My Incredibly Convoluted Life as a Changeling Monarch

by LordBrony2040

First published 4th of May, 2014

The brony changeling prince(ss) continues his/her/its life in Equestria...however shot it may be. Sequel to My Secret Life as an Evil Insect Overlord

So I’ve been in Equestria for about two months now, and everything seems to be going great…

Except I’ve still only got the choices between some horribly monstrous body that makes all the ponies run in fear, or a pretty princess that all the guys think is hot to turn into. And there’s also that whole emotional vampire/changeling thing. And ponies keep asking why I don’t have a cutie mark. And I’m not 100% sure if this isn’t all just some stupid dream. And my girlfriend is kind of a…well, she’s Twilight Sparkle so THAT list of problems is going to be a mile long.

But hey, at least I’ll be starting my new job at Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns soon as the teacher for this new subject called…Defense Against the Dark Arts?

What do you mean I can’t get out of it?

Great…well, when Sombra comes back for the dead to kill us all, I reserve the right to say I told you so Celestia!

Prologue: My Little Overdue Existential Crises

Disclaimer: I do not own MLP:FiM all characters, names, ponies, and so forth belong to Hasbro.

As I laid in bed awake, I came to the same revelation that I had the night before, and the night before that: Equestria after dark sucked.

While I’m pretty sure Manehattan or Vanhoover, or even Canterlot was still a pretty cool place when the sun went down, small towns with only the bare minimum of electricity like Ponyville basically shut down upon nightfall. On top of which, without electricity, the internet, or any modern convenience that I had given up on ever seeing again while hooves were my main mode of transportation, there wasn’t much to do after dark except stargaze.

However, that particular activity was one of those 100% nonsensical things about Equestria I had sworn never to touch beyond simply looking up at the night sky. Twilight might not have liked it that I didn't want to use her telescope and share in another one of her interests, but keeping my sanity in check by not asking how physics and certain universal constants could just be thrown out the window kept me from turning into...well, Lesson Zero Twilight.

All I could really do upon nightfall was be alone with my thoughts, and even those were things I didn’t like to talk to these days. Thanks to everything that had happened recently, my denial was having a hard time convincing the rest of me that everything was okay. The truth was, I was an emotional wreck and not getting any better.

I tried to clear my mind of the past two weeks as I felt Twilight climb into bed and snuggled close to me from behind. The contact of the princess against my pony coat made me tense, as I could feel from the way was she was nuzzling my neck what was about to happen thanks to both the emotional and physical smell of arousal coming from the Goddess of Magic. She wanted sex.

While a week ago I would have literally jumped on the chance to make love to the woman curling up next to me, those times had come and gone since the death of the last changeling queen and my ascension to the empty insect throne. Things had changed, and not for the better in some areas.

I didn’t know what was wrong with me. Although changelings didn’t really sleep, whenever I went into the hive mind before, I left it feeling at least somewhat more sure of myself and confident in my abilities. It might of well have been sleep with the way I usually woke up refreshed and confident in my decisions. Hell, most of the time it was better! However, all I had been getting from sleep since Chrissie died was the physical part of the rest, and a complete lack of reassurance.

Now, the idea of being with Twilight just made me depressed.

So for the third night in a row and eight time in the past few days, I turned her down.

“Not tonight Twi.”

There was a pause in her movements, which was awkward. Every time before when she had put the moves on me and been shot down, the alicorn had gracefully backed off with an okay and a shrug. However, this time, Twilight shifted around, and the next thing I knew, the library’s little bedroom was lit up by a purple glow. I rolled over to look up at the Goddess of Magic to see a confused, and slightly pained look on her face that made me feel as if someone had stabbed me in the gut.

“Fae, what’s wrong? Ever since we got back from the Crystal Empire, you’ve been…different.”

Crap, I thought before letting out a sigh and slowly pushing myself up in bed to face her.

What was wrong? Well, that was going to take a bit of an explanation. Long story short, over the past few days that I rode home from the Crystal Empire, talked to the others and got a new disguise that allowed me to use my magic while retaining my wings, my body had come to the inescapable conclusion that I was safe in Ponyville. It was a somewhat new experience for me to be honest. When I had lived in the town before, a little voice had always whispered in my ear that I was constantly surrounded by enemies. I needed to keep my guard up, watch everything I said, and made sure that nothing I told the ponies was too suspicious. Considering all the stuff I had messed with early on, I was a little surprised I hadn’t been caught in a lie much sooner.

Since I didn’t have the threat of being found out by the ponies anymore, that had allowed me to relax, and my mind to concentrate on other problems, things I really just didn’t have time to think about before.

The biggest thing being that I was now a sexy pony princess…or regent for a princess that had taken up stewardship of her kingdom to keep her from being overburdened by all that bureaucracy crap that most rulers had to deal with. I did it mostly to try and keep Twilight happy, although if anyone ever asked, I would have said the Element of Magic had more important things to do than play politics and babysit a bunch of country bumpkins. It kind of kept me busy, but not enough so that I couldn’t find time to think about how much of a girl I had been turned into.

Not in the ‘you’re such a girl, man’ kind of sense, but in the female reproductive parts where something is inserted kind of girl. I had quite literally been turned into the female variety of my current species. Even the fact I could use magic while flying again didn't negate the fact that I was doing so as a girl.

“Twilight, look at me!” I told her with a frown before throwing off the blankets covering my body.

It wasn’t my real body of course, the one I had gotten since coming to Equestria anyway. My real body was covered in a black shell that made cuddling with a pony, not to mention the more enjoyable stuff, impossible. No, what I looked like at the moment was probably what I would have looked like if I had been born the same species as what Twilight currently was: an alicorn.

Like Twilight, I had wings, a horn, and my fur was the color of dark chocolate, with green eyes and hair that was the same shade as my mother’s had been. It was almost as if I had been turned into a alicorn version of Chrysalis, and I stress the almost part.

The alicorn just ran her eyes over me in confusion. “I don’t understand. You’re beautiful. Is this about your cutie mark?” she asked before her eyes wandered down to my naked posterior. “I’m sorry, but the spell Celestia tweaked just makes you look like a you version of a pony. Since you’re not really an Equestrian, you can’t get one. I don’t see why that’s so upsetting to you though.”

“Twilight, I’m a girl!”

And thus, we came to the bit of the problem I was having. Back when I had just been your run of the mill changeling queen-to-be, I had been able to put off my whole existential crises thanks to a hefty amount of denial and need for survival. With everything else that was going on, I had managed to convince myself that while I may have been turned into a shape shifting emotional vampire, I was at least, still a guy. Hell, I even kinda looked like one according to the ponies. So despite the fact I was stuck in pretty ponyland, I was at least male.

Then Twilight Sparkle and Princess Trollestia came along with a spell to help me fit into pony society and I went from a slightly masculine, yet biologically asexual creature that laid hatchable eggs without a male to fertilize them to…a little girly pony. On top of which, I was apparently pretty hot. Whenever I went out into the village that had become my home, every guy around along with a couple of the girls would take notice of the new mare on the block and offer a compliment, or try and strike up a conversation. The lack of a cutie mark or actual princess title had been the obvious choice for the first two days, but now the guys knew enough about me to talk about other things. The changeling mind control that told them not to notice my blank flank also helped.

And to top THAT off, they were genuinely friendly and caring. Even Cloud Kicker, who made it NO secret whatsoever that she wanted to get under my tail, showed genuine concern when I was upset and backed off when I wanted her to. I couldn't even be mad at them because...all the ponies around town were just too fucking nice, even with half of them secretly wanting to sex me up.

Twilight looked down between my legs where I was gesturing to with my hooves. “Oh-kay,” the alicorn drawled while she looked down at my girly parts for a few seconds before meeting my eyes again, still confused. “You’re female. I kind of figured that out a few days ago when we were in the Crystal Empire. It was pretty obvious with all the changelings calling you Queen Omnifarious.”

The mention of her brother’s kingdom gave me flashbacks of a pink pony that were better left forgotten in my subconscious. I didn’t think Cadence could have ever been that scary. She was a pretty pink pony princess for crying out loud!

