to her plan – if she could have escaped, she would have way before then, plus it'd be way easier for Chrysalis to kill her, or at least another changeling. And Chrysalis could've sent you anywhere else... in those caves or maybe in Equestria. And if she had and you managed to come back somehow, it'd just be your word against hers, which she made sure would make us take hers. Why would she send you to the one mare who could totally unravel her whole scheme?”
Twilight swallowed hard, the pain on her face making Pinkie's heart twinge and twist, even if neither could stop their minds from pursuing the line of thought that caused it.
“Well, with how she was taunting me after teleporting me away... I think she just really wanted me to have murdered a princess, one of my oldest friends and my brother's true love. I'm... not sure she had a reason beyond sadism... which, you know, could definitely be enough to motivate her.”
“But it'd still be a huuuuuge risk!” Pinkie said, shaking her head. “Doesn't say much for her plans if she's willing it gamble it all on that happening. Even I wouldn't screw up a whole plan just to have a bit of fun... well, not intentionally, anyway, aheh,” she rubbed the back of her neck as her mind started filling with potential counter-examples. However, before Twilight could respond with any of the reassurances that were written across her face, Pinkie shook the thoughts off and refocused. “Besides, if she was that good at manipula-tation, she'd have known that, even then, you'd have never gone out of your way to murder somepony. The worst you'd have done was rough her up a whole lot, but... well, from what you've said, Cadance was already pretty roughed up.”
“Er...” Twilight momentarily looked like she wanted to argue, but if Pinkie was reading her right, she was too busy thinking about the rest of what was said to focus on that. After a moment, she pressed a hoof against one side of her face, at once pressing against her forehead and her eye as she tried to both envision Chrysalis's thought process and reconcile it with her image of the changeling queen. “She... well, she could... I think her whole plan was... er... she decided to...”
“If it was all her plan, then she decided,” Pinkie said, finishing Twilight's last start-of-a-thought, “to try a risky, difficult and compli-ma-cated plan instead of a simple, safe and reliable one, then did the one thing that would obviously make it so you could undo it all. Is it just me or is she sounding... really, really... not smart right now?”
“I... no, that can't be right – she's Chrysalis!” Twilight growled out as her hooves vibrated in agitation. “One of the foremost enemies of all ponykind... all lifekind. Sure, her hebetation field makes it easy to fool ponies, but she has to have some kind of intelligence. But... but you're right, that's all... the most obvious explanation is incompetence, but what could possibly be making her act... that... stupid...” Twilight's eyes widened.
And, while she couldn't be certain, Pinkie felt like her own widening eyes were a perfect mirror. “Unless...” she said before she and Twilight said, in almost-complete unison:
“She's affected by her own hebetation field!”
“She's affected by her own dumb-dumb field!”
There was a pause before Pinkie and Twilight let out an only-slightly-less-synchronized giggle. After a moment, though, Twilight's face fell.
“Well, that's... kind of encouraging, but... I think it might make it even harder to find her if the one thing we thought would set her apart – her intelligence – instead blends in just as much.”
“Mm, maybe, but...” Pinkie thought for a few seconds before shaking her head. “Well, it also means she's way, way more likely to slip up and give herself away, even if the ponies around her won't be able to notice. Maybe... Twi, if we could figure out a way to protect ourselves from her field, could we just... look around and talk to ponies and see if we can figure out who she is the old-fashioned way?”
Twilight hummed as she thought. “Maybe... though, anything that could protect us would definitely draw attention and seem suspicious... though neither she nor anypony else would probably notice. Plus, well, it'd probably be you who did the asking, with how much you know about everypony, and I don't think anyone would be suspicious about you doing something that looks... out-of-the-ordinary.”
Pinkie laughed in appreciation of Twilight putting things so delicately. “I am the weirdo with the ear-dough!” she said, idly feeling inside her ear for any of the dough that got in there when she was baking with an odd frequency. “But we'd still need a way to protect ourselves. Out there, I mean – obviously we're protected here in your... mind-field-protection room?”
Twilight snorted out a momentary laugh. “Well, actually, the purpose of this room is to be isolated from magic in general – I have a few long-term experiments in here that can't afford to be affected by any large magical events or phenomena. Honestly, it was just a happy coincidence I was scheduled to check up on them... and that I'd written down enough dumb stuff on the schedule to notice the hebetation field... and, for that matter, that the field didn't make me mess up or ignore my schedule completely.”
“I don't think anything could do that,” Pinkie said with another laugh, happy that the mood had lifted since their earlier despair. After a second, though, her brow lowered as she remembered something. “But, wait, I thought this field was some kind of electric... magnet... radio... stuff?” she finished, knowing the idea but unable to remember the exact words. “Don't Fair Day cages only protect against...”
“Electro-magnetic radiation, yes, that's normally true,” Twilight explained, a small smile on her face, “unless the metal used is cold iron, in which case it does a pretty darn good job blocking magical effects too. It'll stop any kind of passive magical field and even a lot of direct spells.”
“Oooh, that makes sense,” Pinkie said, smiling at the ingenuity. “Shame we can't spread it out over the whole town... or, I guess, over everypony in town, or maybe just Chrysalis herself... though she probably wouldn't stay still long enough to let you put it up around her... unless you put something really tasty somewhere and got her while she eating, but she eats love – I don't think...” she blinked for a second before squeezing her eyes shut and bonking herself hard on the head, angry at having gotten distracted again by her usual mental antics. “Sorry, Twi, I just got... got carried away, I promise I... I...”
She was caught short when she opened her eyes and looked at her friend. “Twilight?”
“Yes?”
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Like what?”
“Like I'm a thousand-year-old lost book going for a bit at a yard sale?”
Twilight opened her lips, turning her smile into a grin with more than enough joy to make Pinkie ignore how it felt like it had slightly too many teeth. “And you say you're not that smart...”
Kek! I was waiting for that shoe to drop.
Step 1) Beat up Cadence and throw her into a mine beneath the city
Step 2) Replace her and make her groom cough up a bunch of love
Step 3) Tell everyone that you plan to take over the city so that they erect a force field to keep all of your master infiltrators outside
Step 4) Get married and keep draining love all by yourself
Step 5) Attack the city by having your starving master-of-disguise minions bang their heads against the force field like moths against a light bulb
Step 6) Rule the world!
12005858
For what it's worth, it's possible that the threat which warranted the barrier was completely unrelated. Most likely Tirek, who escaped while Cerberus was distracted earlier in the season and wasn't properly dealt with until two seasons later.
I also headcanon Celestia as actually having changeling detection spells, but that they pick up Cadance as a false positive she's learned to ignore. This makes replacing the bride of a major wedding significantly less idiotic.