My favourite part of The Mean Six is just that Chrysalis happens to know a spell that'll turn trees into magical copies of ponies. I mean, of course she does, the episode requires she does, but it amuses me greatly.

Like, did she mean for the copies to be opposites? Was that an accident? Part of the spell? Does it work with anyone? Does it have to be trees? Can you use bushes, say? Could you make an army that way? Can anyone do this spell or is it Changeling-only? Does any of it even really matter when the whole point is just so the episode can happen?

It also gives me some helpful pointers as to her character. And of course I'm a fan of her photographer. Master infiltrator and no mistake! But yes. Amusing stuff.

“Richard! Richard I need you!”

Richard emerged from around a corner, fresh something trivial and inconsequential, removing his apron even as he moved to meet her halfway as Chrysalis came stumbling back in.

“Back so soon? Did you win, your majesty?” He asked, casting the apron aside.

“Be quiet, Richard!” She snapped, leaping up and lurching forward with a final buzz to fly the remaining distance between them, colliding with him full-force, wrapping around him and bearing him with a thud to the ground, where he landed flat. Again.

“_{Take that as a no…}” Richard mumbled, but Chrysalis, curling into him, elected to ignore this.

“Think nice thoughts about me,” she said instead, eyes closed.

“I always think nice thoughts about you, your majesty.”

“Well think nicer ones!”

Richard didn’t say anything to this, but a moment or so later that ever-simmering, sickly affection did start bubbling over enough for Chrysalis to be able to get at it, and get at it she did, with much gusto, the Changeling equivalent of upending the glass down your throat.

“Perhaps you should slow down there, your majesty,” Richard said, feeling a touch-lightheaded all of a sudden but not so lightheaded that he forgot what effect overindulging on human emotion (read: his) could have on a Changeling (read: her). He had seen it before, after all.

Chrysalis paused only long enough to snap:

“I know what I’m doing!”

Before promptly getting back to it.

She did know she was doing, too, and what she was doing was deliberately overdoing it. Once it became clear that this was her intention Richard drew no further comment to it, content instead to think nice thoughts about her while dealing with that unusual (though not unduly unpleasant) sensation of getting his emotions sucked out of him.

Apparently - so he’d heard - for the locals the experience could sometimes be quite unhealthy. Somehow, perhaps on account of being a freakish alien, he had thus-far managed to avoid any particularly serious side-effects of the process. Certainly, Chrysalis had sated herself on his ‘nice thoughts’ multiple times and he’d come out none-the-worse for wear beyond a slight giddyness.

Strange. But just one of those things. Again, likely just because he was a freakish alien. He did not work the way the locals worked. That was his excuse at least.

Worse things had happened.

Drinking deeply as she was, it did not take Chrysalis an especially long time to reach her fill and then intentionally go just that little bit over and then just a smidge beyond that. Once there, she stopped and was comfortable to just continue resting sprawled on top of Richard.

She had that dazed, happy smile on her face that she sometimes got after overindulging herself, tongue poking out a little between her teeth, eyes lidded. Seemed as good a time to probe as any.

“Want to talk about what happened, your majesty?” Richard asked.

And she did open her mouth to do so, but then even through the fluffiness she realised what it was she was about to do and stopped, mouth snapping back shut again immediately, jaw setting.

Pushing up and away from him - though not dismounting from the position she’d taken atop him - she glared down, eyes boring into him even if she was dangerously close to seeing double right at that moment.

“Nothing went wrong! I just decided that my revenge should be even more crushing! So I withdrew in good order so I could plan accordingly,” she said, answering accusations no-one had actually made.

“Sensible move,” Richard said, nodding, getting a hoof waved under his nose a moment later for his troubles.

“I do not need your approval, Richard! While you were learning how to spell your name, I was being trained to conquer empires!” She said, throwing her head back at the last part, gesticulating wildly, briefly getting distracted by being confused over how you did spell Richard before reminding herself it didn’t matter and she didn’t care.

“That’s very impressive, your majesty. Might I ask who trained you?” Richard asked, tucking his hands in beneath his head, just to get more comfy. Chrysalis glared down at him some more.

