VIII. Life is Beautiful
Solitary Locust
Chapter VIII: Life is Beautiful
For the first time in days, Twilight awoke in a soft, clean bed. For the first time in days, she was warm and comfortable, and not in great pain. For the first time in days, she was able to turn away from the bright sunlight streaming in through the window, mumble a poorly worded request for five more minutes, and drift halfway back to sleep without diving into a terrible nightmare about being chased up and down the streets of Equestria by a mob of her best friends. For the first time in days, she felt like she didn't have to worry about anything.
She blinked rapidly, struggling to adjust to the light that was shining in shafts through the blinds over her bedroom window. A forehoof went up to shield her face as she sat up, for the light was much more overwhelming now without her bedsheets blocking it out. After a few moments, she opened her eyes fully and saw a black, chitinous object surrounded by a bright halo of light—except where the light happily poured in through a cylindrical opening in her upper leg.
Having dared to allow herself the weak hope that she might see a mulberry-coated and slightly overgrown hoof there, she ought to have been crushed by the sight of the changeling's limb in its place. But, for some reason, there was nothing; perhaps because she was still not awake enough for the part of her brain that dealt with emotions to process the loss, or perhaps because she was simply too numb to care anymore.
The closest thing she could think of to liken to the way she felt now was a hangover. It was, in fact, quite similar to the way she felt after some of Applejack's cider get-togethers: her head seemed to have been stuffed full of cotton after being hit hard with a big, heavy sledgehammer. Trying to retrieve a coherent thought from the tarry depths of her brain was about as easy as trekking through a mire of congealed sludge while hooked to a cart loaded with rocks.
But somehow, Twilight felt at peace nonetheless. The little worries that had tormented her since she'd been changed did not come clawing out of the darkness, leaving her to feel... nothing, really, except for a mild sense of contentment.
And it was good. More than good; it was perfect.
Sitting up in bed for the first time in days drove home how lucky she was to be alive. Never before had she truly found pleasure in being able to look through her own window at the birds outside, or gaze straight ahead and see the awful macaroni picture Spike had made of himself and Twilight several years ago that she'd pinned to her wall. Or, rather, what enjoyment she had previously gotten from it had been completely redefined. To do those things brought her joy, certainly, but just to be able to do it was more precious to her now than anything in Equestria. It had been such a terribly mundane experience until she'd been forced to repeatedly prepare herself to never do anything of the sort again. There was, it seemed, nothing like a near-death ordeal to make one appreciate the very smallest joys life had to offer.
Yawning sleepily, she pulled the covers up over her head and turned back over onto her side so she didn't have to look at the light in a last-ditch attempt to evade the morning and go back to sleep. With the sheets bunched up over her head and wrapped around her to form a sort of cocoon, Twilight felt safe and protected; untouchable by the world around her. She imagined, in her sleepy half-awareness of the surrounding stimuli, that the sun-warmed sheets were her friends, all hugging her tightly and nuzzling her, full of love and friendship and all those other things she'd come to value above all else. The very memory of the affection, of the love, that they shared between them was almost as tangible as the real love she'd eaten the day before.
After some time—she honestly didn't know how long; it could just as easily have been hours as minutes—a soft and uncertain male voice spoke from somewhere outside Twilight's blanket cocoon. It took on a distorted, reverberating quality in her head, blending into the almost-dream she was having.
But Twilight knew that it wasn't a product of her imagination. She could also feel the presence of a being nearby through her empathy sense, which was still too new for her to mistake its input as part of a dream. She dug herself out of the sheets just enough to peer over them and find out what was going on.
“Whud?” she asked blearily, yawning and glancing around. “Whoozare...? Wudjasay?”
Once again, the bright light from her window shone directly in her eyes, which made her turn away and look in the other direction. There, she found, was the doorway, and in the doorway was the source of the empathetic presence: a small, chubby green-and-violet creature with lizard-like scales who walked on his hind legs.
“I said, uh, it's like, almost noon,” said Spike, still sounding unsure of himself. He scratched his head with a claw. “I think, uh, maybe it's not such a good idea to lay around and sleep when, uh, you know…”
Spike jabbed one finger against the scales of his other arm a couple of times, and then did the same to his leg. Quite a while passed while Twilight tried to figure out what he was referring to; a difficult task indeed when her brain was still mostly asleep.
Finally, she gave up trying to find an answer on her own. “What're you talking about?”
“Well, uh... uh... you just... uh…” Spike floundered around for a while, saying nothing of any real value. Then he said, “You're, uh, black, and you have holes in your legs, and, uh, your face is pretty messed up, and some other stuff, and—o-oh, yeah... you, uh... you look like a changeling—”
He said this last part very fast and in a lower voice than usual, and continued speaking loudly almost immediately afterward, as though to drown out the very fact that he'd even said it. “—so maybe it's not such a good idea to sleep all day right now...?”
With a miserable groan, Twilight rolled over and pulled the sheets back up over her head. They brushed over the little sails on either side, triggering small bursts of undefinable colours to pop around inside her brain. In the end, this proved to be detrimental to her ultimate goal of going back to sleep, as the abrupt abuse of her senses jarred her further awake.
“Twilight?” Spike's voice came again.
The word rattled loudly inside her skull once it had entered her ears. She opened her eyes again, and this time she made an effort to keep them open, even as she tried to clear her head by shaking it. It wasn't long before they closed again, shut tightly in discomfort: the ache in her leg had finally registered.
“Gimme five more minutes,” she eventually mumbled, only vaguely recalling that she might have said something similar to the window when she'd first awoken.
“Well, uh, okay…” he replied. “I'll just, you know, be downstairs... making breakfast, and stuff... Whenever you're hungry, I guess. Y'know?”
“Mhmm... thankz a bunch…”
Twilight heard Spike's thumping footsteps on the floor as he turned around and left the room, taking his emotional presence with him. As soon as the noise faded away, the ex-unicorn yawned and pulled the sheets even further up. It was unlikely that she'd get back to sleep with her leg hurting the way it was, but she really wanted to procrastinate getting up for as long as she possibly could.
In the past, she had been the sort of pony who had operated well by routine. But with her routine all but irrelevant now, it was difficult to get anything done at all when she wasn't being pressed by a direct threat to her life. She wanted to stay in bed and lounge about all day, thinking nothing but thoughts of happiness and joy, and perhaps drifting off and dreaming every so often.
It was what she deserved, wasn't it? In the novels, the plays, the radio shows, the heroine always got to relax after the danger had passed, didn't she? There was always a handsome stallion by her side, perhaps a medal being pinned to her chest, and that overall feeling that all was well with the world at last.
But all was not.
Not for Twilight, whose world was still turned upside-down and pulled inside-out. She had reached a temporary safe-house, it was true, but she couldn't rest just yet; there were still untold trials to be faced. There was still danger outside, and her body was nearly broken. Unless she was ready to give up right then and there, lying in bed would do nothing to help her. This was not the time to be lazy.
She finally rolled over, disentangled herself from the sheets, and crawled headfirst out of bed, still fighting against the fuzzy cotton-like veil of sleepiness that hung between her and her thoughts. Because she failed to think ahead in her current state, she unthinkingly put her two forelegs on the floor and shifted her body's weight onto them both. Her broken leg promptly failed, and she lost her balance with a sharp grunt and crashed onto the floor in a heap; face-first, her body sliding off the bed entirely. For a few moments, she just lay there, struggling to gather her thoughts up and come up with a proper response to what had happened—the sudden fall, as well as the pain radiating up her foreleg and from her nose, had temporarily disrupted her ability to form coherent ideas.
Almost dragging herself back onto her hooves, she stumbled obliviously through the room in the general direction of the door. Her hooves stepped on a few things she didn't mean to step on, including her mane brush after she bumped into a bookshelf and knocked the brush and some other things to the floor, but she was still too woozy to really care all that much about what she might damage.
The indifference and unconcern with which she plodded across the room, eyelids continuously drooping shut and snapping back open again, might have been mildly comical had there been anypony around to watch—but, of course, there was nopony else, and the once-pony herself was barely able to stay upright at the moment, much less observe her own actions from the viewpoint of another.
Twilight eventually made her way out into the stairwell, which was also deserted save for herself. She descended the stairs slowly and carefully, over a period of several minutes, hindered severely by the stiffness and the ache that flared whenever she put any weight on her injured foreleg. Each step meant having to lower one leg at a time until she'd made it down a little further to prevent herself from either losing her balance or leaning too much of her body on the broken one. Moving around caused the general physical malaise she'd been feeling since she woke up to evolve into actual queasiness. Around this time, she sort-of noticed that her teeth were chattering and it wasn't just her limbs that were shaking, but her whole body.
