Three follows his hive link towards Thirteen, buzzing above the heads of the dwarves happy for any distraction from the endless days of walking and dragging their posessions on carts. How she managed to disappear so quickly is beyond Three, but that’s not the concern here. Thirteen had an encounter with One without the boss around, and it ended up exactly like every single one before.

Three stops and keeps hovering on the spot as a group of dwarves pass by with a device looking like a giant metal cistern crossed with a train car, one of the motorized pieces of infrastructure from the old city. From his experience studying technology with his friend Six, another changeling drone but one with keen interest in technology, he knows this is a mobile crystal electricity generator into which all dwarven portable devices can be plugged and recharged. According to his hive link, Thirteen must be somewhere around, and yet she’s nowhere to be seen.

He taps his hoof against the chassis of the generator in thought. A moment later he hears quiet banging from the inside. None of the dwarves pulling the thing react, so he must be the only one hearing the noise.

“Huh?” he mutters to himself, tapping three times again, “One.. two… seven.. thirteen.”

Thirteen taps resonate through the metal in response, making Three immediately fly off to the pulling dwarves.

“Heya, guys!” he hovers above them when they don’t stop. He understands that, stopping in these tunnels would mean backing up tens of thousands of dwarves, “I think there’s someone stuck inside that generator.”

“That’s impossible,” the nearest dwarf shakes his head in response, “We would have noticed anyone getting in. Besides, why would someone want to do that?”

“I’m not sure,” ponders Three, “But we should check it out.”

“Look, Three,” says the dwarf. Most of the dwarves have at least heard about the few more prominent members of what technically is their changeling ruling class, albeit one ruling with very benevolent and friendly hoof, “To get inside, anyone would need the proper tools, and we would have to unplug all the devices, and restarting the damn thing takes hours, because it would have to cool down-”

Three, however, knows exactly how dwarf minds work by now. Someone being melted inside the generator core is a nuisance, but their own fault. However, if there was any chance of any high-tech thing getting damaged...

“But I can hear banging from the inside,” Three points at the generator, “What if something got loose and-”

“Hey, Crunchtime, get the multimeter,” the dwarf immediately looks back, “We might have a loose coupling inside the core. Get on it, now!”

Crossing his forelegs on his chest, Three looks up at the ceiling with a smug smirk.

Some twenty minutes later, two dwarves crawling on top of the generator in protective rubber gear each inside, scream in horror as something grabs them, and then pull out smoldering Thirteen currently missing most of her mane and tail whose leg holes are crackling with small arcs of lightning.

“There’s your loose coupling,” Three flies over just as limp Thirteen starts sliding off of the cylindrical chassis.

“How is she alive? How long has she been in there?” Crunchtime shakes his head, quickly putting his priorities in correct order, “Is the generator okay?”

Shaking his head, Three guides Thirteen’s slide down the side of the generator, and pushes her towards the wall of the tunnel. After few worried questions from the dwarves passing by, Three pokes Thirteen’s muzzle with his nose. She looks scorched on the outside, but Three can’t sense any serious harm done to her.

“Nnnngh...” she moans.

“How many fingers am I holding up?” he asks, helping Thirteen prop her back against the wall.

“N-None...” she would furrow her brows in puzzlement if she had any left, “We don’t have fingers.”

“Glad to see you’re okay,” Three smiles back, sitting down on his haunches, “How did you even get there? Or why, really?”

Thirteen looks away.

“I’m… I’m...” she mouths ‘useless’, but out loud she says, “not sure. I just… I just wanted to get out of mom’s sight. I knew the second I showed her the figurine that it was a stupid idea. For holes’ sake, it was a block of wood with few nails in it...”

“I dunno,” Three raises his foreleg, and with a green shimmer around it, a hollowed out space opens in his foreleg above his slot for crayons, revealing the mangled figurine. The hole closes as he raises it up, “The frowny face is pretty spot on,” he sticks his tongue out at Thirteen who can’t help but giggle.

“I guess I got that part right,” she sighs, “Too bad that everything else is crap,” she looks down at Three. Three licks her nose. She lowers her head and draws him into a hug, “Why does mom hate me?”

“Miss One doesn’t hate you,” Three shakes his head, expecting a discussion from Thirteen. She, however, ponders that for a moment.

“You know what?” she says in the end, “I think you’re right. She had all right to throw that piece of garbage away. I’m just useless, incompetent, stupid changeling and I don’t deserve sympathy if I can’t do anything right,” she says, her voice starting to shake.

