Double Jeopardy
Starlight Glimmer — sprawled casually two seats away — glanced toward Chrysalis and slowly raised an eyebrow. "You're going to kill your prisoners."
Another disbelieving murmur swept through the audience, and not for the first time, Chrysalis bristled at the impudence of … whoever the ponies were that were watching this wretched joke of a game show. She squinted against the glare of the spotlights, but couldn't make out anything more than shadowy figures in the darkness beyond the stage.
So she whirled toward Starlight. "Has the master villain," she said caustically, "fallen so far that she finds that hard to believe?"
"Here we go again," Twilight Sparkle muttered from the seat between them, slumped over her podium. "Another lecture to the ponies outscoring her ten to one."
The crowd's whispers shifted to suppressed laughter. And even though changelings were physically incapable of blushing, Chrysalis had spent enough time in pony form to feel phantom heat in her cheeks. She shoved herself upright in her chair, baring her fangs.
"You're not even evil!" Chrysalis shouted, waving a hoof at the huge Who Wants To Rule The World? logo behind them. "That's what this farce is supposed to measure — your skill at seizing and holding power! How dare you act like an authority while you 'solve problems' with friendship —"
"Then why," Twilight said with a roll of her eyes, "are you still losing?"
Chrysalis bolted off her chair, flipping her podium away as her rage at the ponies boiled over. "The game is rigged!" she screeched.
The crowd broke into a collective groan. A few boos echoes from the back of the room.
Chrysalis jabbed a hoof out toward the darkness. "You shut up! You know nothing! I've conquered your country twice now! I've captured your leaders — and they live or die at my word! No amount of 'points' will ever erase —"
Her sentence trailed off into a strangled little cough as she felt the tingle of magic clench around her tongue. "Stars and clouds," Starlight shouted toward the ceiling, "do you ever shut up?"
Chrysalis reflexively tried to light her own horn to counter it. Her magic flared, sputtered, and died. Twilight's horn lit too, and a second aura clamped in around her body.
Panic tightened Chrysalis' chest. As the audience erupted into open hoots and catcalls, she glanced to the bored-looking figured in the Master of Ceremonies' seat. Nightmare Moon — grooming a hoof-edge with a file held in her magic — surveyed the struggle with an unflinching stare, and then looked down at her hoof again.
Twilight languidly stood up, stretching her wings out. "Apparently we have to explain even this basic thing to you, which is a disappointment I really should have expected."
"Mmh—!" Chrysalis protested, cut short by a sharp jerk to the tongue.
Starlight sneered, leaning back in her chair and putting her hind hooves on her podium. "Of course the game is rigged."
"The thing is," Twilight said, pacing past Chrysalis' paralyzed form, "it's rigged in your favor."
"The game uses your definitions."
"You said yourself," Twilight said, "evil is about power. Getting what you want."
"So the only one who isn't evil here is you!" Starlight bellowed as the crowd laughed and jeered. "Because you're stupid!"
"Mmmph!" Chrysalis flailed uselessly against the ponies' iron grip, her muzzle contorting around the prickly field encircling her tongue.
"Do you know why I locked Twilight in a room for reprogramming when I've got Equestria's greatest mind control powers?" Starlight said.
"Or why I let her come live with me based just on a promise to be better, when I had a friendship laser and friends telling me to use it?"
Starlight leaned in. "I could have solved the problem by ripping her brain apart and being done with it."
"Same," Twilight added. "But with rainbows."
"Eradicating our captured prisoners would have been simple. It would have been, briefly, satisfying."
"And," Twilight smoothly added, "it would have cost us everything. A powerful asset. Gloating rights." An unsettling smirk spread across Twilight's muzzle — the sort Chrysalis herself might have given. "And the ability to watch my foe suffer for years as the guilt ate her from the inside out."
"You think the ability to kill gives you power?" Starlight said. "Oh, you poor, pathetic fool. Power comes from making beings want to obey you."
Twilight slowly walked up to Chrysalis, caressing the underside of her jaw with a hoof as the crowd's jeering redoubled. "From being strong enough to gain their respect."
"You think we respect you?" Starlight said, then inclined her head at the crowd. "You think they do?"
The hints of motion in the darkened crowd boiled over into activity. Figures surged forward toward the edge of the stage.
Dark figures.
Changeling drones.
"What do you think we see when we look at the pointless sacrifice you ordered for petty revenge?" Starlight said, her pupils lengthening into slits.
"Weak!" the changelings shouted, as the swarm began to climb up into the light. "Greedy!" "Failure!" "Usurper!"
Twilight's smirk grew fangs, and she gestured at the swarm with a holey hoof. "And once we lose our respect for you —" she said as the dark figures closed in — "how will we act when you aren't awake to keep us in line?"
Chrysalis jerked upright with a gasp.
She blinked repeatedly as her throne room swam back into focus. Her honor guard stood at attention at the doors, and the background hum of her hive-link tickled at her groggy mind. The alicorns she'd captured in her second attack on Canterlot were still slumbering in the pods glued to the floor to her right. If it weren't for her tight chest and her clammy chitin, everything would have been perfect.
Just a dream.
She swallowed through a dry throat. No laughter. Just a dream.
Behind her, a throat cleared, and she nearly jumped out of her exoskeleton before placing it with her hive-sense as her seneschal Bloody Mandibles. "What?" she snapped, trying to cover her lingering fear with irritation.
"I said, my queen, that the executioners you ordered to suck the prisoners dry have arrived, and are waiting just outside."
Chrysalis stared at him, desperately groping for inflection in his flat, disaffected speech. Flailing for some hint of expression on his rigid facial chitin. Searching for the tiny muscle twitches, the movement of his blank eyes, which would have revealed the emotions hidden behind any soft, weak pony face.
Nothing.
She looked away, feeling her chest squeeze and her windpipe clench. Turned her head slowly toward the pods. The blue alicorn's face was slack with sleep, and her open eyes were unfocused, but somehow, that unflinching stare seemed all too familiar.
Chrysalis stared at her prisoners for a while as her breathing gradually slowed.
"Not just yet," she finally said.