Was she sick? The symptoms were those of an infection, but too much time had passed for them to logically have been caused by her broken leg—hadn't it? Something inhabiting the wound would have shown itself sooner. Furthermore, the injury had been almost completely unblemished when she rebandaged it the night before. Surely even in a changeling there would have been outward physical signs of an infection, wouldn't there? Had that been covered in the reports she read from the Royal Guard? She couldn't remember.
Her broken leg was far from the only possible source of infection she had acquired over the last couple of days, anyway. Just the memory of that disgusting, filthy, stinking, unclean sludge that she'd concealed herself in when she ran into Lightning Dust's search party made her stomach churn horribly. What terrible parasites could she have accidentally ingested when she was wallowing about in that mire, Twilight wondered. She suddenly felt like she absolutely needed to prove to herself, by any means necessary, that there were no tiny worms in her belly eating her from the inside out.
Thankfully, as she ran down a hazy mental list of her symptoms—nausea, chills, headache, fatigue, stiffness, general malaise, dizziness—she realized that they didn't really fit a specific disease or a parasitic infection. There were too many different systems being affected for that, unless she had contracted some kind of superbug that was attacking every organ in her body at once—in which case she was probably going to drop dead in a day or two no matter what she did and so worrying about it would have been fruitless either way.
What seemed more likely was that her body was finally responding to everything that had happened to her. The last few days, especially the night before, had been a nightmarish experience, and would certainly have taxed her to the point of literal physical exhaustion. Perhaps her fear and the constant jolts of adrenaline had kept her from completely falling apart until the end; perhaps she'd just reached the end of her line and wasn't aware of it until the morning came because she wasn't paying attention to her already pain-racked body. In any case, to think that just feeding and getting a few hours of sleep would somehow cure her and completely regenerate her health was foolish at best.
The second floor was deserted as far as Twilight could see, although the light in the hall had been turned on and there were noises coming from the kitchen. Because doing otherwise would have required more mental energy than she was currently willing or able to dedicate, she assumed the noisemaker was Spike and not somepony who'd come in to hurt her. After all, why would somepony else be in her kitchen of all places, where there was really nowhere to hide, and who else but Spike would have that particular combination of naive obliviousness and grown-up concern so prominent in their emotions? Satisfied as much as she felt she could be, she turned away from that end of the house and pushed open the bathroom door, which was only a foreleg's length away.
It seemed as though Spike had taken it upon himself to clean the bathroom up a bit after she had fallen asleep. There was no sign that anypony had taken a bath there the night before; it was as clean and spotless as when she'd first dragged herself in. Even the sickly greenish-yellow spots where she'd bled onto the floor had, for the most part, been scrubbed away from the tiles, leaving only the occasional ghost of a stain as a reminder that they'd ever been there in the first place. Twilight made a mental note to thank Spike for cleaning up, but as a relatively low-priority item on her nebulous to-do list for the day, it was quickly lost to the haze.
Closing the door softly behind her, Twilight headed for the toilet. After she'd relieved herself and washed her hooves thoroughly, she put the seat down and sat on it for a moment, so she could massage her pounding skull with her good hoof in the hope that it would ease some of the pain. But rubbing her head did nothing to diminish the feeling of being stabbed through the eye with a railroad spike. In fact, it seemed to make her headache worse, somehow. Soon, she gave up and stood again, and went over to the bathtub.
She had decided, at some point that morning—though she couldn't actually remember when that point had been—that it would be best for her to follow as much of her normal routine as she could. After all, routines and lists and organization were the absolute, undeniable key to succeeding in any given endeavor. Twilight was also aware that she herself tended to operate most optimally when doing things by the book—to have control over her environment was quite important to her emotional functioning, something she'd only recently come to realize.
The first part of this routine was to take a shower, and Twilight was certainly going to do that. She had, of course, just had a bath the night before, but hot water was another one of those little things that she was determined to never take for granted again.
When she went to turn the tap, nothing happened. It took a moment for her to realize that she was trying to turn it on with her magic, not her hooves. The familiarity of the activity was such that Twilight hadn't even had to make a conscious decision to cast the spell that manipulated objects. She sighed, sat back, and squeezed her eyes so tightly shut that stars burst across the insides of her eyelids, and then she reached out and bumped the tap a few times with her good hoof.
Some fifteen or twenty minutes later, Twilight finally turned off the water again. She'd showered until the hot water was literally exhausted, and was now as clean as was physically possible of the remaining dirt, grime, sweat, and blood that had continued to cling to her after the previous night's bath. The heat had relaxed her considerably and lessened the terrible pounding in her head by just a little, and most of all it had helped to wake her up at last.
It wasn't really possible for her to actually be awake in her current state; this was as close to wakefulness as she was going to get. Were her situation less dire, Twilight would have elected to go back to bed and rest for the next week or so—it was probably the healthiest option for her in the long run, given how utterly exhausted she was on every level. A body healing from the level of damage she'd sustained needed more than a couple of sporadic hours of sleep. But Twilight could ill afford to waste time relaxing at the moment, and she knew it well.
She moved on to the next item on her mental to-do list, which was brushing her teeth. And it was here, when she moved in front of the sink, that she simply lost herself for a moment. Though not normally one to get distracted easily, Twilight was unable to resist the sudden urge to gaze at her reflection in the mirror once she saw it.
Strangely, seeing that alien body mimicking all her movements in reverse wasn't as jarring an experience as it had been when she first saw herself in Fluttershy's cottage. A sense of blankness and slight confusion was the the only substantial thing the sight really produced within Twilight. With that blank feeling numbing her, the ex-unicorn looked her reflection over a bit. Injuries still marred her body, but she was, for perhaps the first time in her ordeal, able to look at them without a pang of terror or anxiety shooting through her stomach.
The hot water had caused her body to flush strangely in the places where large numbers of her peripheral blood vessels were not covered by armor-like chitin. Her face, neck, and empathy sensors, in particular, had taken on an odd greenish hue, giving her an appearance that would have looked distressing and sickly on a real pony. The rest of her body, though it had for the most part reverted to the insect-like, black-armored form recognizable as that of a changeling drone, still had patches of mulberry and white on it where the forced transformations of the night before had failed or gone awry. A mangled half of a cutie mark decorated one flank; it seemed a combination of her own, Celestia's, and several other nebulous designs as well.
Most noticeably, her broken nose was still twisted and smashed as it had been that first night, if not more so. It was also extremely swollen, to the point of looking almost comical. This, Twilight theorized, was probably a result of getting punched in the face the evening before. The amount of abuse inflicted on her nose made it almost a given that she'd have to have multiple surgeries to make it anything near normal again—if even that minium was possible.
Sickly yellow bruises covered quite a bit of her body where the armor didn't provide protection, particularly her torso. There, the discolouration outlined two of her ribs well enough to make them out in one spot. Some of those bruises were starting to turn brownish as they began to fade away, but others were quite new and still ached when Twilight touched them. More likely than not, the latter were products of the day before, particularly the abusive treatment she'd received at Trixie's hooves.
After a long, careful session of self-examination, Twilight determined that she had probably cracked a rib at some point, since her chest hurt almost as badly as her leg had the other day. Though she couldn't actually remember when she'd received that particular injury—the whole of the previous day seemed to have run together into a blurry mush now that it was over—she wasn't at all surprised that it had happened. If anything, it was surprising, given all that she had been through, that she hadn't been hurt worse, or even killed.
Rather less unpleasantly, though, she could also see that the missing chip of chitin from her cheek had partially filled in since she'd last looked and was beginning to heal over, as had some of her other injuries. This, as well as the significant decrease in pain from her foreleg, had to be at least partially due to the fact that she'd inadvertently gorged herself on Spike's affection the night before. It seemed that changelings were able to metabolize their 'food' very quickly indeed.
Twilight finally tore herself away from the morbid visage, as she'd been staring at it for quite some time. Deliberately avoiding giving herself a chance to look again, she hunched over the running sink and started rinsing out the disgusting film of mucus and saliva that had been coating the inside of her mouth for the last couple of days.
It was only then, when the cool, sweet water had filled her mouth, that Twilight realized just how thirsty she was. Almost immediately after she'd swallowed the first mouthful of water, she impulsively guzzled half a dozen or so more from the tap. Then she sat back and let out a small burp, feeling much better.
A small, satisfied smile crossed her face as she took her toothbrush from behind the sink and squeezed some toothpaste onto it, half-listening to the cold water in her belly slosh about audibly whenever she moved. Then she inserted the toothbrush into her mouth and started gently brushing her teeth. At first, it was uncomfortable—the fangs in particular got in the way, and one of them ached terribly—but Twilight kept up her efforts despite the discomfort. Soon, she was rewarded by a fresh, minty taste overpowering the nauseating one of changeling blood and mucus.