“Awww, come on,” Three objects, but Thirteen raises her voice a little, interrupting him.

“Tell me which part of that wasn’t correct if you don’t think that’s true.”

Now it’s Three who has to think for a second before saying:

“Have you tried everything?”

“What?” Thirteen pulls away.

“I mean, what about juggling? Have you tried juggling? You said you couldn’t do anything right. What have you tried, really? Everything?”

“Three, how would juggling make mom love me? She’s so amazing. Dad loves her, you call her miss One, she punched her way to greatness when higher ranked changelings teamed up on her. She’s the best fighter ever, every warrior in our hive and most of the dwarves look up to her. Now imagine me walking up to her and saying ‘Look, mom, I can throw balls up and catch them’. Besides, you know how coordinated I am. I broke my fetlock when you were teaching me how to dig properly. Focusing on three flying things at once? My head would explode, I assume.”

Three presses his hoof against her barrel, nods, and trots off for a moment, returning with three balls of flame spider silk.

“Give it a shot,” Three tosses them in the air, manages to catch two of them, promptly misses the third one upon which he misses the other two he’s thrown upwards again. A dwarf passing by kicks the ball rolling away back to Three, “Thank you!” he raises one in his forelegs towards Thirteen who carefully takes it.

She tosses it upwards, catches it, and repeats it few times.

“Hooves aren’t the best for this, are they?” she chuckles nervously, eyes narrowed in a picture of pure concentration.

“They’re not bad. I think Five is really good at juggling,” Three shrugs and winces when Thirteen tries to throw all three balls up and fails catching even a single one immediately, “Don’t worry and keep going.”

“Why bother? I don’t have basic coordination, and I’ve been trying to learn fighting from Five, I got few magic lessons from Seven, and I even got some infiltration tips from Gem when she was here. You know, the useful stuff. You can guess how it went...”

“You think I can do any of that?” asks Three, “And where did you get such a silly idea that those are the only thing our hive needs? You’re not a warrior, that much is clear,” he shrugs, “And maybe you’re not good with magic, so what? It took Two five years before she found a way she could do that. In fact, do you know the first thing she did? She won the rulership of Brauheim in a drinking contest for the boss. Can you imagine it? She won a whole city in a drinking contest, and the dwarves took it seriously. Well, most of them.”

“I heard that story,” Thirteen drops the balls again. Thankfully, the crowds of walking dwarves are helpful in kicking the scattered silk back, “Though mom doesn’t let me explore our hive mind too much. She say that I need to learn something useful first without just copying stuff and experience of others. All she let me learn was the dwarven language.”

“Try again,” Three’s smirking for some reason unknown to Thirteen. When she makes another shaky throw upwards, he starts talking immediately, “And you know about Seven, right? He’s terrible at getting love for himself. He just goes to pieces when he has to be intimate or close to anyone, so he used to close himself off in the castle library all the time, completely reliant on boss and others to feed him. And miss Gem? She could barely walk during her first months, and she was so weak that fighting anyone was completely out of the question. And she still managed to help out because where boss couldn’t shapeshift-”

“What?!” Thirteen drops the balls in shock and, just like before, dwarves kick them back, Three urges her to give it another shot, and starts talking again.

“Yeah, boss coudn’t shapeshift for the longest time, but back to miss Gem. Miss One tried to make Gem do infiltration her way, which was to look all big and sexy and hourglassy, but it didn’t work for Gem at all. Instead, she chose a more modest disguise and walked around, genuinely interested in ponies, which made them talk where miss One’s presence made them shake. We all have our ways, and some are more difficult to find and may take a detour through a completely unexpected direction.”

“But I’ve been trying to get better ever since I was born, and mom hasn’t had a good word for me, and rightfully so.”

“Oh really?” Three raises an eyebrow.

“Yes, really.”

“Reeeeeally?”

“Really!” Thirteen drops the balls again, “But I guess I just have to keep throwing myself at stuff and hope for the best, right? I mean, if I get hurt on accident, the hive isn’t losing anything valuable.”

“Can I ride you?” asks Three.

“Whuh?” Thirteen leans away at the sudden change of topic, “Sure.”

“Then let’s catch up to the shop where I got the balls. I promised we’d return them soon,” they gather the balls, Three flies up on Thirteen, and huddles in a way to be able to hold all of them at once.

“What was with the juggling anyway?” asks Thirteen after they find out the shopkeeper lady who gets a hug for her trouble, and boops Three’s nose in response.