“I trained myself,” she hissed, swaying, blowing some mane out of her face but achieving nothing in the way of change. “Did you know I once managed to single-hoofedly capture every princess in Equestria? Me! All on my own! Every last one of them!”

He had indeed heard her mention this before. Several times. He had a feeling that she might have been glossing over some of the details but he’d never seen any reason to bring up how, at the time, she’d had hordes of minions at her beck and call who might have maybe helped a little with this particular caper. Not cricket kicking a Queen while she was down.

“How’d you manage that again? You never did actually tell me,” he asked instead, which was close to but not exactly the same thing. It gave her latitude to toot her own horn. Latitude Chrysalis chose to snub. She lurched over and fell forward so her nose squashed against his.

“I do not need to waste my time filling you in on the details! It is enough that you know it happened, Richard! I did it! Me! The Queen! Your Queen!”

“Fair enough, your majesty.”

This answer satisfied her, and so with some effort (and Richard’s assistance, not his help, these things were different) she managed to get back up to a halfway sitting position again, everything still a little vague and fluffy.

Then, as those in Chrysalis’s conditions were sometimes known to experience, her mood took a sudden dip into the maudlin.

“I had a throne, once,” she said, sadly, staring at a very old chair that just-so happened to be in her eyeline.

“You’ve said, your majesty,” Richard said.

“A mighty throne! A fearsome artefact of terrible, awesome power!” She said, managing to raise both hooves up in the air before having to bring them both down again to keep from overbalancing.

It had been spiky, too! Couldn’t ever forget the spikes. The spikes were important.

“So I heard,” Richard said.

“At the very top of the hive! A commanding position, suited to my station!”

“Must have been quite something.”

“It was…”

And here she tailed off, a distant look in her eyes, and Richard knew that he shouldn’t really say anything. He gave her some time and some quiet

Then it was right back to bombastic anger once more. So service as usual, really.

“And then it was stolen from me!” She snarled, face twisting, horn glowing briefly as she swiped the offending, irritating chair out of sight. It broke somewhere further away and Richard made a mental note to tidy it up when he had time.

Chrysalis continued:

“Stolen from me by the crafty, scheming, conniving, underhoofed pony Starlight Glimmer who duped and misled my former subjects, now all ‘reformed’ - traitors! Traitors all!”

“I do find the use of the word ‘reformed’ oddly sinister, I must admit,” Richard said.

Being human, he found the choice unsettlingly euphemistic. Like what you’d find stamped on the records of someone who’d had an icepick tapped into their brain. He knew it wasn’t like that, it was just where his mind went. Cultural thing.

Oddly too this was one area where he and Chrysalis actually overlapped, or at least slightly overlapped. Like two speeding trains overlap before whipping past one another. Neither of them liked the word that much, albeit for different reasons.

“The pathetic doublespeak of cowards, to hide their true intentions! To see the world infected by their disease of friendship!” Chrysalis bellowed, wings flaring and very nearly toppling over backwards, being steadied by Richard.

This seemed a bit much to Richard, really, this outburst, but then he was (again) human and was still a little confused by how they did things on this side.

“And calling friendship a disease is just odd. Like it was a discrete thing and not a, you know, social outgrowth or something. You people really do things very strangely over here.”

Chrysalis considered yelling at him for being an idiot but then, looking at his dumb face, she realised he was an idiot, and yelling would just be a waste of time. So instead she lay back down on top of him again, getting comfy.

“Be quiet, Richard,” she said, spotting a stray dribble of that weird affection of his that had escaped her notice up until now and had somehow ended up on his cheek. She licked it up and then closed her eyes, settling in. Richard screwed his face up. The tongue thing was something he never really got used to.

“As you wish,” he said.

She cracked one eye at him.

“As you wish what?”

“As you wish, your majesty.”

“...better.”

She then yawned. Too much of Richard’s maybe-good-maybe-bad affection often had the effect of making her sleepy once the fluffiness had really settled in. Being full and fed helped too, obviously.

And warm...

“Take me to bed, Richard,” she said, making no moves to assist in this.

“I’m going to have to carry you for that,” Richard pointed out.

She yawned again, longer this time.

“You have my permission…” she mumbled, dozy smile widening as she felt herself being picked up. Good help wasn’t that hard to find, she supposed...