As for Twilight, I stared at her. It was all I could do for a few seconds. I mean, seriously…do I have to spell it out for her?

“Fae, please tell me what’s wrong,” she asked. With her voice so soft and kind, I couldn’t bear to meet her in the eyes anymore and just hung my head. That was the problem with having the perfect girlfriend and knowing you're not good enough for her: she'll never call you on it.

“Why am I still here?” I asked before realizing that was way too vague a question, especially considering we were currently in Twilight’s house. “With you, I mean. Why are you still with me even though I’m…like this.”

“…I don’t understand,” she mumbled. Her eyes did that thing that let me practically feel the guilt in her body well up, as if there was something she had done to make me upset. All it did was remind me why I had avoided talking about this whole thing up until now.

Although she was all around best pony, Twilight had a developed a bad habit of taking responsibility for things that were in no way her fault and trying to shoulder a lot of burdens on her own. It was something new she had acquired since picking up her wings, and I just knew Equestria was going to do its best to show her just how much of a bad idea it was to shoulder everything yourself. Hell, it nearly killed me when I tried it just a week ago!

I let out a groan and leaned my head back against the headboard. “Why are you still with me, even though I’m a girl?”

“Because I love you,” Twilight explained to me as if she was telling me the sky was blue. “Wait…this is one of those, I used to be a human things, isn’t it?” She let out a sigh and reached over to put a hoof on my thigh…or fetlock, I suppose. “Okay, let’s start at the beginning. You’re upset, because you’re a mare when you used to be…male? I’m trying to come up with an expansion of the spell we used to change your species, it’s just…without something to test it out on, I can only go so far so fast.”

Twilight’s question had me frozen in indecision on my emotional state. On one hand, I wanted to tell her yes. I was having a problem with the 100% confirmation that the universe as a whole decided to put girl on my ID card. But when it came down to it, when I really deep down thought about it, I could have dealt with that problem by just slapping a new face on and going about my business…if not for Twilight.

Being a shape shifter, I could have just taken the form of some random pony in the street, but…that had problems of its own. For one, I was actually starting to feel guilty about running around for a week as Flash Sentry; no matter how much he deserved being stuck in a cocoon and being fed on by psychic vampires that messed with his mind so much he couldn’t remember anything that had happened while in my captivity. But, the thing about taking on a false body that wasn’t just a variation on my changeling self like I had on at that moment, then sleeping with Twilight when I was like that…like I had done before…it just felt…wrong.

There was the fact that doing so would have made what was going on a lie. It would have been Twilight being with some other stallion, and I wanted Twilight to be with me, not…some mask I was wearing.

I wasn’t as inconsiderate as to think I needed to go around full changeling queen. My little Ponyville rampage to get Celestia's attention still had some of the ponies nervous there were shape shifters behind every door and we were just waiting to come and eat them. But the disguise I had was at least me as a pony…if a female me. That made it doable.

So I wasn’t as upset with the fact that I was kind of a female, I was upset because I was a girl, and Twilight didn’t seem to care about it. It didn't make sense! If she had been into girls, then the nerd would have been going out with one of her friends a long time ago.

“Why are you still with me, even though I’m a girl?” I asked while trying harder to organize my thoughts. “I know you’re not gay or anything, but…so…why are you still keeping me around?”

Twilight’s eyes widened for a moment. “What do you mean? I am happy, you make me happy and I’ve never been happier,” she told me in confusion with pain and desperation showing in her voice. “That’s why I wanted us to stay together.” That, and I know for a fact I was Twilight’s first serious relationship. I had no illusions this whole thing would have ended days ago if I had been boyfriend #2 or #3.

As for what she said, it actually took me a minute to process that one. Although humans and ponies had what was basically the same written language, our verbal languages and how those letters were arranged made things completely different. Some human words had pony equivalents, and could be swapped out easily enough like hay and hell. However, I had found during my stay in Equestria that there were some words, and even some human concepts that ponies just didn’t have.

Mostly, it was the darker stuff that they were better off without.

I thought it was a little odd, but…it was also probably the reason Celestia didn’t leave me to die in the arctic waste. Despite everything that had gone on before, when I had decided to rescue Twilight, I had crossed into her inner circle. Ergo, I couldn’t simply be left to die. Ideas like betrayal and cutting her losses didn’t pass through the goddess’s mind at all.

Apparently, the homosexual connotation for gay was another one of those things that was lacking in pony-land. Considering I couldn’t think of the correct pony word for lesbian, I tried to think of a better way to explain things to her.

“Is is because I can’t figure out the spell?” the Goddess of Magic continued. “Just give me time. Until then, you can change your shape to anypony you want. We…we can even go to Canterlot tomorrow, or Cloudsdale if you want to find a pegasus body to imitate. It'll be somepony you'll never run into on the street, I promise!"

The sigh I gave managed to hold her off for the moment, and I looked up at her. “That’s just it Twilight, it wouldn’t be me. This,” I said, gesturing to my pseudo-alicorn form, “this is me, or the closest thing to me that you can be with without everything just turning into a total lie, and…I know you’re not attracted to mares.”

And with that, everything just seemed to click in Twilight’s head. Hell, I even saw a small tick in her head when the information just kind of hit her.

However, instead a look of recognition or her usual exclamation when she figured something out, Twilight’s face twisted into an angry frown. “What? Who told you that?” the irate alicorn demanded. “Just because I’m from Canterlot doesn’t make me a snob!”

“Wha-”

“How in the hay could you even think that?” she grumbled before looking away. “I’m not even a noble, and even if I was, it would have been Shiny who would have been set to inherit the title! My parents wouldn’t have cared how many fillies I fooled around with.”

Completely lost, I just gave the usual, ‘I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about’ response. “Huh?”

“I can’t believe you of all ponies, Ms ‘I’ve seen every adventure you’ve been on’ actually thought I would-wait, is this about that gossip column the Cutie Mark Crusaders ran last year?” she asked. “Because that’s all it was, gossip! I am not a snob!”

Before she could do something like kick me out of bed, or banish me to the moon, I used my magic to close her mouth with a snap and held up my hooves in surrender. Considering I hadn’t eaten in days, it was about all I could manage. “Uh, Twilight…maybe we should start from the beginning…actually, screw it. Just…what’s a snob?” I asked before her magic dispelled mine and her glare of irritation turned to one confusion.

“A mare that only wants to be with stallions,” Twilight said explained. “Why? What did you think it meant?”

I frowned in thought. “Umm, I thought it meant a pony who thought that they were better than anypony else.” Hell, that was even the description my changeling-implanted dictionary gave me. “And what do you mean only stallions? That’s the norm!” Despite several of the differences between our societies, that little fact of life remained the same. Most of the couples I had seen going around were your classic guy/girl kind.

Hell, aside from Vinyl and Tavi, Lyra and Bon-Bon, Cloud and Blossom, all of the other pairings out there were heterosexual couples like…well, there were the Cakes of course, and The Doctor had Derpy…except that didn’t count because he was Time Turner and not really with the pegasus, so there was always…Cheerilee and Mac! They were a couple…sort of. So that made it…3 to 2 in favor of the girl on girl?

That didn’t seem right. I really needed to look into the whole Ponyville dating scene more closely.

“Actually, if you factor in the gender discrepancy, a stallion and mare relationship is the exception to the rule,” she explained. “Although the nobles of Canterlot usually rely potions to help make sure their first foal is male, most of the other ponies are left to the law of averages that give us a five to one shot in favor of having a filly. So, with five mares to every one stallion, the vast majority of relationships in Equestria are mares being with other mares.”

Then how the hell do they have enough kids to keep the population going? I wondered. I knew there wasn’t something like ‘love babies’ or huge multiple partner groups with something approaching two guys and seven girls. I’m pretty damn sure I would have noticed if there were!

Stopping that line of thought before it gave me a headache, I looked over to Twilight. “So…what you’re saying is…you like being with mares?”