“A bit of hoof-eye coordination practice and, as I said, it’s what miss Five is good at. She used it to practice while learning how to fight. Also, I mean, I like watching others juggle, because I’m no good at it,” Three shrugs.

“Neither am I, so it couldn’t have been much of a show,” mutters Thirteen to herself.

“I dunno,” Three spreads himself over Thirteen’s back. It’s nowhere as comfortable as lying on boss’ or One’s broad back, but it’s alright, “Say, how would you like to go camping?”

“What do you mean? I’ve never been on the surface before.”

“Well, boss said we could help ponies with the apocloplypses and that I’m the best one to do it, but that I can’t go alone.”

“Apocalypse?”

“Yes, that.”

“Why would you want me to go with you?”

“Well, we won’t be infiltrating because we’ll be helping out in the open. We won’t be fighting, because we’ll be trying to help. And we won’t be using magic, because that’s in the hooves of much better unicorns and alicorns already. Boss can’t send any of our infiltrators, because they are coordinating the dwarf migration either, and you said it yourself - if you get hurt, the hive won’t be losing anything valuable. And please don’t say that again or I’ll tell boss about what miss One did to your figurine.”

“No, please don’t!” Thirteen starts shaking, “I can’t stand it when they argue, I know how it hurts them both. I’ll go with you and I won’t say anything. Dad will be proud if I do something useful to help you, and I’ll be out of mom’s way like that.”

“Plus, we’ll save everyone in the end and mom will see that you’re a hero!” Three taps Thirteen’s sides, casually draped over her now, “Now ho, my faithful steed! Off to find the best bossdad ever.”

Thirteen just sighs.

Three doesn’t push his morale boosting further. Instead, he smiles to himself as he ponders one thing - when Thirteen was completely focused on his storytelling, she was juggling with absolute precision.

Remember how I said that Thirteen came from a queen egg? Everyone thought it would be like in the old times when bad mom was trying to rule the world. The other would-be queens, like Cryo, turned out to be bad mom’s best generals. Miss One thought so too. Unfortunately, Thirteen turned out to be Thirteen, and miss One took it hard.

First, she tried to train Thirteen so that she would learn proper hoof-eye coordination, and I think she just pushed too far too quickly. Thirteen tried her best to meet miss One’s demands, but she simply couldn’t keep up. Two tried to tell miss One that she wouldn’t be able to do what miss One wanted from Thirteen, but miss One just blew her off by saying that Two wasn’t from a queen egg, and on top of that her mixed abilities would need much more time to develop. Thirteen, though, should be full of potential, and that proper training should awaken the right kind of skillset she would be perfect for, be it warrior, infiltrator, or possibly drone.

I tried to cheer Thirteen up like I did when other drones or the boss needed time to relax, which meant that I took her digging. There’s just something about the monotonous grinding of rocks underhoof, focusing only on digging enhancements that calms us down. Thirteen could never get the rhythm right between switching hooves and infusing love, so she often ended up either using too much love, or hitting rocks with a loveless hoof and hurting herself. One time I started singing, and she joined in. She has a beautiful singing voice, but it turned out she could sing properly only if she was concentrating on something else. When she tried to sing, she just went all crackly. The thing with juggling today was the same.

Well… and then, some three months into the fruitless training, miss One said in front of everyone n the throne room that they must have used up all their good genetic material on Gem and Two and that everything useless that remained got shat out in the form of Thirteen. Her words, not mine.

Boss shouted her down immediately. I haven’t seen him this mad… well… ever. Even usually argumentative miss One just slunk back when he was done. Unfortunately, the damage was done. Even thought boss tried to persuade Thirteen that it was okay to be clumsy at her that age, hugging her proved dangerous as she poked his eye out with her horn on accident. He was okay, obviously, but she couldn’t forgive herself, and collapsed a small pocket on herself, refusing to talk to anyone and saying she was too dumb to breathe anyway. She couldn’t get out, but when I told her that the rocks would let air in, she just said that at least she couldn’t get out and would starve soon.

Boss was furious with miss One, and due to their special hive connection, she felt it in force boss wouldn’t be able to translate to anyone else. He thought about Thirteen a lot, and that bled into miss One who couldn’t hide her disappointment in her which boss felt in turn, only feeding his anger. I guess that’s a risk of such tight bond miss One and boss share.

Author's Notes:

Me, and a story without a suicidal character? Never!