She went through the long, laborious process of disinfecting the many cuts and scrapes all over her body and dressing the more serious ones appropriately, and then took some ibuprofen from the medicine cabinet to help with the swelling in her leg. Then she stepped away from the sink and towards the door, still limping a little bit.
As she trundled down the hall again, she smelled something familiar through her twisted nose: the smell of tempeh bacon cooking. It must have been quite strong if she could make it out so clearly even with her nose broken. Unfortunately, it didn't make her mouth water the way it should have. Twilight wasn't sure if that was because she was a changeling and now had different 'culinary preferences', or if it was simply because her stomach was so upset.
Stepping into the kitchen, Twilight found that Spike was indeed hard at work making breakfast. The tempeh bacon wasn't actually cooking but sitting on a plate next to the still warm stove, while Spike himself was making what looked and smelled like a mushroom-and-cheese omelette. Even though the food didn't seem appealing at all, Twilight couldn't help but take note of just how good of a cook Spike was—still one more thing she'd always overlooked and failed to appreciate.
He started violently when he turned around and saw her, his feet leaving the floor for a second and his eyes bugging out slightly. Equally startled by his response, Twilight instinctively backed up a few paces, banged into the table, knocked over one of the stools beside it, tripped, and ended up in an awkward heap on the floor with her legs splayed out on either side of her.
“Twilight!” Spike said in a slightly higher-than-usual voice. He dropped what he had been doing, literally, and waddled over to help the dazed librarian. “Are you okay?”
Twilight sighed, feeling something heavy settle into her chest as she replayed the last ten seconds in her mind. It was obvious why Spike had reacted that way: her appearance had frightened him, as he wasn't used to having scary, deformed changelings walk in on him while he was making food. She couldn't really blame him, having seen what she looked like in the mirror just a short while before.
After shooing Spike away with assurances that she was fine, she got back to her hooves, righted the stool she'd tripped over, and sat down on it, resting her good hoof on the table and letting her injured one hang down at her side. There were two painted ceramic plates on the table; one across from her, where Spike usually sat, and the other slightly to her left. Rather than drag the plate over to her, she took the time to painstakingly relocate the stool itself—everything had to be exactly in its usual spot, or else it would become yet another environmental imperfection needling her psyche.
“Hey, Twi... your horn's glowing again,” said Spike suddenly. He sounded rather uncomfortable with the fact.
Looking up, Twilight could just barely see a soft light glowing above her head, between her eyes. Her horn was indeed shining dimly on its own again, and she could feel the faint current of incoming love magic it was picking up. The energy sent ripples of calm throughout her body, acting as a sort of painkiller, in a way, for both her physical trauma and emotional strain. She closed her eyes for a moment, letting the calm wash over her.
“Yes,” she finally said to Spike, somewhat absently. “Yes... It seems to be doing that. Glowing, I mean.”
He frowned just a little more. “Isn't that thing supposed to keep you from doing magic?”
“I-it's supposed to,” agreed Twilight. Pressing her hoovess against her closed eyes, she considered the matter a bit. “But I think the... the range of frequencies it covers clearly isn't inclusive enough to effectively, ah, completely impede the entirety of certain reflexively activated changeling spells.”
“Huh?” he said, clearly not following at all. “What?”
Twilight experienced a familiar twinge of irritation; the kind she felt when somepony didn't 'get' a concept she was presenting in what she felt were very understandable terms and forced her to grasp at analogies that failed to properly convey most of what she was talking about. Fortunately, it wasn't hard to come up with a fairly simple alternative way of explaining this particular idea.
“It's, um, it's like a—a radio, sort of. A bit like that.” Twilight waved vaguely at the little radio sitting by the window. “A radio has different frequencies, uh, that you can tune into to get different stations, right?”
“Right,” agreed Spike as he got some orange juice out of the refrigerator and poured it into a glass.
“Well, magic is the same. Kind of. Different spells are on different frequencies—and usually in similar groups of frequencies according to what kind of creature is using them, since all magical creatures have easier access to one or two groups—and... well, it doesn't exactly work this way... but if you want to block a pony's magic, you have to tune the—the device you're blocking it with so that it's able to intercept those particular magical frequencies.”
“Okay,” Spike said, nodding and still looking confused. “But why does the magic ring thing not work on you?”
“It does work on me, but it doesn't work completely, because my body is tuned to use changeling magic as its default now,” she told him. She amended this quickly: “Well... s-sort of. I also have my magical connections—the ones I had as a unicorn—so I'm... I'm not actually sure what's going on with... my magic…”
Pausing for a moment, Twilight rubbed her head without considering what she was doing first. To her surprise, it did help her headache a bit this time.
“...Just that it's very out-of-control and I don't think I should try to use it right now,” she said at last, and waited for a while more before speaking again. “The, um, the changeling magic that powers the love absorption spell is on a different frequency than the unicorn magic that this limiter was made to block, so it seems to be leaking through... and since the command to cast the spell is apparently generated primarily by something I have yet to gain proper control over, I don't think I can stop it from working at the moment.”
“Oh,” Spike said. “Okay then. I guess that makes sense…”
Twilight let out what was left of her most recent breath in a shaky sigh. Without saying anything, or really even thinking anything, at all, she watched Spike start to move all the food he'd cooked over to the table.
“Want some?” he asked her, clearly prepared to pile food onto her plate at a single word so that she didn't have to exert herself.
“Spike, I can't eat normal f…” Twilight began. It felt like quite an awkward thing to say, for some reason, so she couldn't quite find the right words to say it. “I mean... changelings... Well, they can't... Well, I mean, they can, but they can't... um…”
She paused thoughtfully, having realized that although eating pony food wouldn't yield any energy, it probably wouldn't hurt, either. Changelings, after all, were well-adapted to the task of blending in with countless species and cultures, and that included the presence of a false digestive system to process normal food when pretending to eat with 'real' creatures. Eating with Spike would do little for her body either way—but she found that it appealed to her because it could help bring back a bit of normalcy and order to her life; something she desperately needed. She moved the plate back in front of her.
“Yes, Spike,” she amended. “I would love to have some of the food you made. Thank you very much.”
The ex-unicorn sat patiently and allowed Spike to heap a large portion of just about everything onto her plate. He sat down on the other side of the table and put about twice that amount of food onto his plate, while Twilight tapped her hoof idly against the tabletop and stared at the fork and knife he'd put out next to the plate.
It took some effort for her to figure out how to pick up the fork and knife. She hadn't had to eat that way since she was around five years old, before she'd learned to handle things with her magic. Worse yet, she only had one hoof to work with. Once she finally got it, barring how the fork kept dropping from her hoof, she began eating—slowly. Even if her ability to manipulate things hadn't been so limited, she wasn't rude enough to eat right off the plate, even in this state.
Although she could taste the food, it lacked something or other that had made it so appetizing when she was a pony. Twilight ventured a guess that since her body didn't actually need it, she wasn't going to enjoy it as much. At the same time, her horn was still shimmering slightly, bringing in a small but steady stream of familial love from Spike. This time, she didn't feel bad for consuming that love—it was hers, after all. Hers to do with as she pleased, to sustain her in her hours of need, to keep her alive, and to keep her hope from dying away.
“Twilight?”
Twilight started at the suddenness of the voice and dropped her fork onto the floor. After unsuccessfully fishing around for it with her hoof, she looked back up at the dragon on the other side of the table, half-imagining that her cheeks had probably turned slightly green with embarassment.
“Yes, Spike?” she asked, still trying to reign in the shudders that were passing through her body.
A pause followed this, during which Spike twiddled his claws anxiously, occasionally opening his mouth and then closing it again. It got to the point where Twilight was considering giving him a prompt, but before she could say anything, he finally spoke himself.
“What do we do now? I mean, after we eat, and stuff.”
For quite some time, she said nothing, merely staring blankly at Spike as though he'd spoken to her in an alien language. Birds chirped in the distance, and somewhere even more distant, a pony declared, in a rather distraught tone of voice, that they were glad they had insurance against magical damage.
The pause was due less to Twilight considering the matter than to her trying to avoid considering it. Just thinking about the future was a terrifying matter, something that loomed over her like a great shadow and threatened to bring back those worries she'd just fought off. But, soon, despite all her attempts to keep her attention focused elsewhere, her mind did turn to that all-important question.
What would she do next?
There were a thousand possibilities as to what Twilight could do, all vying for superiority within her head. Should she run again; go somewhere else, keep hiding until she found a solution on her own? Or should she go to the basement, carry all the information she could find about changelings down with her, and barricade herself in?