“And stallions of course,” she added. “Wait…is that why we haven’t had sex since Celestia found that old spell? You thought I was just…humoring you?”

I looked away from the alicorn and nodded. “I thought…well…I mean, you never showed any interest in mares before so…yeah.”

Apparently, that was beyond the wrong thing to say, as Twilight quickly lowered herself to something approaching my level of hesitance. “Well…that’s because nopony’s ever shown any interest in me…until you.”

All of a sudden, a huge weight felt as if it had been lifted off my chest, and I nearly collapsed with relief. The fact the one pony I could really depend on at the moment, the one pony I needed more than the others wasn't just going through the motions with me...it made me... “You have no idea how happy I am to hear you say that,” I mumbled before leaning over to lay against her for support of an emotional nature more so than the physical kind. Although just who was supporting whom was kind of up for debate.

Unfortunately, the moment was ruined when I was reminded of the limits to how human a pony could be, and I found myself continuing to lean over, even when pressed up against Twilight. She let out a squawk of some kind, and we both ended up tumbling out of her bed. As Twilight rolled off of our small love next, I tried flapping my wings to get away, only to feel a hard yank on my tail that brought me tumbling down after the alicorn.

As the vertigo cleared and I found myself able to see straight again, I noticed that I had landed on top of Twilight, and judging by the feeling of movement beneath me-

“Fae,” the muffled voice of the alicorn called out.

-her face was directly under my ass.

The next thing I knew, I felt myself wrapped in the tingling glow of Twilight’s magic, and the world turned upside down as she picked me off the ground and hung me upside down in the air. “Okay, one…you are going to spend the next month getting lessons in pony society from me!”

Oh joy, I told myself in a sarcastic manner. Although history was a good subject for me, Twilight’s teaching methods were a little…dull and tended to involve more Starswirl than I thought possible. I mean, she had long since surpassed the old fart what with gaining wings where he failed to do so, but I didn’t want to know what to try pointing that out when the last guy who ended up messing with one of her idols was probably living in a hamster cage these days.

“And two,” she continued after drawing in a deep breath, “if there’s something bothering you, bucking tell me about it! I’ve been watching you mope around for days, DAYS! All this time thinking it was my fault for not figuring out how to alter genders with that transformation spell! DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW THAT’S MADE ME FEEL?”

Although it was pretty hard to cower while floating upside down in the grip of your demi-goddess of a girlfriend’s telekinesis, I managed to do it. “Sorry,” I squeaked out.

With the glow of her horn the only light in the room, Twilight got back up on the bed, and sprawled out until she was in position for sex. “Now come on and let’s go, you haven’t had anything to eat in three days, and if I have to go one more night without any attention from my fillyfriend, then I think I’ll go insane!”

As she lowered me back down onto the bed, I looked across Twilight’s body from where my head rested between her legs and sighed. “Twilight?”

The alicorn’s expression softened a bit at the tone of my voice. “Fae? Is there something else that’s bothering you need help with?”

“Yeah but…we can deal with it tomorrow morning, I just want to say…thanks…for everything. After everything that’s happened, I really don’t deserve you.”

Twilight smiled, then rolled her eyes and shook her head. “And stop putting yourself down so much,” she told me. “There’s a big difference between modesty and what your doing. So stop it, understand?”

“I’ll do my best,” I assured her with the best smile I could manage under the circumstances.

“Good, because Spike is due back the day after tomorrow, and you already wasted three days with your moping, so we've got to make up for lost time.”

I snickered. “…we’re not leaving the tree house at all tomorrow, are we?”

“The tree house? Fae we’re not leaving the bed.”

Author's Notes:

So begins the sequel to MSLaaEIO, will not be updated as fast as I did the first one.

In case it wasn't obvious, the prologue for this takes place before the epilogue for MSLaaEIO.

Also, a special message for those of you using DISH Network to record your MLP! When I looked at my scheduling the other day, I saw for some reason they are not putting the series finale into the usual record command slots/timers and I had to make a new record command/timer to get it. So check you scheduled programming, would hate to see someone miss out because the provider's programming is stupid.

Chapter 1: My Little Adventure in Fillysitting

My name is Harry Blackstone Copperfield…oh wait, that’s the other smarmy guy who uses magic and has more trouble with mythological creatures that he knows what to do with. My name is…Omnifarious, although thanks to one of my friends it got shortened to Fairy…and after a bit of work and some mind control I got it changed to Fae since having the nickname if Fairy is just so many levels of gay.

Once upon a time, I was your average guy, living your average life until I woke up in the magical land of Equestria as some kind of bug-fairy-pony thing…and a princess. So I got the freaky sex change on top of my species alteration. Or at least half a sex change, sort of. It was umm…kinda disturbing. But I dealt with it like a man! Meaning I cried a lot over the loss of my manhood and found anything else to focus on to forget the fact that I no longer had the right kind of plumbing.

Then I had a magical pony adventure in which I lied to a bunch of my future friends, kind of accidentally manipulated this one girl into falling for me, then nearly bore witness of the destruction of Equestria. I still say that last part totally wasn’t 100% my fault, because my mom was to blame for most of it, and I just went along for the ride until I managed to get in a lucky shot and cleaned up my mess.

And if my girlfriend can get godhood for cleaning up a mess she made in the first place with some thousand year old book, I think a little forgiveness and understanding from others isn’t too much to ask. Hell, I beat myself up worse than anyone from My Little Pony ever has.

Yeah, that’s the other freaky thing. When I woke up, I was apparently in some kind of cartoonish world. Everything was real and 3D, with all the details and realness, but…the place I’m in has a freakish resemblance to a child’s cartoon show even down to everything being about 20% brighter, and a princess running everything despite their being no queen in their monarchist system.

But I adapted, as best I could without going insane anyway. Still had some pretty hard moments, but well…when you’re surrounded by an entire species that’s learned how to deal and move on with shit better than any other member of your old race, you learn pretty fast how to get over things.

So, being in some weird cartoon land…didn’t bother me one single bit.

Nope! Not even the littlest, tiniest, slightest itty bit.

I had other, more pressing matters to deal with like ruling a kingdom of monsters and babysitting.

Yeah, babysitting.

The Cutie Mark Crusaders are evil.

Not the good kind of evil either. I’m the good type of evil. I’m the type of evil that takes the moral low ground for the good community. Case in point, about a week ago, Applejack had a vampire fruit bat infestation. This group of overgrown locusts showed up and started eating all her stuff. Of course, being a logical mare, she wanted to get rid of them rather than letting the giant parasites eat her out of business and possibly cause a famine. Her farm’s doing better than when I first moved in thanks to a few changes in the production, but their traditional ways means there’s a limit to the amount of cider they can make every day. The Apple family couldn’t simply hand over a fourth of their trees and survive. And that’s if the devouring swarm didn’t decide to grow and eat all the apples come next season. Which they would, I know this from personal experience, what with being a vampire creature that belongs to a race of monsters that has wiped out two species that we used to eat.

But of course, Applejack’s logical solution that would have saved her family and prevent the town from succumbing to a massive apple shortage was countered by Fluttershy’s argument of 'just give them your trees'. And after some mishandled magic and a good amount of Fluttershy guilt stares, Applejack abandoned one of her orchards to a parasitic infestation that would grow faster than the seeds they spit out turned into full-grown trees.

Okay sure, ponies were the caretakers of nature in Equestria and all, but that whole experience was making me start to understand why they were having population growth problems if they had to abandon farming communities when the newest pest moved in and decided to just take everything. That, and the vast majority of the population is female. It’s kind of hard to get a large population when only one in five babies is a boy.

But then how did AJ stay in business? Well, I snuck into the orchard one night with about five hundred some predatory monsters that can look like any pony they want, and exterminated the bats.

All of the bats. Bodies were easy to get rid of when you had magic.

Then we just told Fluttershy they must have gotten creeped out by Twilight’s magic or something and migrated somewhere else. The farm was saved, Fluttershy was happy, and nopony else had to deal with a group of roaming pests trying to eat their food.

