Kurze Beine
Fizzlepop slid the budget draft across the conference table and did her best to look unmoved.
“I can taste your nervousness, Prinzessin. Be at ease.”
Frau Chrys‘s lilt was too syrupy and graceful for a creature her size. So were her hoof movements as she adjusted her pince-nez and peered at document. Fizzlepop was no toff, but even she knew Frau Chrys was built like an Amazon. And even though the sweater, glasses, and matriarchal mane pinned by Chineighse chopsticks all came together to give the Changeling Queen an inviting air, nothing hid those rippling insectoid muscles. Fizzlepop could imagine Chrys in another life, naked as a feral animal and howling raucous threats from behind a drooping mane pockmarked by scars from decades of predation. Yes, Fizzlepop saw alternate Chrys terribly clearly.
“Und now your heart rate is up,” the Queen continued without looking up from Fizzlepop’s proposal. “Breathe. For both our sakes. Your discomfort is mine, you know.”
Empaths. Fizzlepop hated that her trusty stoicism was useless against such creatures. She drummed her hinds and exhaled noisily. Frau Chrys rewarded her by setting the proposal down and sliding it back across the table. Fizzlepop couldn’t help but resent the power play.
“You read too much into me, Element der Magie.” Frau Chrys had stood up and was now crossing the room to a structure that looked like a filing cabinet made of beeswax. As the Queen magicked the top drawer open and began leading through the contents, Fizzlepop realized it was a filing cabinet made of beeswax.
“Do you accept the terms?” Fizzlepop challenged from her seat Chrys’s guest table. Frau Chrys extracted a file and peered at its contents before answering.
“Entschuldigungen. I cannot.” Long, mantis-sized steps returned her to the table post-haste, extracted folder in tow.
“The tithe payments can be staggered over a twelve moon cycle instead of a six moon one,” Fizzlepop countered in well-rehearsed language. “I can also lobby for your people’s lump sum to be paid at the end of the cycle instead of the beginning. No promises, though.”
“You overplay your Bauern, Prinzessin. I said I cannot agree to pay what you ask. Not I do not agree.”
For the first time, Fizzlepop dared to hope she had the upper hoof here. King Sombra was an easygoing sort who would forgive his Faithful Student for mucking up her first foreign negotiation. Especially with a species as disciplined as the Changelings. Still though, Fizzlepop's desire to succeed at this was a matter of pride. She would sooner snap off her own horn at the base than back down from a creature bigger and more beastly than she was.
“I'm guessing you have a counter-offer,” Fizzlepop concluded, gesturing to the folder. "I can... I can hear hear you out of course."
Frau Chrys took her time flattening out the mystery document.
“Mein hive is poor, Prinzessin Berrytwist. Very poor. You will see here our finances for the past year.”
Fizzlepop stared dumbfounded at the scrawled inflows and outflows. She’d brushed up on her Changelinguistics in preparation for this meeting, but they had to be failing her because the workforce numbers seemed cosmically off. The hive had over fourteen hundred drones registered in the census last year, but the amount in active workforce was currently listed as twelve. Not twelve-hundred, and not even one hundred twenty. Twelve. Fizzlepop feverishly played back her entrance to the grotto and how many drones she passed on her way to Chrys's central spire. Sure, she'd only seen two or three watching her curiously from treetop perches, but she'd figured the others were... disguised. As rocks or saplings or whatever offal happened to be littered just a little too close to the main path to the royal chambers. This couldn't be right. There had to be some deception happening here.
“W-w-what is this? Some sort of bookkeeping fraud?”
"Nein."
"A plague you never reported?"
"We do not get sick, Berrytwist. Not in ways ponies do.”
The undersides of Fizzlepop's wings were beginning to sweat. Under less intense circumstances, Fizzlepop would have been impressed by Frau Chrys‘s brazen shamelessness. Who could reign over a kingdom with a double-digit population and still call themselves a monarch?"
“Who indeed,” Frau Chrys mewled sadly. “Last year's head count was so high. So full of clutches I'd gestated and loved as best I could. Over eintausend grew to maturity, but only a dozen were loyal enough to serve their queen. The rest were led astray. A betrayal unthinkable for the average pony Queen, but Changelings move like dominoes. You do not understand how blessed I am to still have twelve loyalists. I know one other Changeling Queen who has zero.”