Or, perhaps, she could just curl up and wait for the end to come—that seemed like the most straightforward response.
The ex-unicorn put her hooves against her skull and pressed, wishing she could literally squeeze some of the thoughts out and focus on just a few at a time. But, since she couldn't do that, she decided to go for the next best alternative: she would make lists.
She would make order out of chaos.
She would organize.
Organization was good, organization was useful, organization was the answer to all problems and dilemmas.
“Before I even consider deciding on any definite course of action…” Twilight poked thoughtfully at her mostly untouched omelette with her knife as she spoke. “...I'm going to need to get as full an understanding of the situation as possible.”
Her words caused Spike to look up at her with an expression of confusion that was probably rooted in the abruptness of her statement. It had been quite some time since he'd asked his question, after all. Eventually, he appeared to connect the two points in his mind, and his confused look settled into a neutral one; the kind he used to communicate that Twilight is being Twilight, and I know it.
“Okay then,” he said.
“Spike, please tell me all you know about what happened in my absence.”
“Okay,” repeated Spike, biting into a piece of toast.
He scratched his head for a bit, still nibbling on his toast, then began. “Well, uh... Everything was pretty hectic after, you know... Uh, Rarity and Fluttershy came and got me from the library, and we sent Princess Celestia a letter saying you'd been kidnapped by changelings.”
“So the Princess knows?” There was a sinking feeling in Twilight's stomach. She'd known on some level that the Princess would inevitably find out, but that didn't soften the blow at all. “She knows about what happened in the town square?”
“Pretty much, yeah.”
”Pretty much?” She couldn't believe Spike could be so indifferent about something like upsetting Princess Celestia. “What does 'pretty much' mean? How much did you tell her about what happened? What was her response? Is she worried? Is she angry? Is she angry at me?”
“I don't know!” said Spike, sounding exasperated. “Rarity wrote the letter, and I just sent it. The Princess said something like, uh, she's sending the Royal Guard, and then she was like, Twilight's smart and we shouldn't be too worried because you'll show up safe and everything, and then, uh, I spent the night at Rarity's boutique.”
Pausing, Spike puffed himself up slightly, as though this were some sort of major accomplishment. Twilight, however, had more pressing matters to focus on than Spike's imagined conquest of Rarity's sofa; namely, a particular combination of words that he'd said.
“I did show up,” she said, more to herself than to Spike, as the realization sank in. “I did show up, didn't I?”
A sense of panic started to take hold of Twilight as she recalled the pony—no, the changeling who had been posing as her. She couldn't believe that she'd forgotten that very important piece of information, even with her thoughts so muddled. That changeling was the biggest danger to her at the moment, because if it saw Twilight as a threat to its social camoflauge, it was going to want to get her out of the way as quickly as possible. Who knew where she would end up if it got to her: the basement, dead, imprisoned in a cocoon for the rest of eternity?
Worst of all, it was impersonating the pony who lived in the very place she was taking shelter: her. It wasn't until that moment that she had actually considered that the imposter might come back to the library as a process of maintaining its act. For all Twilight knew, it could come through the door at any moment, see her, and everything would be over—
“...the Royal Guard showed up, and they pretty much took over the town—I dunno if you noticed that, but they're kinda everywhere, so I guess you probably did.” Spike rambled on, oblivious to Twilight's exponentially growing alarm. “Uh, I was kinda not really in the loop much, but I guess Rainbow Dash and some other pegasi were in the forest looking for you, 'cause they thought the changeling might'a... er, if there was a... you know…”
“Spike, Spike... wait…” interrupted Twilight, fidgeting nervously. “Spike, the imposter... It could come here—I need to—I need to hide somewhere—”
There was a lump in her throat that threatened to turn into... something, she wasn't quite sure what yet, but it was probably bad and probably related to her anxiety issues. It just wasn't fair: she'd expended so much effort just surviving, and here somepony else had taken everything she'd hoped to return to, and now it was going to undo everything just by walking through a door, and she'd never—
Twilight forcibly stopped herself from continuing that line of thought the moment her brain produced the word never. Words like that signaled that she was thinking out of control, that she was fearful and her mind was racing beyond the limits of logical reasoning. This was not the time to panic; this was a time when rationality and calmness were of the utmost importance.
“Spike,” she tried again, in a more level tone. “There's a... a good chance that the changeling posing as me is going to come back here, to this library, at some point quite soon. I believe it w... It would be prudent to assume that it's going to be back sooner than later, and to plan accordingly with that in mind…”
“Well, it already did come back,” Spike told her, sounding like he didn't think it was that big of a deal.
“I-It came back? When? Where is It? Did it see me? Why didn't you tell me before? What if it's preparing to come back and drag me away to a changeling hive—” She leaned forward at Spike, almost vibrating with anxiety. “Why didn't you tell me? Spike, tell me what happened! I need to know. Tell me, Spike. Spike. Tell me.”
He recoiled away from her. “O-okay! Calm down, Twilight. You're freaking me out!”
“I am calm!”
“You’re n… Yeah, well... It came back, like, an hour after you went to sleep,” said Spike, apparently deciding it would be best to just answer the question. “It was all banged up and stuff, and it said Trixie was back, and it got beat up by her, and stuff, and everypony was looking for her and you…”
As she was tapping her hoof nervously on the table, waiting for him to go on further—for he had stopped, looking at her—Twilight suddenly realized Spike had attached an implied question to the last part of his statement. “Yes, yes, she's back, and she... I would venture a guess that the changeling was probably defeated by her, as she had quite a bit of magic at her disposal... but that means Trixie is still on the loose…”
Memories of the psychotic showmare invaded Twilight's conscious mind, and she shivered a bit. It was hard to feel bad for Trixie in spite of how she'd obviously been infiltrated by dark magic. The sheer madness she had displayed was disturbing on a grand scale, and made Twilight wonder just how far this Trixie was willing to go for revenge. But, the ex-unicorn reminded herself, this wasn't the time to think about Trixie; she had more pressing matters to deal with right now.
“...Where is it now?” she asked Spike. “The changeling, where is it?”
Spike puffed himself up again, looking quite proud indeed. “Well, I just told it I saw you go past the house toward the forest, and it went away again. Like, real fast. It was pretty crazy about catching up with you, y'know?”
Still deflating from her bout of hypervigilance, Twilight nodded and said, “Yes. Yes, I suppose it would be. And that's the last time you saw It?”
“Yeah,” he told her. “It hasn't been around since then. It didn't spend that much time around here when it first came to town, anyway. When it was leaving, it said it probably wouldn't be back until later tonight, so I should just make dinner for myself.”
Under any other circumstances, Twilight would have chastised Spike for lying like that—but at that moment, she could think of nothing but how wonderful and lifesaving his sudden craftiness was. Without it, she would surely have been discovered already by her double, and so she couldn't possibly fault him for protecting her. In fact, it made her want to hug him, though she didn't really have the energy to move over and do it.
Instead, she asked, “Spike, how did that changeling even get into the town? Didn't somepony cast the revealing spell on it?”
“Uh... Well, uh, I was at Rarity's place, and this stallion from the Royal Guard came to the door and said they found, uh, you, in the forest. So we went over to the hospital where they took you, 'cause they said you were acting funny, and—”
“Wait, wait, wait…” Twilight cut in. “Did they check to make sure she wasn't a changeling? Did somepony cast the spell on her—It?”
“Well, I dunno if they did it earlier, but there was a big thing going on up at the hospital 'cause they needed a... Oh, hey, you remember Moondancer from school?”
“Spike, please stay on topic!”
“I am on topic!” said Spike defensively, waving his claws around like he tended to do when he was upset or exasperated. “‘Cause it was her that came with the guards to check that you were really a pony. She came with the guards as an att... attash…”
“Attaché?” suggested Twilight, and Spike nodded.
“Yeah, that! Because none of them could cast the spell that reveals changelings. Anyway, uh, Moondancer cast that spell on the other you and it didn't do anything, so they said you—I mean, the changeling that was pretending to be you—It—was actually you. That's what they said, anyway. But, uh, after we were allowed to see her—I mean, it—we went and saw her, and she was acting all weird. Like, it took her ages to remember who any of us were, and she was kinda just weird. The doctor said she had a construction and that made her forget stuff.”
“I think you mean a concussion.”
“Yeah, one of those. But I said to her... I mean, It. I said that I didn't think it was Twilight, and it got all upset and Rarity kinda yelled at me for making it cry, and then they took us back to the library. And then I told her I knew she was lying, and she said to go to my room, and then I told her I don't have a room,” Spike rambled. “And she got all crazy and told me to just do chores all day, but I didn't because I knew it wasn't you and chores suck.”
“Spike, language,” Twilight chastised firmly.