That’s what you call a win in my book.

Sure I was lying to her, but more than half the town still had no idea I was a changeling queen. The types of lies that kept the ponies happy, I could deal with.

But, getting back on track, the Cutie Mark Crusaders are evil, but not the good type of evil. They’re more like…well, you know how you have these two kids, and they’re both really good kids, but when they get together…they tend to do stuff like release inter-dimensional horrors on an unsuspecting populace and then not tell anyone about it? That’s the type of evil they are.

The kids aren’t bad, it’s just when the group gets together, the Equestrian destiny stuff that this world I’m in seems to run on just decides to fuck everyone up the ass within a hundred mile radius.

So when I showed up at Rarity’s place the day before her and the girls were set to go to Manehattan, and the three little fillies ended up standing there with smiles on their faces without a scene from a disaster movie occurring behind them, the only think I could think was… My spider sense is tingling.

“Ah Fae, good to see you darling,” Rarity greeted me as she hauled enough luggage to hold orchestra’s worth of equipment into her boutique’s main room. “You really must come into town more, I haven’t spent any time with you in over a week!”

I sighed and looked away from the foals as they simply stood off to the side, acting a little too behaved for my tastes. Then I focused on the marshmallow unicorn. “You know what happens when I come into town Rarity,” I told her. “Besides, I see you girls enough.”

“Oh, you’re just being silly darling,” she assured me. “The stallions are just being nice to their newest…well, alicorn I guess. I’ve been meaning to ask, why is it you never took a crown, anyway? You’re certainly capable of doing the job.”

The question had me shrugging my shoulders. “Please, if I wanted that much paperwork and responsibility, I would have stuck with…” I paused and looked over to the children, unsure of how to continue.

About a month ago, when I had gotten this great idea to mess with an evil object known as the Alicorn Amulet for extra magical power. Then, I kind of went on a little ego trip, and might have scared some ponies around Ponyville by going a little overboard while causing a scene to get Celestia’s attention. For a race of creatures that forgave Discord of all things, they knew how to hold onto their fears. But because of that, and I think she wanted to be a dick, Celestia had decreed that me and the other changelings couldn’t walk around in pony society without a special transmogrification spell that turned ponies into another creature.

While the whole changeling thing kind of points to our shape shifting abilities, its limited in the fact that we can’t just mix and match physical traits from ponies that we see walking around to create something original. Tia’s version of the spell didn’t copy traits, but turned the target into the pegasus/unicorn/earth pony version of themselves. Although I got an alicorn disguise being the leader of my race and all. The spell was a long way from perfect. It wasn’t meant to be used on us and there were now a hundred ponies in Equestria that looked identical to one another, with the exception of what species they ended up as.

But it did help ponies around town ignore the fact I was the same creature who terrorized them not too long ago. Hell, some of them didn’t know about my actions at all, and just thought I was the newest princess, here to handle Twilight’s royal duties so she could take care of all the weird shit that happened around Ponyville every few weeks.

“Uh Rarity, do they know I’m a…xeno-morph?” I asked, using the code work for changelings I had come up with.

“A what now?” Apple Bloom called out.

“I think it’s a fancy word for changeling princess,” Sweetie told her.

“I thought she was their queen,” Scootaloo added.

“Well of course they know you’re a changeling, Darling,” Rarity told me. “I wouldn’t have hidden that from them when you’re going to be watching over them for the weekend.”

I froze. In fact, the news nearly had me changing back into my natural form for the extra protection it provided. I mean, I knew Rarity had a little problem with just roping her friends into doing a few favors for her new and then, in fact all the Bearers had a weird habit of expecting everyone else to think just like them when I came to their Elements, but this seemed a bit much.

A few hours? No problem.

An afternoon…doable.

A weekend? Well…that left me fearing for my safety.

These were the Cutie Mark Crusaders. A sadistic spirit of chaos had caused less trouble around Ponyville than these three children! I didn’t want to touch them with a ten foot pole, much less have to take care of them for a whole weekend!

On top of which, I did have an actual job…sort of. Five days a week I heard minor cases involving any local disputes from the citizenry of Ponyville, then went back to cleaning out the rebuilt castle. The first wasn’t that big a deal. Being ponies, the biggest dispute I had to settle for them was ownership of a pie. The castle wasn’t that big a problem either, just the discovery and storage of this or that dark magical thingy that Tia had left laying around when she decided to just abandon the place after the Nightmare Moon incident.

But I didn’t want ponies to know the place was full of things like the Necronomicon, and in the hands of a race that had wanted to do nothing more than eat ponies a few months ago.

So I decided to try and get out of it without actually seeming like I was. “What about their parents?” I asked before remembering Apple Bloom’s lack thereof and Scootaloo’s well…I had no idea really. Sure there were plenty of theories regarding the filly, but you just don’t go around asking whether some kid is an orphan or not. Even then, it was still pretty tactless with Bloom in the same room.

“Out of town,” Scoots explained.

“Mother has come down with a cold I’m afraid,” Rarity explained. “Usually, I would have had to risk it, but since Twilight told me you didn’t want to come to Manehattan with us…why is that is that anyway? I would have thought one last hurrah before you’re trapped in that Canterlot school would have been good for you.”

I gave the mare I tired expression, as I had explained this little fact about my changeling biology to her and the others more than once when I caught some of the stallions around town looking at me a little too long. “Pheromones, remember?" I asked retoically while tripping over the new word in pony that had to be invented to explain my unnatural ability to attract other ponies. "There’s no way I’m walking around a crowded city until I get this thing fixed.”

Like 90% of the equine populace, Rarity simply rolled her eyes at my explanation as she took her bags in her telekinesis. “Ah yes, the supposed magical scent that makes stallions fall head over hooves in love with you,” she told me. “I thought Twilight has been trying to give you more confidence these past few weeks. You really should just admit to yourself you’re attractive and get it over with.”

How is it that Twilight knows about the speed of light and the theory of relativity but nopony knows jack about pheromones? I asked myself before looking back to the unholy trinity for moment before the door closed. It was then I realized that Rarity had managed to get away with me still holding the CMC caretaker bag. Crap.

I wanted to chase after her to continue the conversation, but… denying ponies anything, at least to their faces, was my one great weakness. Stupid Equestrian society and its perfect inhabitants. My ability to resist their charms had only diminished without a life threatening mind bond that promised death should I turn against the greater whole of my race.

Well, as long as I keep an eye on things…I suppose nothing bad can happen, I told myself. I mean, they hadn’t burnt down the town or anything since I had been living in Ponyville. So they couldn't have been as bad as I feared.

With a sigh of defeat I looked back to the fillies. “Come on girls, let’s go say goodbye to Twilight and the others.”

I also needed a meal. If I was going to be watching over the three fillies of the pony apocalypse, Twilight was going to be sleeping for most of her ride to the big city.

Five hours later, I was nervous as hell.

The reason for this was simple: everything was going just fine.

With me staying behind to take care of the library, Spike had gone along with the girls for a much needed vacation, or to carry their bags, it really wasn’t all that clear to me. So that left me to defend Ponyville from the horrors of the CMC! However, those horrors involved the girls doing their homework, looking through books to find a special project Twilight promised to help them out with before she left, Sweetie Belle trying to talk me into showing her how to do magic, and the girls taking a childlike interest into what I was looking through.

All in all, it was a bit less…frantic than when they met me for the first time and saw an adult pony without a cutie mark. It was one of the few times my conscience didn’t nag me about using mind altering magic to make ponies think there was nothing out of the ordinary about an alicorn not having a tramp stamp. Well, perception filter was probably a better way to put it since the magic was centered more around me than in the minds of the ponies.

“So what’cha lookin at Princess Fae?”

Skipping my usual line that I was a regent and not a princess, I closed the history book and turned my attention over to the little earth pony at my hooves. “Researching other alicorns like Twilight.”

“You mean like Princess Luna and Celestia?”