Fizzlepop’s already heated brain was refusing to parse Chrys’s words. Other? There were no other Changeling Queens in all the world. Even Fizzlepop herself only knew of the parallel Chrysalis because she'd snooped on the other side of the Mirror Porta-
Oh. Oh wow.
Despite herself, Frau Chrys looked politely pleased. “You thought yourself clever prepping for this meeting by snooping on my counterpart, Prinzessin. But I snooped on her too. Months ago, after mein hive turned their abdomens on me.
An exiled pony led them astray. She is called Die Herzensbrecherin in our words and "Cadance" in yours. Bad creature. Ruinous creature. Full of terrible, false love magic that poisoned the head of Leutnant Thorax. Together they left, their haze enchanting all to follow them. All but twelve, who mein meager magic was able to free. Was last year, but feels so long ago. So very long ago."
The Queen shook her head.
"We hoped to rebuild before you arrived and saw us so weak. New egg clutches have been laid, und Herr Pharynx is my Leutnant now. He suggested I peek through the Mirror Portal. Perhaps mein counterpart had seen the same betrayal, battled Die Herzensbrecherin and won back the defectors with flying colors. Perhaps she could give advice.”
Frau Chrys shivered and licked her incisors. They were large pseudofangs, dry from apprehension and dull from decades of disuse.
“You know what I found.”
Fizzlepop shifted in her seat, not noticing until now how tensely she'd been holding her shoulders. “I do know. And I’m so sorry, Queen. It must have been horrible to see yourself like that.”
“Ja, it was indeed. I wager you felt the same seeing your own counterpart.”
Fizzlepop frowned. “Huh?”
“Tempest. The outcast whose horn...” it was clearly Chrys’s turn to be confused. “You mean you peered into Prime Equestria to see me, but not yourself?”
This was a test. An attempt to belittle. Fizzlepop plumed her chest fluff before giving her bold retort. “I am King Sombra’s Faithful Student, and the Element of Magic. I’m fully confident the other Berrytwist is nothing less.”
Frau Chrys gave Fizzlepop a look. A very long, contemplative look.
Then she swept a transmuting hoop of green fire over herself.
Fizzlepop felt as if the very air had been sucked from the windowless conference room. The fledgling Princess scrunched her eyes shut, but it was too slow to escape the image of those terrible facial scars, sad sallow eyes, and worst of all that splintered, blunted stump where a horn should have been.
The other Fizzlepop, if she could even be called that, lacked wings. She also lacked any royal regalia on her scuffed, ironshod hooves. All that False Fizzle had was a tight, moth-eaten shawl knotted around her. The kind only worn by vagrant paupers who camped in the wilds between civilized lands.
Fizzlepop’s pride and optimism wanted to reject what she’d seen. To write it off as Chrys morphing into some elaborate, concocted lie. But Fizzlepop knew her own face. Not even a queen among Changelings could invent deformities for that canvas. Not so starkly.
Chrys prime, or "Chrysalis" as Fizzlepop’s research found her to be called, was a seething, foaming monster. But base as that monster was, at least she had a timeline in which she was allowed to exist. There was no Princess Fizzlepop in the other Equestria. Whoever this pony was, she wasn’t Fizzlepop. Maybe she had been at one point, but not now. She'd been somepony else for a very long time.
“You and I are blessed,” came Frau Chrys's voice. Fizzlepop opened her eyes to see the Changeling Queen back to normal, but looking no less sad.
“We are blessed,” Chrys repeated, “to be here as we are. You with your dreams intact. I with mein still loyal dozen."
Fizzlepop nodded. She cleared her throat twice, three times, then four to be fully certain her voice wouldn't waver.
"Thank you for being honest with me. About everything."
"You are a good pony, Berrytwist. Both of you are. Und if you believe the selves should meet, your King's mirror portal is always open. Remember though, you are royalty first. Tomorrow may be yours to travel where you wish. But today we sit down and negotiate mein people’s yearly tithe. Now that we are equals with no secrets to hide.”