Though he rolled his eyes and was clearly reluctant to apologize for being 'cool', Spike said, “Sorry, Twilight. Anyway, you know, then Trixie came to town yelling in the middle of the night, and it went out to go see what was going on, and there was a lot of explosions and then you came in, and then... yeah…”
For a moment, Twilight said nothing, only nodding slowly to show that she was taking it all in and considering it.
“Well, it's good that you got it to go away from the house. Thank you for that,” she murmured after some time. “But I don't think I ought to assume it's going to be out all day, or else I might be caught off-guard.”
“So what do we do now?” repeated Spike.
“Spike, please. I'm trying to think.”
On a macro level, she had two choices: she could either attempt to prove to somepony else that she was the real Twilight Sparkle, or she could keep running from her problems. The answer to that was very simple—Twilight didn't think she'd be able to survive much more 'running', based on the experience she'd already had over the past few days.
“I can either turn myself in or choose some other method of proving my identity,” she mused aloud. “Based on my previous experiences, I am likely to find myself severely injured or worse if I attempt to deal with the easily-panicked average pony. So, I'll have to find an alternative method of bringing myself to the attention of trained, professional authorities that does not involve immediate, unannounced direct confrontation.”
“Well, I sent a letter to Princess Celestia last night, so…”
Twilight stopped moving entirely, feeling as if freezing cold water had been poured down the back of her neck. Eventually, she spluttered, “Y-you what?”
“Sent a letter to Princess Celestia,” said Spike, who did not appear to share in Twilight's rapidly growing concern.
“But I told you not to!” the changeling blurted out, gazing at Spike with eyes that begged him to say it was a joke. “I told you I'd figure it out in the morning!”
Yet again, Spike threw his claws up in exasperation. “It's not like you were making sense half the time! She can help, Twilight! She always fixes this stuff.”
“Spike, when I tell you to do something, you do it! And when I tell you to not do som—to not d-do s-something... don't do it!” Her breathing started to pick up in pace as a whirlwind of jarring, jostling thoughts tore through her head, and the kitchen started to blur and shake wildly. “Do you understand me?”
“Okay, okay! Jeez!” said Spike. “Calm down, Twilight!”
“Don't you tell me to calm down. I'm very calm!” she choked. The kitchen was going around and around like a carousel, and she couldn't seem to make it stop. “Why won't anything work the way I want it to anymore? Everything was perfect until I cast that spell, and now everything is so messed up and I just want something to work the way I want it to!”
She fell silent and just sat there, breathing heavily from the exertion of her outburst. For some reason, she was suddenly very acutely aware of the way her hooves and horn were tingling; a feeling similar to the one she got if she held her breath for too long. During the silence, Spike said something to her that her brain didn't quite manage to process—maybe it was all just gibberish; she couldn't tell.
Somehow, Twilight was able to reign in her intense desire to run around the house smashing everything she could reach with her hooves, and after a while she straightened up, feeling a little bit better. Maybe it had been a bit cathartic to get angry, but Spike hadn't done anything wrong and didn't deserve to be subjected to ranting about something he didn't have any control over.
“I'm sorry,” she finally said to Spike. “That... that was rude of me. I'm so sorry.”
Spike shrugged awkwardly. “It's cool... I guess…”
“Thank you.” More silence passed while the ex-unicorn tried to reorganize her thoughts and pick up from where she'd left off. “...so you sent a letter to Princess Celestia.”
“Yeah.”
Twilight fidgeted with her hoof, rubbing it rather hard against the table. “What did you say? In, uh, the letter.”
“Well, uh, I said you were in the library and you got turned into a changeling,” said the dragon. “And I said I know it's you 'cause you know stuff that only Twilight would, and you didn't try to attack me or anything.”
“I see,” Twilight murmured, still tracing her hoof over the lines in the wooden surface. “Did she reply?”
“No, not yet,” said Spike with another shrug.
“Well, I suppose that makes sense. She's a very busy mare, and I expect she has more important things to do than clean up my mistakes, like running the entire nation of Equestria.” There was a tiny gouge in the wood about the diameter of a coin turned on its side that looked like it'd been there for quite some time, as it had been covered over by varnish. Had it been like that when she bought the table? “I suppose she probably sent one of the Regional Inquisitors like Hornbeam or Leere to sort it out.”
“Yeah, that's the name of the guy in charge. Lee-are, or whatever you said.”
“Oh, I see. Well, he knows what he's doing. I think he used to be an appellate judge for the Canterlot Region. Sometimes he writes periodicals for the Journal of Equestrian Law.” The table couldn't have been gouged out like that when Twilight bought it, because she'd inspected it and made absolutely certain that there was no damage before she gave the bits to the salespony. “He might have been a Royal Guard, too, though. I can't remember.”
Spike, clearly knowing less than Twilight did about the subject, just shrugged again. Twilight continued to examine the table in silence, trying to figure out when it had recieved that chip, and why it was covered over with varnish. She had no recollection of having either damaged or repaired it, and she was reasonably certain she would have remembered one or the other, if not both.
“But, uh, what are we gonna do now?” repeated Spike.
“Spike, did you do something to this table and then try to cover it up?” Twilight asked, completely ignoring his question. “Because it looks like something gouged out a bit of the wood, and then somepony tried to... uh…”
She trailed off, suddenly trying very hard to remember why she had just cared so much about the little chip missing from the surface of her table when her horn was useless and she looked like a gigantic insect, and everypony wanted to grab her and beat her breathless. The table had seemed so important just a moment ago, and now, suddenly, it wasn't anymore. With a slow exhale, Twilight leaned back and looked up at the ceiling for a while.
“It would be best to work under the assumption that somepony is going to come to the library eventually, whether it be The Changeling or the Royal Guard,” she said, mostly to herself. “Therefore, I'll have to be out of here by, say, three. Maybe three-thirty. Of course, I need a place to hide, and my body wouldn't be able to handle going all the way back to the church in the Everfree.”
“There's a clubhouse-fort-thing in the trees at Sweet Apple Acres,” suggested Spike. “The Cutie Mark Crusaders—you know, um, Rarity's and Applejack's sisters, and the filly that tags along with Rainbow Dash—they use it a lot. Sometimes they have sleepovers there.”
“Then I should stay away from it, Spike. I can just imagine those three trying to get their cutie marks in catching changelings.”
Scratching the side of his head, he said, “Uh, they kinda already did try that... Well, they got in trouble for it, too. I heard Rarity talking about it when I was at the boutique. Uh, Applebloom got sent to Manehattan, Sweetie Belle is with her parents in I-don't-remember-where, and Scootaloo got grounded and she's not allowed to leave the house for three weeks without supervision, except for school.”
He looked pleased with himself for having been able to supply this information, and Twilight just couldn't bring herself to tell him otherwise. It wasn't a bad suggestion, really, now that she knew the old treehouse would more than likely be deserted—the Guard had probably already checked it as one of the most obvious hiding places early on; maybe again the night before, when Trixie had brought Twilight into town. There was a chance she could relocate herself to it for a night or two without being caught, and plan from there.
And in the course of considering the benefits of this move, she realized the solution to the problem of where she would go: after staying in the treehouse for a night, she could then sneak back into the forest and make her way to Zecora's home. Though Twilight supposed Fluttershy or Pinkie Pie would probably be just as willing to give her the benefit of the doubt as Zecora, the zebra was still the best choice because at least the place she lived wasn't crawling with Royal Guards and concerned townsponies anymore.
In fact, if she left the area, they probably wouldn't pursue her into the forest again, even if that potential alarm surrounding the town caught her on her way out. Twilight was ostensibly safe, and the real Twilight doubted she would be pursued with the same vigor after it was decided that she was heading away from the town. The more she thought about it, the more excited she became—it was actually a very good plan.
“Alright. Alright, I'll go to the treehouse, then. Could make my way over to Zecora's from there,” muttered Twilight. “I could even sneak right back into the forest if I make good time getting there.”
She paused again, having hit upon a rather significant issue. “But how will I get there without being seen by anypony?”
“Can't you just... I dunno. Can't you, like, change?” Spike asked, making quotation marks with his claws as he spoke the last word. “I, well, isn't that what being a changeling is about? Like, you can, uh, you can turn into ponies, right? Disguise yourself so nopony knows it's you.”
“I can't.” Anxiously, Twilight ran her hoof up and down the side of the table again, this time pointedly refusing to touch, look at, or acknowledge the gouged-out spot. “The limiter covers that frequency. Even if I did have sufficient access to my magic, I still don't know how to physically control that change. It works by itself when I lose... when my emotions are extremely strong... although that tends to happen with any branch of magic where the caster isn't appropriately trained to keep it under control.”