Scootaloo’s question got a shake of my head before I held up the book I had been scanning through. It mostly revolved around Hearts and Hooves Day, but the mention of the princess in it was what had been my focus. “No, like Twilight and Cadence. Normal ponies who have been elevated to alicorn status for one reason or another over the years.” Nothing in the books was all that clear on the subject, really.

Putting down her own her own tome entitled ‘So You Want to Be a Playwright’ Sweetie Belle spoke up. “There’s been others?”

“A few, but…there’s not really that much in the way of actual information beyond a word about them here or there in passing,” I told them. The mentioning of other alicorns throughout history was almost on accident really. When it came to full information, Equestrian history was pretty…lacking. It was one of the reasons Twilight had been so excited I had been into it, nopony else cared all that much. Even princess Luna didn’t have much written about her besides the Mare in the Moon fairy tale.

Hey now there’s an idea, I thought to myself before looking around at the books on the shelves. Considering I was in a land of magical talking ponies, just how much of the stuff that was in those old wives tales was actually real?

“Why’d you be wantin' to learn about princessin' anyway?”

“Because she is a princess, duh!” Scootaloo explained.

“I thought you said she was a-”

I put my hooves between the three of them to stop the coming argument. “Okay girls, that’s enough of that. We need to get going if we’re going to make it to the castle before sundown.”

The statement only seemed to excite the fillies, not calm them down. But it did stop the argument. However, it wasn’t until we had gotten all packed up and ready to go that the true horror of what I was about to experience was to be revealed. I led them out of the library and after locking the door behind me, I turned to the children and-

“CUTIE MARK CRUSADERS CASTLE EXPLORERS! YAY!”

-managed to keep my body from vibrating after they finished shouting in my ear.

As the ringing died down, I looked over to the children and sighed as good naturedly as I could while contemplating my options. The easiest and most guaranteed method for dealing with the trio would probably be to just take them back to my castle, knock them out, slap them in cocoons so they would stay that way and just wait for their sisters to come home. They had stuck me with the damn job anyway, so they couldn't really complain about the quality of the work, right?

But I was pretty sure my growing conscience was going to have a problem with assaulting children, especially well-meaning ones like the CMC. So that idea was out, and I wasn’t about to tell them they couldn’t go looking around the rebuilt castle since my IQ was above that of your average raisin. I knew they’d try sneaking away as soon as my back was turned if I said no.

“I’d be happy to give you a tour, girls,” I told them with a smile. Since I doubted any attempts to stop them would amount to anything, I could just take control of the situation and make sure nothing went wrong. “Now come along, we need to get moving.”

The trip through the Everfree was, thankfully, without any problems. But I had spent my first three real weeks in Ponyville carving out my territory at the cost of nearly two hundred changeling drones that started with the death of the biggest creature I could find, so the other creatures of the forest know to give my kind a wide berth. The end result was a good safety buffer around Ponyville and the trails my kind had set up for the Red Grove, as well as the castle. However, the rest of the forest had become a bit rowdier with less room to share.

Zecora had even moved from her normal hut into Everfree Castle for safety and quick access to changelings to gather herbs for her. A roof that didn’t constantly leak was probably another bonus. Unfortunately, it meant I had to put up with her speech patterns all the time. I would never understand why she spoke only in rhyme. It was one of those questions that just made her look at me like I was stupid or something.

Unfortunately, with the children around, I decided to keep my disguise on so they wouldn’t be freaking out. The journey through a part of the woods that was unknown to the fillies made them nervous enough despite my assurances that nothing in the area was going to hurt them. It kind of annoyed me that I had to stay in fake alicorn mode, but...it was better than frightened children, if marginally.

“So Princess…umm…just how many changelings are living at your castle these days?” Sweetie Belle asked me nervously as we made it to the bridge that joined the two separate sides of the chasm.

The wooden monstrosity that stood before us had been built better than the mess of rope and planks that had been there before, but it still looked pretty bad compared to the mass of towers beyond it. However, changelings weren’t the best at construction, and I only had what Ponyville could provide in the way of labor and materials when it came to certain parts of the rebuilding process. Tia may have been helping with the castle itself, but the area around it was another matter.

“Just three hundred, not counting the ones that are asleep,” I told her. We were actually spread pretty thin.

Although only about one hundred changelings were capable of interaction with pony society for any long length of time without causing any problems, that still left a good 1300 that were kept awake with other jobs to do; all of whom were smart enough to speak. For the most part, they just went around our area of the forest, making sure a manticore or hydra didn’t wander into my underpopulated area without warning.

After remembering stories about the foals last encounter with changelings, I looked back to give them a reassuring smile. “Don’t worry girls. I promise everything is going to be just fine.”

With that promise, I brought them all across the bridge and onto the castle grounds.

Okay, calling it the Castle of the Two Pony Sisters a castle was a bit of a stretch. Sure, it was a big stone building with four towers built at the north, south, east, and west corners, archways, and some fancy architecture that Luna had helped slap together over the past month. A real castle had walls, and was made to keep out invaders. The thing I was living in was more like an oversized house with twelve too many secret passages and enchanted objects of dark magic hidden beneath the floorboards.

It’s also kind of lonely.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not some pathetic loser who constantly needs the input of his friends to get out of the dumps. I had outgrown that little problem two weeks ago. But when the place you live in gives an echo just from walking on the floor and the only creatures around have the conversational abilities of a robot, or a rhyming obsessed zebra, things either become very dull, or very annoying very fast.

“So girls, where do you think we should start?” I asked.

A grumble of their stomachs was their answer, and Sweetie looked up at me unexpectedly. “How about dinner?”

The question caught me off guard, and I laughed nervously. After living as a changeling for a few months, things like the hunger of other ponies tended to slip my mind. Even my natural hunger didn’t work like a normal person’s, it was determined by how much magic I had stored away. If I were to just lay down and not move, I could theoretically go the rest of my life without a meal.

It was also why I didn’t store much in the way or food at the castle. Actually, I didn’t store any food, it was all Zecora’s.

“Let’s go see what Zecora has to eat, shall we?”

With any luck, I could even dump them off on her.

Being able to smell food and not get hungry, or eat it was an interesting experience. After all, there’s a biological imperative present in all humans to eat. This is usually triggered when said person wanders around outside their local Burger King and smells the ventilation from the kitchen are pumped into the air.

But not us changelings! Which I suppose is a good thing, as smelling pony food would actually make me want to eat pony souls. Not that all pony food smelled good, or was eatable even before my intestinal tract was replaced with a goo sack mind you, but unfortunately, the food my annoying castlemate was cooking up would have been edible before my sex/species change.

“So, we’re having vegetable stew Zecora?” the little earth pony asked as she jumped up to try and look into the over-sized chamber pot that the zebra cooked everything in. And by everything I also meant her potions. I was more than a little worried that the girls would end up growing extra legs or something.

“Indeed my dear Apple Bloom,” Zecora assured her. “So you’d best have plenty of room.” A poke to the stomach with the dry side of her oversized ladle knocked the filly down.

As the zebra continued to mess with the food, I felt a tug on my tail and looked back to see Sweetie Belle standing behind me. “Can we go see the dungeon now?”

“Patience little one, the food is almost done,” Zecora told them.

Thankfully, before the children could counter the zebra’s reply about how they wanted to see the dungeon, or Celestia’s old bedroom, or Luna’s old observatory that very second, a hideous, vampiric monster strode through the doorway to confront me. It’s very appearance made the children freeze in terror, while I sighed in relief.

To the non-changeling observer, the creature wouldn't have looked any different than its thousands of identical twins. But after living with him for weeks, I tended to notice the minor differences that separated different changelings aside from their personal scents. The armor he was wearing helped too. Only ten changelings wore it, and he was the only one of them at the castle at the moment.

“Number 1,” I addressed the changeling before following its gaze for a moment. “Ignore the foals. Why are you here?”

“We found another secret panel Highness.”

I frowned at the declaration. Whoever designed Sister/Everfree Castle must have been half-insane. Even a month after reconstruction of the upper levels, we were still finding stuff hidden behind this corner or that tapestry to open secret doors, panels, and just about every other little kind of hidden entryway there was. For the stuff that was just a trapdoor to a normal room, we gunked up the gears with our resin and left it in the closed position. For entrances to secret rooms that hid stuff, I had to clear the place out, then we either made it into something resembling a normal room, or just sealed it away.

It was actually kind of disturbing just how many dark artifacts were hidden away in the castle. I didn’t know enough about magic constructs to safely dispose of them, or if they could be disposed of at all. Even Tia was hesitant to get rid of the things. Apparently the destruction of magical artifacts didn’t always go in a non-combustible way like the Alicorn Amulet had. Maybe science finally trumped magic in the idea that energy couldn’t be used up, only converted.

“So seal it up, I thought you had enough brains to decide stuff like that for yourself,” I grumbled. I didn’t like the fact my #1 assistant had just scared the hell out of the kids. Stupid thing should have known better considering it was supposed to be the leader of my top ten changelings that I could trust to do things without me having to look over their shoulders.

#1 tilted his head before asking, “and secret room it leads to?”

I grit my teeth at the question and didn‘t bother to hide my anger. “You found a room and you’re just telling me this now?” I shouted before heading for the door at a fast trot. “Show me!” In this castle, hidden rooms that were dead ends meant there was some kind of magical object hidden inside them, usually protected by some kind of trap.

In all honesty, I didn’t want to have to let the kids out of my sight. But I didn’t want to just leave ancient magical artifacts just laying around either. So I assured myself that they had Zecora looking after them, and it shouldn’t take long to transport the mystical whatever it was down to the old treasury vault where all the rest of my magical stuff was stored.

Oh, and avoid the trap or two that the thing probably had installed to protect it. No mystical object in Sister Castle was complete without a hidden deathtrap just waiting to be set off. As I had yet to die from any of them, the only words I could say to sum up Tia’s security measures were: EPIC FAIL.

Celly's death-trap architect really sucked.

So I followed my #1 minion down some stairs, through a hallway, around a corner, down another step of stairs to head back across another hallway and float down a spiraling set of stairs until I finally got to the hallway that led to a little indentation in the wall flanked by a pair of changelings, where the artifact was being stored. I walked past a door, and then another door after half-a-dozen steps, and another half-a-dozen more, and then…I stopped at where the hole had been knocked in the wall, and frowned before looking further down the hallway to see three more doors spaced about half a dozen steps apart.

I looked back to the hole in the wall with several bits of debris surrounding it, where there was supposed to just be a door, opening up to a small room. “How exactly did you guys find this place?” I asked before looking in, lighting up my horn as I did so. The air still smelled stale and the room had a complete set of thousand-plus year furniture just sitting around consisting of a small a single bed, and a tiny dresser with a mirror on top, and a basic armoire.

“We heard a rustling of the wind coming from the wall Highness,” #1 explained.

I nodded as I walked into the sealed off chamber. “Oh, I guess that makes…wait, what do you mean wind? We’re underground. Having a breeze flow this deep makes absolutely no sense at all!” I said as I rounded to glare at the changelings, and froze in shock at the three additional presences I found standing there.

“Cool! A chamber of secrets!”

“That’s secret chamber Scootaloo.”

“Ah don’t know, looks like an old storage room ta me.”

I just stared at the three little fillies standing behind me, my jaw going slack. “It…wha…you…WHAT ARE YOU THREE DOING HERE?”

“I was looking for the bathroom!” Scootaloo proudly declared.

“I was-hey you stole my excuse!”

“Ah was following yah with the others!” Apple Bloom told me, earning a glare from the other two fillies. “What? Applejack says always tell the truth!”

Sweetie Belle groaned. “Is that why I had to be the one to tell Zecora we were about to wet the carpet if she didn't let us go pee?”

Ignoring the munchkins for the moment, I stormed over to the room’s exit and glared at the lead changeling in the hallway. “And what the hay were you thinking just letting them waltz in here like this?”

“You ordered me to ignore them Highness,” #1 replied in a simple manner. If I hadn’t of known any better, I would have called him on being a smartass; but one of the reasons I gave the changeling in front of me the rank of #1 was because he followed my order to the letter when I gave them without opening anything to interpretation.

So I just groaned and-

“AHHH!”

-spun around quickly at the scream to see what the girls had done now…and went wide-eyed when I could only count two of them in the room with me: an earth pony, and a unicorn.

A shiver ran down my spine, and I looked all around the tiny dormitory and found that the little pegasus hadn’t suddenly learned how to fly so well she created a hole in the ceiling. So I turned to the only other occupants in the room and gave the CMC a wide-eyed look. “What just happened?”

“Ah don’t know!” Apple Bloom exclaimed as she stopped looking around the room frantically for a moment to give me a glimpse of her panicked eyes. “One second she was there, and the next there was this scream, and then she was gone!”

Sweetie Belle was being a bit more productive in her panic. She was trying to open up the ancient clothes cabinet and calling out for the filly. “Scootaloo, are you in there?”

Just to make sure, I pulled the filly away from the armoire with my telekinesis and set her down between me and the ancient bed. Then after wrapping the doors of the portable closet in my magic, I opened it to find…just a bunch of stupid old clothes. Judging from the colors of dark blue and gold, they had probably been old palace livery that the servants had worn. Making the room we were in an old servant’s apartment.

There was a slight ringing in my ears, and then I heard a rather melodious scream come from right beside me. By the time I looked over a second later, Sweetie Belle was gone.

I grit my teeth and looked around as fast as I could. Shit! Shit! Shit!

Scootaloo I could lose. She was an annoying orange little brat with no good family connections except to Rainbow Dash (sorta) and I knew the pegasus would forgive me.

Sweetie on the other hand? Rarity would murder me in my sleep!

Nearly gone into full panic, I looked around the room again. “Sweetie! Can you hear me?”

“T-The bed!” Apple Bloom’s declaration drew my attention to the little filly, and then I followed to where her hoof was pointing at the ancient mattress. “S-Something pulled her under the bed!”

Without wasting any time, I scooped Apple Bloom up in my forelegs and spread my wings to try and take to the air for a second before the claustrophobia-inducing living space told me I had no room to move with a wall smacking my plot. Then I used my magic to slide the bed across the room towards me and…

…frowned at the complete lack of giant holes, secret passages, or magical portals. While part of my mind noted that this would have been time for a snarky comment about it never being that easy, I was a little too frantically enraged that somehow, two innocent little children had been snatched from right under my nose to voice the words.

“W-Wut?” Apple Bloom mumbled when I pushed my butt off the wall and landed in the middle of the room to glare at the sight of the disappearance. I sat so I could still keep the remaining Crusader in my pony arms, and did my best not to look worried when she turned her eyes up at me. “But Princess Fae, Ah saw her go under there! It was like somethin’ was yankin’ Sweetie from behind!”

I hugged the tiny pony close and gave her a reassuring smile. “It’s okay Apple Bloom, I believe you. Don’t worry, I’ll get to the bottom of this.”

“What do you think happened to em?”

“I don’t know, but I promise everything’s going to be just fine,” I assured her in what was probably going to end up being my motto for the night if this mystery kept up. However, I was already working 'please or please don't kill me' into something a little less pathetic-sounding for when their sisters got home.

The filly looked back up wide and frightened eyes. She opened her mouth to speak and-

“liar.”

-I felt a tug on my tail, then a hard yank from behind that pulled me backwards with enough speed I didn’t have time to fight back before I was dragged past some…dark curtains? After that, the floor just disappeared out from under me, and Bloom screamed in my arms as we went down.

Once the mind numbing screams of the frightened child were stopped by her need to take a breath, I found myself able to think again and flapped my wings to try and fight whatever the hell was dragging at me. It didn’t stop my descent, but I was able to slow things down enough to give me time to think, light up my horn, and take a look at what had snagged my tail.

The thing in question was just a thin black tendril that had wrapped itself around my tail and extended into the darkness past the illumination provided by my horn. The appearance of such a thing made me grit my teeth. Oh fuck no! I’ve heard enough rumors about Japanese porn to know where this is going, I told myself before turning the magic in my horn into something destructive.