A shudder passed through Twilight at the thought of there being a kind of magic—one that was currently inside her, no less—that she didn't have complete control over. She had grown comfortable with her overpowered unicorn magic thanks to Princess Celestia teaching her to reign it in and keep herself under control, and it was not pleasant to have this control taken away from her. Having a changeling's magic was different, but memories of that explosion of energy during her test were prickling unpleasantly at the corners of Twilight's mind nonetheless.
“List... need to make a list…” she muttered automatically, and then realized that she wasn't even at that stage in her planning session at the moment.
Though idea of going into something and winging it, so to speak, was loathesome to Twilight, she decided after an eternity of trying to slog through her mental sludge that she was just going to have to make up her escape from the library as she went along. The best she would be able to do for the time being was minimize certain risks.
“Spike, I'm going to have to travel all the way to Sweet Apple Acres like this and avoid being seen when I do. I'll need your help for it.”
He nodded. “What do you need me to do, Twilight?”
Twilight hummed thoughtfully. “I need you to go look around the town and find out which parts are most heavily patrolled by the Royal Guard, so that we know to avoid them. While you're doing that, I'll get some supplies, and—Ah. Spike, what happened to all the changeling research I collected for my presentation? It'd be very useful to bring that as well.”
“Well, the other you, you know, well…” Spike started. He stopped, took a breath, and began again in a somewhat calmer manner. “I bundled all that stuff up 'cause you got a bunch of mail while you were gone and we needed the space. And then the other, the changeling you—I mean, the you that's actually a changeling but looks like you but isn't... It came here, and I got worried it would destroy everything to keep from having anypony learn about changelings, so I hid it all in the closet upstairs.”
A small smile tugged at the corner of Twilight's mouth. Finally, she was going to get her hooves on some information that would be useful in finding a way to reverse the transformation.
"Good. I'll get that from upstairs, and I'll get the things I need, and then I'll meet you again when you're done going around the town. Take something with you to write down what you see—or, actually, I'll write a list of some things and you can draw on the back of it. Just, if anypony asks you what you're doing outside, running all over the place, just tell them I sent you out on errands."
Feeling very excited with her own ingenuity, she looked around for something to write her fake list with. Spike helpfully got her some parchment, a pen, and ink from the little bookshelf under the window. She remembered not to try using her magic this time, and ended up writing an extremely messy list of some generic things for him to pretend to be doing—mostly checking on the experiments that were contained at specific places around the town instead of the library.
“Here,” she finally said, and passed the list to Spike. There was a giddying bubble of smugness in her chest now, the kind Twilight only experienced when she'd done something she knew was particularly clever. “I know you don't typically go to the general store on Thursdays unless there's an emerg—”
“It's Saturday,” Spike interrupted awkwardly. Twilight stared at him in half-comprehension for a bit, then managed to convince her mind to adapt to this information.
“...you don't go to the general store on Saturdays, either, but nopony knows that routine unless they've paid very close attention to your habits as well as mine for a very long time. Even if The Changeling comes across you and asks what you're doing, it won't know that you're acting abnormally if you tell it you're doing your usual errands, because it doesn't have my memories. It'll assume you're telling the truth, and why would it risk its cover questioning something so mundane? With the way it was acting in the town square, I expect it's been manipulating ponies into disclosing information it doesn't know under the guise of having a head injury that's causing it to forget things.”
She paused, and promptly filed this realization away in a corner of her brain for possible future use. That sort of thing could provide invaluable revelations if she took the time to analyze it properly. An understanding of the changeling's role in her transformation, perhaps, or some way to trick or trap the creature and set everything right...
“A-anyway... please make some notes on anything else that might impede our journey,” Twilight finished distractedly. “Places where there might be obstacles: particularly busy routes, unusually observant ponies, Pinkie Pie. That sort of thing. I'll meet you back here when you're done, and we'll get going then, alright?”
Spike nodded. He got up from his seat and hugged Twilight. “I'll go in a minute. Just gotta put away all the dishes and stuff first, 'cause I don't think you could do that with just one hoof.”
“Alright. Thank you, Spike.”
Twilight allowed him to take her plate away—not much of her food had been eaten—and silently watched him clean it and put it away, along with his own. Then he left, bidding her goodbye as he did, and the ex-unicorn went upstairs to look for the books he'd hidden. They were indeed hidden in a tote bag in the back of the closet; all the books, and the notes that had been mailed to her from Canterlot. Twilight pulled them out and laid them on her bed.
After all, there was no reason why she couldn't have a quick look at them while she waited for Spike to come back.
“...and then we'll go and give out invitations and we'll get everypony in town including the Royal Guards and they'll stop being so grouchy-wouchy and we can invite Spitfire too and do you know where Trixie went because I need to plan her party too. Oh, oh, and we can have a piñata that looks like a changeling so when you hit it you get little candies that look like hearts, geddit? 'Cause they eat looove…”
Not far away from the library, Pinkie Pie was prancing around the back kitchen of Sugarcube Corner with a tray of cupcakes balanced on her nose. Piled around her were the building blocks of a Pinkie Pie Party: streamers, confetti, banners, candy, punch mix, and so on. Setting up a party might have been a simple task with the party cannon to help, but like any great campaign, throwing a good party required a lot of preparation beforehoof.
To this end, the pink mare had taken on an indentured servant for the day. Lyra Heartstrings, who wasn't too big on parties, had, about a month before, swapped a planned Pinkie Pie Birthday Party for a promise to help out at Sugarcube Corner. Thus, she was now trapped in the bakery, trying to retain what little was left of her sanity in the face of extended exposure to Pinkie Pie.
“...without enough confetti, so I had to go to another store to make sure I had enough! This is a big important vee-eye-pee party so it has to be perfect and oh my cupcakes I've never been so excited for a party except for that one time…”
“Okay,” said Lyra, who was leaning idly on her hoof behind some cake mix boxes, in a bland voice. Helping Pinkie had amounted to little more than listening to her seemingly endless rambling, and it was starting to really grate on the unicorn's nerves.
“And, oh, oh. Oh!” Pinkie almost tripped over a large barrel of confetti, but did a sort of awkward dance on the spot and managed to keep the tray balanced. “And also, also, also, we need to find out if Spike will let us into the library early, y'know? 'Cause I want it to be a big surprise, but, uh, I don't want to spend the night in jail for breaking and entering again. It was really nice of Cheerilee not to press charges, but I think the town police are starting to get kinda annoyed with me about it, and it's never nice to upset anypony by breaking the law.”
Lyra snorted grimly. “It's... relieving that you understand that, Pinkie Pie.”
“Yepperz,” Pinkie agreed, still cheerful. Then her ears perked up, and she said, in a voice so high with excitement that it was hardly more than a wavy squeak, “Oh, oh. Oh, oh, oh! Hold on, Lyra. I'm going to go give Spike his invitation now, 'cause he's passing by! And I can give him Twilight's, too!”
“Isn't this party for Twilight? And isn't it a surprise party?”
“Yep,” repeated the pink mare, “but that doesn't mean we can't also invite Twilight to the surprise party!”
This did not make sense to Lyra, but she nodded as though she understood anyway and said, “Absolutely true.”
“Don't go anywhere; Auntie Pinkie Pie will be back in a jiffy!” Pinkie said, and promptly scooted out through the door.
“As if anypony could ever escape you,” muttered Lyra.
Idly, she poked at the folded banner while she waited for Pinkie to return. This brought to her attention that she didn't even know who the party was going to be thrown for, having been unable to decipher that information from Pinkie's rambling. Lyra was aware that Spike was the name of Twilight Sparkle's pet dragon, though, so it didn't take long for her to figure out that it was probably a welcome back party for Twilight. She flipped back the corner of one of the smaller banners, the ones meant to be hung from every possible part of the walls.
WELCOME TO PONYVILLE, TWILIGHT SPARKLE!!! was the message it bore. Pinkie had even designed patterns on the edges that looked like the mulberry pony's star cutie mark. From this, Lyra concluded with reasonable certainty that the fruits of her misery would indeed be going to Twilight.
“How do you manage to sew these so quickly?” she asked curiously, holding up the banner, as Pinkie Pie came back into the kitchen. “There must be, what, a dozen of them? Do you just make them beforehoof and then store—Wait, you even sewed today's date on this one…”
Pinkie giggled and waved her hoof, as if to dismiss the whole thing as insignificant. “Silly, I couldn't make them in advance. How could I know who's going to come to Ponyville before they actually come? Even my Pinkie Sense isn't that good. I just make them real fast with my super-duper Pinkie Party Planning Skills. Sometimes I outsource to Rarity, because she makes better designs than I do. Anyway, I only put today's date on it 'cause I didn't have time to throw a party yesterday. I kinda feel bad about that, y'know? Everypony deserves a Very Special Pinkie Pie Friendship Party when they come to Ponyville for the first time ever.” She hung her head for a second, looking ashamed of herself. “I was just... too busy to fit it into my schedule…”
Lyra actually did feel rather bad for Pinkie. Throwing parties was, after all, her special talent, and the unicorn's experience learning how to play the lyre had taught her quite well how distressing it was to fail at one's special talent, even once.
“I'm sure Twilight won't be that upset,” she said in a consoling tone. “She's usually pretty forgiving if you're late with something, as long as you're sorry for it and it isn't a library book.”
“That's the spirit,” Pinkie agreed, as though she thought she were the one consoling Lyra. Her sadness had already evaporated, and she was back to baking more cupcakes for the party. “I wonder if Twilight will like hot sauce cupcakes. I should make an extra batch, just in case.”
“I don't think she likes hot sauce much. Didn't she almost burn her taste buds off at her first welcome party? Rarity told me Twilight's been deathly afraid of hot sauce ever since that thing happened.”
With a confident shake of her head, Pinkie said, “Nuh-uh. Twilight wasn't at that party, silly. That party was for Twilight, and Twilight is Twilight. And Twilight is Twilight, but Twilight is Twilight, so Twilight isn't Twilight and so could not possibly have been at that party because I would remember it.”
“Okay then,” Lyra mindlessly agreed, nodding, as she wondered if there were any good mental health clinics where she could make an appointment for counseling when her period of servitude was over. “That... makes sense...?”
“Of course it makes sense, silly.” Pinkie shut the door of the oven, having just put in one last batch of her infamous hot sauce cupcakes. “I'll just make the extra batch, and if Twilighty doesn't like them, oh well. More for me!”
“Good thinking.”
“Yep!”
Lyra suddenly found that half a town's worth of invitations were being stuffed into her hooves, and Pinkie was looking at her with a rather manic glint in her eye.
“Let's go give out the rest of the invitations!” Pinkie said.
Some time passed, which Twilight spent the majority of skimming through her collected research on the hunt for something relevant to her current predicament. Sitting on her bed, the ex-unicorn had piled everything into two stacks; that which she'd gone through already and that which she had yet to look through.
It proved to be one of the few study sessions she'd ever had where the joy of reading was outweighed by her irritation that she couldn't immediately find what she was looking for. Part of the annoyance came from how it was suddenly very difficult to turn the pages without magic, just as it had been when she was a filly. Unlike when she was a filly, however, Twilight didn't have the patience to go through the laborious process of using her mouth and hooves to go through entire books. As for those, there was little of use in determining how one could sponaneously become a changeling. Most of it was rehashed facts that Twilight had already committed to memory the first time she looked through, or else just restatements confirming things that she knew: changelings reproduced without the direct help of ponies, it was impossible for their magic to steal memories... and so on.
The first remotely useful thing she got out of it was a chance to check whether there was any further evidence of experiments performed on captured changelings, once the idea came to mind. There wasn't any overt evidence of it that Twilight could find, thankfully, but many of the documents that had been sent to her were full of redacted sections, and sometimes seemed to be obfuscating things—though she didn't know what those things were, precisely.
Though it had not been apparent to her before, nearly every document was brimming with what could have been equated to tribalist rhetoric. Changelings were described as racial parasites; as cockroaches that sucked ponies dry without a hint of remorse; as subequine creatures that gave nothing and took all.
And all of these things Twilight did not doubt were true, having dealt personally with their queen, but it bothered her now that this sort of biased propaganda had ended up in scientific documents without proof to support it. It was science, and science was meant to appeal to logic—not raw, primitive emotion. Eventually, she became sick of reading what increasingly seemed to be vehicles for exactly the kind of hysterical thinking she'd wanted to prevent when she agreed to make that presentation. How she'd failed to notice it was beyond her; how opinionated, how biased, how racist the notes were; and it made her ill to her stomach.
Seeing that it had been over an hour since Spike had left, Twilight went downstairs and got a couple of her most complex volumes on the nature of magical interactions from the basement. It seemed she was going to have to take those with her and try to figure out the answer using theory. She placed all of the books and supplementary documents into her saddlebags, and then went about getting supplies for her trip. She didn't have any prescription painkillers, but she at least had ibuprofen that she could take with her. Just in case, Twilight put some more bandages, disinfectant, and a first-aid kit in the bag, as well as her traveling canteen, which she filled with water first.
Then she sat, waiting with as much patience as she could muster and occasionally glancing over at the clock again. The numbers slowly climbed, and as they did, so too did Twilight's anxiety over when Spike was going to get back. He'd been out far too long, she thought; what if he'd been detained, or something else bad had happened to him? Growing ever more nervous, the ex-unicorn kneaded her good hoof against the bedspread, wishing that she could simply will Spike to come back.
A sudden, muffled thumping noise elsewhere in the house made her jump slightly, having brought her out of a tense stupor that was really nothing like being distracted or half-asleep at all. Twilight's ears twitched as she looked around and tried to determine where, exactly, the sound had come from, but she'd been too out-of-it to pick up on that when she first heard it happen.
She slid off the bed and limped over to the door, straining all her senses to pick up even the slightest sound or movement. Perhaps she had just imagined that there was something downstairs. As anxious as she was, it wasn't completely out of the question. But to dismiss it would have been a mistake, because if Twilight really had heard something, it could have come from some hostile invader as easily as from her number one assistant's return.
As silently as she could, Twilight crept down the stairs, still listening intently for some sign of movement. The whole trip was a laborious activity, as she had to accommodate for the awkwardness of her broken leg. Each step made the stairs creak—how had she not realized how loud going up and down them was until then?
Just as she stepped out into the hallway, a blob of emotions registered on her empathy sensor's radar. It was distinctly not Spike's, who had generally (as far as Twilight understood the input, which wasn't much) exuded a combination of concern, confusion, caring, and mild irritation whenever Twilight had interacted with him once she'd been transformed. The most powerful feelings that came from this visitor were fear, uncertainty, and a deep and crushing anxiety; something so terrible that Twilight herself could have easily relived her traumatizing experience with the Want-It-Need-It spell through it.
And though she knew that she ought to have hidden, Twilight was unable to do anything but stare down the hall as it drew closer; as, she deduced, it ascended the stairs. The wriggling ball of emotion paralyzed her somehow, because she half-knew that she recognized it from the night before; and yet again, her mind simply refused to accept the truth, to accept that things were the way they were.
Not until it was visible to her eyes did Twilight dare believe what her sixth sense was saying to her. Not until that very moment, when two hooves shined with cheap lavender polish stepped into the hall, was she able to accept that the mulberry coat, the well-cared-for horn, the cutie mark, and everything else had come back to her as the skin of that stranger-but-not-stranger from the town square; that it was there, that it was coming for her; coming to eat her, to ingest her and complete its mimicry of her, so that nopony would ever realize that she was missing, and her complete erasure from the world would then be as true and unquestionable as the ringing noise echoing through her head and the way her entire body suddenly felt like it was made of rubber so her bones were wobbling and she might fall but it wouldn't matter because she couldn't run anyway and she was about to meet her end forever and ever—
“Oh.”
It was the thing's voice that brought Twilight out of her emotional hiding place in the back of head. She looked at it, subconsciously disgusted by how it was a perfect match for her old form, and saw a look of surprise on its face; as though it hadn't the faintest idea what to do. But there was a violet-mulberry spell forming on its horn; growing, swirling, until it launched at Twilight.
The crash of whatever the errant spell had hit being blown to pieces broke the strange tension between them. A surge of adrenaline shot through Twilight as she realized, fully, that her life was currently at stake and if she didn't do something quickly, she wouldn't have much of a chance at all. Her lookalike was powering up another spell, but it seemed more hesitant and unsure of itself, and Twilight took advantage of that.
With her broken leg numbed by the adrenaline, she crossed most of the distance between them before the spell just fizzled out, and the 'unicorn' looked up at its horn in disbelief and fear. Then Twilight reached it and slammed her entire (admittedly almost negligible) bodyweight into the other creature. Though not entirely thrown off by the attack, it rocked back, and soon lost its balance and fell onto its haunches.
Twilight jumped on it, thinking not with rational logic but with the most primative parts of her brain; the ones that dealt with fear. There was only a passing note made in the coldest regions of her frontal lobes that such aggressive behavior under stress was not normal for equines, and that the changeling she was wearing was clearly affecting the way she reacted to the situation, somehow. Or, perhaps, she was too cornered and too desperate to do anything else, having spent the last few days running, or maybe she just hated herself and hadn't realized it yet.