Just because I was a girl at the moment didn’t mean I was letting anything touch my female junk. Except…maybe Twilight, she’d kind of been expressing an interest in getting me off that might have been wearing me down over the past month. Okay…Rainbow Dash too, if she offered…and quite possibly a rule 63 version of the two of them.

What can I say? Twilight fixed a spell by Dumbass the Gandalf impersonator in less than 24 hours, but a month had passed and she hadn’t been able to figure out a way to change my girl pony form into a guy that didn’t leave a ethereal residue that completely messes up a changeling’s transformation magic. So I needed to start accepting the possibility of me not having any balls wasn’t just going to be a euphemism for my inaction problems.

I lit up my horn and fired at the thing dragging me down into the dark abyss near the edge of my tail. “BAD TENTACLE PORN MONSTER!” There was a sound of a shriek as my magic struck the thing and erupted into a swath of green flames to burn at the appendage pulling me down. A second later, it released me and retreated.

“Uh, what’s a ten-tackle porn monster?”

I flinched, and looked down at the filly in my forelegs. “Um…something you should never mention to your sister…ever,” I ordered the child. Not that I thought Applejack knew the answer, but she would ask Twilight. Then I’d be screwed. Because she’d probably give some kind of magical constructed demonstration…on me.

Either that, or it would give her ideas; and I already had enough with the teacher and student role-play she put us through about once a week. Just thinking about her ‘bad girl’ act with day late paper scenarios as the student and exemplars of how to stimulate various regions of pony female anatomy when she was the teacher using me as a model made me want to groan.

Ever since unlocking a whole new…subject to study, the not so little librarian’s libido was ludicrously lively in its lust. Which was actually pretty weird since alicorn’s didn’t have a monthly, or the ability to produce offspring. But then again, Twilight had triple the appetite for a pony, so why not the same amount of hunger for her sex drive?

“Now what Princess Fae?”

The child in my charge brought be out of imagining my girlfriend’s nightly activities, and I looked down towards the darkness below. “Now we see where that thing was taking us.”

“Couldn’ta we of just done that by lettin' it snag us?” Apple Bloom asked.

I increased the light of my horn to up the illumination around us by several fold, and found that we were in some kind of large tunnel with smooth, blackened rock walls that looked too…even in color to be obsidian. “Rule number one in fighting monsters Apple Bloom, never let your opponent dictate anything. Now come on, and let’s go find our friends.”

The trip down didn’t take long, nor did the search.

The black hole I had been pulled down into opened up to a cavern about a quarter the size of a football field with an arching ceiling fifty feet high. Apart from the odd black stone that the place was made of, there wasn’t much else except for a dense layer of dust at my feet. The two fillies we were looking for had been pushed into the walls until only their heads and the ends of their hooves could be seen, and they sat suspended a good fifteen feet above the ground. Thankfully, they were both fast asleep.

“Welcome to my realm unseelie,” a whisper of a voice both seemed to reach my equine ears and echo throughout the small chamber at the same time.

Just seeing the children up there unconscious, and possibly hurt, got me all the anger I needed to fuel the dark magic changelings ran on. Messing with the Mane Six pissed me off plenty, but they could at least defend themselves. Kidnapping little kids was a whole new low for bad guys as far as I was concerned. The anger that little fact dragged up helped me forget I was in the middle of this thing’s home turf, however sucky it was, and I had yet to see them damn thing beyond the whatever it was that grabbed me.

“So the bad guys are stooping to nabbing children now?” I shouted as I looked around the area while making sure Apple Bloom kept herself underneath my legs so she couldn‘t get grabbed. “Who are you anyway? He Who Walks Behind? Slendermare? Tril…Tirra…um…dragon lord guy? Evil Goat? The Smoooooooooze?”

The darkness seemed to take form in front of me, rising out of the ground and forming into a shape that looked disturbingly humanoid, only it was ten feet tall with spindly arms that ended in a three fingered hands that wiggled more like tentacles then stood straight like fingers or claws. “Foolish creature, I am-”

“WIDE OPEN!” I shouted as I threw all the destructive magic I could muster at the slender shadow. The blast struck the monster in the chest and bathed him in green fire, elating a scream from the shadow as it pushed him into the wall and held him there for a few seconds before the magic of my spell gave out and revealed the monsters cowering form.

With the damn thing still alive, and me feeling brave over the fact my opponent was now pretty helpless, I heroically leapt over the filly I was guarding and concentrated my magic in my hooves to stomp on the monster a good dozen times while my forelegs were wrapped in the destructive flames of my magic. Only when I had to pause and take a breath did I check to make sure the thing beneath me wasn’t breathing…if whatever it was even did that. I gave it a few pokes to make sure though.

“And that Apple Bloom, is why you try and get the bad guys to go into an introductory monologue,” I said while changing another spell in my horn to consume what was left of the shadow spirit with my changeling magic’s flames.

“Pardon Princess, but that don’t seem all too fair,” the little pony spoke up from behind me.

Rolling my eyes, I flew up to the other foals and teleported them out of the wall, then nudged them awake while trying to get the last word in with the kid. “Yeah well, neither is snatching little foals…or roping me into this whole babysitting job in the first place. I swear, that habit is going to come back and bite your sister in the flank one day.”

“Wha? Where are we?”

“Ugh…my horn hurts,” Sweetie Belle complained as I managed to nudge her awake with my muzzle.

“No idea, but-” I was cut off as the ground around me started to crack, and everything around us made the sound of glass breaking. As the ground beneath us literally shattered, I snatched up the foals in my magic, then put Bloom on my back while my forelegs held the other girls. With the three of them secure, I could put all my magic in my wings except what I needed to light my horn. Not wanting to stick around and see what happened when the whole place came tumbling down, I flew back up into the well that had dropped me here as fast as I could.

While I could fly and had the girls in a firm grip, there was a big difference between dark cave made of black stone with no source of light, and the infinite black abyss reality itself seemed to shatter and fall into. I didn’t want to know what would happen if I was in the area that cracked apart and fell.

As the area around us became smaller, I looked down to the children in my forelegs.

“Okay girls, do me a favor and don’t tell your sisters about-” I told them before I slammed into something above me, “-OW!” The impact jostled my wings enough to mess up my flapping rhythm.

“-telling you Celestia, I can’t penetrate the membrane of a-”

The impact had me tucking and rolling, and the next thing I knew, I was tangled up in…something that kept me from seeing straight.

“Oh, never mind, they’re back," a disturbingly familiar male voice finished.

Ugh, what the hell? I asked myself as I poked the material holding us with the hoof that had been carrying Scootaloo and realized it was a bed sheet. As light returned to my eyes, I blinked in confusion when I saw Celestia, Discord, and the Mane Six were standing around the upturned bed. All of the girls looked rather frazzled.

All I could think to do was voice my previous thought in pony. “What the hay?”

"SWEETIE BELLE!”

A second later, I felt the little unicorn snatched from my grip and into the forelegs of Rarity. Apple Bloom was reunited with her own sister a moment later, and Scootaloo got a half-hug from Rainbow Dash when she walked over to the larger pony.

I was just left to look around in confusion at the ponies who should just have gotten to Manehattan only hours ago. “Would some pony please tell me what’s going on? How are you girls even here? And what’re those two doing here?” I demanded while pointing at the Spirit of Chaos and Sun Princess.

Twilight was the one who stepped forward to answer. “When we came back from Manehattan and Rarity went to get the girls from the palace, the changelings told them you had disappeared,” she explained, her voice on edge.

“And of course when they were so completely stumped, the princess here called Celestia, who brought me along,” Discord interjected. “I was the only one smart enough to figure out you’d went through that shadow portal that had formed in this room, using the floor as a focus.”

Half a dozen questions ran through my mind, and most of them could be combined into a single sentence. “But that’s not possible! You girls couldn’t have come back from Manehattan yet, I was only down there for six or seven minutes!”