Either way, the information failed to reach the important parts of her mind as she began to beat the imposter with her good hoof. But her strikes were exceedingly weak, and she had no training in hoof-to-hoof combat at all, and worst of all, the imposter was starting to recover and utilize its superior physical condition.
At first, it tried to shove Twilight off itself, but she hung on as best she could. Then it managed to draw its legs up under her and buck her in the stomach, which made a sickly cracking sound as the chitin protecting it buckled under the force. Twilight screamed in agony, but she held onto the fake pony all the same and began using her head as a weapon, trying to stab it in the neck with her horn as she babbled, “You can't take me, I won't let you take me, I'm Twilight Sparkle, the real Twilight Sparkle, and you can't just take my life, how dare you, how dare you—”
There was another crack as the panicking 'pony' beneath her struck her in her broken leg. As Twilight screamed and reflexively drew her leg up against her chest, the imposter shrank back, as though afraid of the power it possessed to inflict injuries on her. But Twilight wasn't going to back down: she drew back her hoof and slammed it into the mulberry creature's throat, and then into its nose while it choked, and then she just went wild and started hitting it wherever she could land blows.
“You deserve this!” she gasped as she rammed her hoof into its face again and again. “You stole my life, you stole my freedom, you stole my safety, you stole my friends, you stole me—”
Under her hoof, there was a distinct crunch. Warm red blood splashed from the unicorn-shaped-creature's crushed nose, covering Twilight's own hoof. Twilight held her hoof up and gazed at it, suddenly acutely aware of the fact that she'd hurt a living thing—and worse, that she'd enjoyed it. The rage was still there; the desire to take out her days of suffering on something that was helpless to defend itself against her...
She felt dizzy, now looking down at the gurgling red-spattered thing. Part of her wished that she could use magic, because she wanted to break its neck right there. Another part was terrified that such thoughts could ever pass through her head, violating the first rule Celestia had ever taught her: to never harm another creature with magic, no matter what the circumstances.
That dizziness got progressively worse, until she was swaying back and forth atop the unicorn-like imposter. A glowing lavender aura surrounded its horn, but Twilight was too confused to remember what to do about it. There was just so much red everywhere, and she felt so guilty it actually hurt, and she just wanted to close her eyes and go to sleep even though that was exactly what she knew she shouldn't be doing.
“Shorry 'bout the nose,” Twilight slurred. “Jus'... angry... but Celeshtia shayd it'sh bad t' hurt other poniesh…”
She keeled over onto the not-unicorn's chest, and the world spun down into a spiral that led to the darkness of sleep. For some time after this, there was silence except for Twilight's soft snoring; a side-effect of having been hit with the very simplest of sleep spells instead of a true knockout spell. This was broken briefly when the unicorn-like thing under her reached up and rolled her to the side, causing her to mumble something nonsensical. The general silence went on, with the only indication of life besides the snoring now being the other pony's occasional blinking and coughing as it stared pensively at the ceiling.
Eventually, it ground out, in a voice that was identical to Twilight Sparkle's, “Celestia also said it's good to forgive ponies. Maybe I could forgive you.”
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3555164
Leute, die Scheiße im Internet ernst nehmen, sind verdammte Vollidioten
1. Why did the other Twilight come back, and who/what are they? Pony, changeling, or neither?
My guess it that it's a byproduct of the miscast spell, though I can't describe further what I mean. And I think it came back because, well, home sweet home I guess?
2. What's going to happen to our heroine now?
Still not sure what to make out of that last part; first they fight to near-death, then not-Twilight forgives the real one. If they become bros now I'd be like <3, but I don't think that'll happen. In general, I'd just like to see Twi getting out of the shit hole at last.
Now please do us all a favor and don't wait another 4 months to release the next chapter.
I have no idea what the hell is going on...
The 'fake' Twilight has no memories but has pony blood...
The 'real' Twilight has all the memories but is a changeling...
So far nothing makes sense.
3555255
shit it's like a story or something
[20:39:38] Columbine: usually there's at least one retard going OMG U UPDATD
Okay I'm here...
OMG U UPDATD
..Now, i will say i haven't read the story. Nor do i plan to. But i just noticed..There are two twilight tags. That makes me laugh.
3555261
3555259
<3
The plot thickens...
3555255
but don't worry--the next chapter is the one where you find out what went down.
3555290
meh.
3555280
it's entirely possible
Hmm, the summary has intrigued me. I shall, must, read this.
It lives, I see. Time to actually read this thing.
3555328
do it fgt
3555280
Well, unless you read fast, you will be reading for a while anyway. So, might as well start now. XD
Great now I'm gonna have to way like another three months for the next chapter.
3555340
somebody's getting coal in their stocking
Needs more salt.
3555345
Oh well.
I'll wait I guess.
Sorry, if I made you angry.
3555350
oh you
3555354
Celestia says it's good to forgive, so I forgive you.
doppleganger? possible new changeling breed that steals memories during incubation? i can get a few more thoughts in a bit
Well, I have to agree with 3555237 on the first one. as for the second, well... only the author knows.
i honestly forgot about this story till now.
3555291 I've been waiting. SO LONG.
A very interesting note to pause on.
3555369
onecitizenspeaking.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451d3b569e201901cbdd438970b-pi
I keep seeing you saying you hate Spike, yet I think you actually put a great deal of... uhm, 'love' into his character in here. That sounded gay, I apologize. Still, you wrote him pretty well here.
In general, awesome chapter. Just a question, do you have the entire outline planned yet? Like, do you know what will happen from here on?
3555397
1. i hate spike but i'm not going to warp how i portray him to reflect that
2. yes i do, but you can't see the outline
It's that time again for Random Theories and Speculations on Solitary Locust!
So... the long awaited showdown took place, and I must say I saw it happening. But the end caught me off guard, what does fake!Twilight mean by saying sorry? Is she gonna turn changeling!Twilight over to the guards? Kill her? The suspense dude!
i613.photobucket.com/albums/tt220/LordApocali/Reaction%20Images/SUSPENSE.gif
THE SUSPENSE.
Another factor to consider is that Pinkie knows. I was lost at first, thinking that she was being Pinkie Pie once again, until the name of the party was revealed and I was like
gifsforum.com/images/image/oh%20snap/grand/oh_snap_2966651.jpg
So many factors, and I still remember you saying that there was a vital clue way back in the first chapter, but for the life of me I could not find it. There's also the fact that Spike sent that letter to Princess Celestia about changeling!Twilight but hasn't responded yet. What the fudge is going on? surely she must have replied. Maybe fake!Twilight intercepted the message beforehand or Celestia could be on her way down to Ponyville but when she gets there it would be too late because fake!Twilight would've either moved changeling!Twilight somewhere else or thrown her to the guards and they would surely kill her because of the fact that she 'supposedly kidnapped' fake!Twilight and kill her, partly of the false accusations and partly because of the heavy racism ponies have to changelings, and probably to other species too. Just look at how they reacted to Zecora in the season 1 episode Bridal Gossip.
I'm gonna take a quick break from speculating mainly because I'm starting to delve into the realms of fantasy here and probably devolve into a quibbering mess trying to crack the case.
NINJA EDIT:::: Just realised what fake!Twilight said.
"Celestia says it's good to forgive, so I forgive you."
So this doesn't exactly mean that she forgives changeling!Twilight. just saying.
3555362
The only way this chapter could have been better was with gravy. Wait, what's this? Leftover gravy? Oh it's on!
3555429
:3
3555392
...I am confused.
3555436
"I see nothing, I hear nothing, I know nothing"
didn't you ever watch hogan's heroes
3555435
But in all seriousness, I'm really looking forward to the next chapter.
3555441
Good! I'm looking forward to writing it
Pinkie!
Good chapter!
What if, they are both Twilight? ^^
3555452
YUS!
It lives! yay
my guess is that twilight is a spirit from the world of the dead (cuz she died) and the impostor is king sombra (he has amnesia and looks like twilight because of magic)
also spike is crystalis in disguise just saying
3555455
close
I was thinking the other Twilight was a Royal Guard disguised, because they believed Twilight was dead and they wanted to hide it so it wouldn't be panic but now i don't know
3555470
Or, to be more exact:
They were.
(Since they are now separated)
3555477
but can you be twilight if you weren't twilight before?
3555487
That's the catch!
For me (in my crazy theory)
They "were" Twilight, one being.
Becoming two.
Thus, both "were" Twilight.
Now, they are only Twilight and Twilight. But not Twilight
3555497
seems legit
3555501
So, alone, they are Twilight and Twilight.
But together, they are Twilight.
Because THEY were Twilight.
Twilight?
3555515
This is actually fairly accurate, even though you were probably not serious.