The statement had Twilight tilting her head. “Fae, you and the girls have been missing for six days. We've spent the last three trying to find a way to get you out!”

“Oh that’s…WHAT?”

Nearly twenty minutes after I had managed to get out of the shadow well…thingy, I changed back into my normal form and had explained everything that happened from my perspective after making sure the foals were okay. When it was all done, I found myself sitting in the conference room of my palace…that was technically Twilight’s since I was only really the steward of the place.

Since I was going for form over function, the room itself wasn’t much to look at. A round table with enough places for seven ponies sat at the center, while light from the outside shone in through western windows, and magical touches that would never burn down provided light for the rest of the area. There were no tapestries, paintings, or decoration of any kind since I had thought the room would eventually be used by the Bearers themselves eventually, and Rarity would throw out anything I put up anyway.

However, at the moment, the ponies occupying the room only included one Element user, two larger pony princesses, and a giant douche; a giant annoying douche.

“Okay, would one of you please run this all by me again?” I asked before looking over to glare at Discord. “In order, without all the words being backwards, and in language I understand.”

Much to my annoyance, the draconequus grinned and took in a deep breath. “In that case, I think this rap will-”

“NO!” the two alicorn sisters shouted at the Spirit of Chaos before I looked over to the large and extra large ponies.

“Can I please eat him?”

Before Tia could tell me no, as she had said the last twelve times I approached the subject, Discord let out a scandalized gasp and teleported over to the smallest real alicorn in the room. “Did you hear that Twilight? Your fillyfriend is thinking about cheating on you with another…oh wait, give me a second for a quick gender swap so the sexual innuendo will make better sense,” he mumbled before looking down at himself.

Luna groaned, I glared at the instigator of the situation, and Twilight just looked around confused. “Umm…would somepony mind telling me what‘s going on?”

“I don’t like Discord,” I told her.

The deadpan expression Twilight gave me practically screamed ‘I get that’ but my perfect little girlfriend would never say something of the kind out loud. “I was referring to the eating comment.”

Of course, Discord decided to explain in his own special way. He took one step away from the table and reached up to a string that wasn’t there before and pulled down a picture of me and Twilight in bed together that looked like it belonged in some kind of pony porn magazine. “Well you see Twilight, when two mares like you and the drag queen over there want to have sex, but find themselves lacking the proper equipment, the usual method to satisfy ones needs involves using your tongue to stimulate-”

“GAH! OKAY CUT IT OUT ALREADY!” The purple alicorn screeched in the chaos spirit’s face.

“DISCORD!” Celestia shouted while Luna managed to hold me back from getting in range of the damn bastard. Damn best princess and her peripheral vision! I hadn’t even shouted and lunged or anything. I was just going to sneak up behind the idiot when he was yakking to himself like usual and end his miserable existence.

A moment later, the picture disappeared, and Discord crossed his arms in a huff. “Fine…sex jokes are a little too tasteless for me anyway,” he said before teleporting back to his seat.

“And to answer your question Twilight,” Celestia continued. “As you know, Fairy has the ability to devour magical energy. How much she can eat and its…nutritional value is determined by the emotional state of the pony she is with. However, because of the chaotic nature of Discord’s magic, changelings don’t need an emotional catalyst to absorb it.”

I frowned at the monster as the alicorn holding me released her grip. “So in other words, if he tries messing with you and your friends again just tell me and I’ll take care of it,” I told her.

“Yes, that ended so well for the last changeling who devoured me.”

Luna cleared her throat and tapped her hoof to the table. “Yes, well…getting back on topic,” she said before looking around with a glare to see if anyone else had something to say at the cost of making her even more annoyed. “What you experienced was a reality bubble…a kind of self contained dimension, if you will. Time moved at a different pace there and when its creator fell, the magic holding it together did as well.”

“And what I saw inside?” I asked, referring to the shadow creature.

This time it was Tia who answered. “No idea,” she said, restoring my faith in her incompetence. Celestial god beings didn’t just go and say stuff like that! They were supposed to be mysteriously all-knowing and shit!

I frowned at the rather huge coincidence that came to mind. “But…the room It was sealed and hidden behind a wall! If there wasn’t some…hidden gateway to an evil dimension or something inside it, then why the hay was it walled up in the first place?”

“Ah that,” Luna said. “Well, as Twilight has no doubt taught you by now, places with high concentrations of mystical energies tend to have odd effects on the surroundings, usually in the form of probability. That room was directly over the Tree of Harmony and skirted its sphere of influence.”

“So many foals were conceived in that bed,” Tia mumbled, making me shudder in revulsion. Modern Equestrian cleaning methods were still kind of behind the human kind. I didn’t even want to know how bad they were a thousand years ago since I had been wrapped in those fucking sheets.

“Not to mention the gambling the servants performed in there.”

“And the wedding proposals.”

“Alchemical experiments.”

I frowned when Luna mentioned the last one. “Really? People tried making potions in a room with no ventilation, and…wait, how the hay is that different from everywhere else in Equestria! This place practically runs on coincidence!”

“To you anyway,” Luna told me, “we prefer the term destiny. But in the presence of great mystical power like the Tree of Harmony, even our…limits to accept things are reached.”

Celestia smirked at me. “And with that room in the lowest level being right on top of the Tree...well, you can see why we sealed it,” she said before frowning. “Although…I guess it makes sense that an incursion would happen there of all places.”

“A what?”

“An incursion, a being from outside this realm coming in and messing everything up,” Discord told me with a frown. “You know, kind of like you.”

While I shot Discord another glare, Tia chuckled. “Now behave you two,” she said before focusing on me. “And yes. About every five hundred years, the walls of this dimension…thin, for a lack of a better term. Some things press against the membrane, and managed to get through. I imagine that’s how you came to view this world in the first place.”

The words confused me for a second, at least until I remembered the BS line I had fed them about being an observer from another dimension over a month ago when I had first come to Equestria. In all honesty, I did my best not to think about that kind of stuff anymore and just did my best to go with the flow. “Oh…right.”

“But instead of a neurotic…whatever you were, this time we got the monster under the bed,” Discord continued.

“Hey! Twilight’s the one with mental…um, never mind,” I quickly said to cover my ass when she glared at me, and I quickly tried to think of something else to talk about. Okay…let’s see, what happened five hundred years ago last time this happened? No A thousand…wait, Twilight said the Nightmare Moon wasn’t just Luna going nuts but some kind of dream monster. I wonder if…actually, Luna probably doesn’t want to talk about that stuff. Another thought flashed as Discord’s words played through my head and I frowned. Wait a second, a shadowy monster that kidnaps kids, and hides under the bed… “Are you saying I just killed the boogie man?” I asked the draconequus.

Discord simply gave me a blank stare. “How should I know?” he deadpanned. “Honestly, John De Lancie, The Q, Bronies! I don’t understand half the junk that comes out of your mouth.”

I groaned as Discord reminded me of the major letdown of our first meeting and seeing like Pinkie, he did not have cartoon awareness…although the guy did seem to have a weird need to reference Harry Potter every now and then, when I demanded where he learned the word thestrals, the draconequus just shrugged and told me he made it up cause bat-ponies sounded stupid.

“Princess Celestia,” Twilight finally spoke up. “Are you saying that there’s going to be more…umm…”

When I caught Twilight looking at me out of the corner of her eye, I supplied the word for her to go on. “Are more monsters like me and that thing going to be finding their way in?”

Twilight shot me a frown for my choice of words, and I just shrugged.

On the other side of the table, Celestia sighed and shook her head. “If I knew the answer to that my friend, then I would truly be as all-knowing as you said some humans see me to be,” she told me before a small smile crossed her lips. “However, it seems fate has saw fit to grant us an expert in such matters.”

“Who-” I managed to get out before every pony in the room turned to look at me…oh, and Discord too. Oh shit… Yeah…I really need to come clean about that whole inter-dimensional mage thing before it comes around to bite me in the ass.

But then, telling the ponies they were all cartoon characters would likely get me shipped off to an insanity ward.

Stupid choices. Why couldn't I have just been born a damn changeling drone?