KrisOverstreet
patreon
Counting Noses Part 5
🕑 Added 2023-11-26 22:03:22 +0000 UTCThe final rush- let's do this so I can edit the thing and find something for cover art!
* * * * * * *
The fact was, Honeybee Studios was a dump.
Oh, there were attempts to keep it clean, especially the seats where the live audience sat during the taping of comedies and special events. And practically any moment when a camera wasn't rolling, hammers and saws were making enough noise that the actors had to shout their script read-through rehearsals. But in the end the best solution the ponies running the place had found was to keep the lights low every place except the stages so that people wouldn't see the exposed insulation, the cracked brickwork, the uneven and sometimes splintered floorboards, and all the other flaws in a gutted, near-abandoned old office building that had been further gutted and stripped to make room for a facility capable of filming four different things at once.
Chrysalis, who this time hadn't bothered with a disguise, noted all this as she stood in the back of a studio and watched the filming of a guardhouse scene for Macula PC. She also noticed that, at least in her opinion, the product being filmed matched the barely concealed surroundings. The sets were sparse except for things right next to the main characters. The acting was ropey, with quite a lot of flubs. She personally thought Macula (who she knew from the hive as a third-tier infiltrator named Cenchrus) had all the emotional and personality depth of the stallions on the covers of the books that she quite definitely did not read.
And yet she could taste the desperation, the haste and pressure and, yes, the love in the air. As she understood it, Macula PC had an intense ten-week shooting schedule to get all the internal shots for thirteen hour-long stories, followed by four weeks of slightly less stressful location shooting in Haywaii for the exteriors. Little fluffs got left in, and subtle acting left out, because as with everything else going on in Honeybee Studios, the perfect was the enemy of the schedule. And although each and every creature in the room wanted the product to be good, they also knew that, good, bad or indifferent, it all had to be in the can and ready for the cutting room by eight PM that evening... and it was already getting close to six.
Then the director called a break while the set crews switched everything for a quiet scene in the Red Robin estate. Chrysalis, after the cheek she'd taken from certain changelings over the last couple of days, felt quite gratified when Cenchrus and two other changelings (a security guard and a lighting technician) came straight over to her and showed proper respect, with the kneeling and the "at your service, my queen" and the averted eyes and everything.
Then a tan unicorn with a masquerade-mask cutie mark trotted over and spoiled it by saying, "Well, I'm done for the day, my queen. The producer said you wanted to talk to me?"
The three changeling drones- the other three changeling drones, for this was obviously Paussus at last- looked embarrassed. "Hey, Short Pause," Cenchrus hissed, "maybe you forgot, but this is the queen. The actual, genuine, disembowels-her-enemies queen. Ring any bells?"
"I know it's the queen," Paussus said without an ounce of trepidation. "I said so, didn't I?"
"Make with the bowing and the groveling, you idiot," the lighting tech hissed. "You want to get us all killed?"
"Do I have to?" Paussus asked with only a hint of whine. "It's so samey, so boring, and it wastes time. Besides, she knows I respect her."
"You wanna look at her face," the lighting tech said, "and tell me that's the face of someone who feels respected?"
Actually Chrysalis was keeping her face perfectly blank. On the one hoof, she was pretty angry with Paussus's casual greeting after the proper welcome the others had given her. On the other hoof, she had this morbid curiosity to see just how much rope Paussus would use to hang himself...
Sadly, the little show ended before it got any farther. Cenchrus sighed, gave Chrysalis another little bow, and said, "My queen, I beg you not to do anything permanent to him. He's got two commercials to shoot tomorrow." With that the three undisguised drones withdrew, leaving Paussus in his unicorn guise and Chrysalis in a little space on their own near the studio door.
Chrysalis looked her wayward subject up and down. "Why are you still in that form?" she asked. "I want a good look at you."
"Oh, this? This is the form I use when I'm just a background extra," Paussus said. "I also use it for commercial shoots if I'm speaking to the camera." A wave of green fire ran over him, revealing...
... well, he was short for a drone, but not abnormally so. And aside from that... well, even knowing what to expect, Chrysalis found herself shocked at how her glance tried to slide off the exposed drone. He was just so perfectly, absolutely average looking. "You're eating well," she noted, managing to focus on the few, shallow holes in his legs. His wings had not a single tatter, and they glittered in ways that gave her horrifying flashbacks to a certain nightmare. She'd been seeing that too often lately...
"Well, yeah!" Paussus said. "Ponies on the street keep giving me little snacks, saying, 'Hey, didn't I see you on TV?' and asking for photos and stuff. And the boss here says we don't have a love quota, so we can keep any love we get."
Chrysalis nodded. She hadn't really expected the drones involved in Honeybee studios to have time to collect love, and their use as a semi-legitimate revenue source and propaganda mill more than made up for a lack of contribution to feeding the rest of the hive. "That's fine," she said. "Now, I have just one little question for you-"
"Hey, that's a great line!" Paussus said, rummaging under a wing-cover for a notepad. "Maybe I should give that to the scriptwriters for Macula- no, no, it's not his kind of line, it's too indirect. Maybe a new character, a detective that rambles a lot, gets the baddies to lower their guard. Yeah, and we'd have him look kind of messy, like he's this total screwup, maybe with a rumpled trenchcoat-"
With a flicker of magic Chrysalis plucked the notepad away from Paussus and swatted him in the face with it. "Do I have your attention now GOOD!!" she shouted, patience at an end. "As I was saying, and do not interrupt me again if you value your life, I have one question." She took a deep breath and shouted so loudly that it knocked over the library flat being rolled in from storage, "WHERE THE TARTARUS HAVE YOU BEEN?!"
Paussus hardly even blinked. "That's pretty good," he said. "Of course, when they got me to play the femme fatale Queen Naiad for the Macula pilot, I went the other way, with the quiet, sensual, menacing tone."
Chrysalis almost let herself get distracted. She hadn't had much time for watching the idiot box the previous fall, what with the race to the moon and all, but she had made time to watch the Macula PC debut, and she'd filled a notebook with ways she could apply and improve on Queen Naiad's performance. It had been, for her, the only reason to watch the thing. But anger won out over curiosity. "I asked a question," she snarled. "I demand an answer."
"Oh, sorry," Paussus said, ducking his head a fraction of a degree. "What was it- oh, wait, I remember. You asked where I've been, right?"
This idiot posed as a changeling queen so successfully that I have believed they actually got a rival queen to be in the show?? He honestly almost forgot what I asked him ten seconds ago! "Yes!" she snapped. "Get on with it!"
"Well, I've been here," Paussus said, gesturing. "Ever since you brought us to Manehattan and bought the building. You ordered us to guard the place, remember?"
No, she didn't remember, because she'd probably said it without thinking so she could ditch the escort and switch to her disguise as fashionable socialite Cool Drink. But she would sooner take the role of that brain-dead pegasus mare whose one line in the scene just filmed had been, "Oh, duck, Macula, duck!" than admit it.
(And she wouldn't have needed thirteen takes to get the line right, either.)
"I mean before that!" she shouted. "You bounced around every single job in the hive and the space program and I don't know what else! You're AWOL fourteen times over! What did you think you were doing, taking a job and then leaving after a week without telling anybody?"
Paussus shrugged. "Dunno," he said. "I just got bored and moved on. Everything gets so boring the second time, you know?"
"Explain it to me." The growl in Chrysalis's voice would have told any normal changeling that dire consequences awaited if the explanation wasn't really good.
"Well, everything gets boring the second time, you know?" Paussus said, throwing up his hooves. "Classes in the hive school were so boring. Why all the repetition if you get the A+ the first time? And infiltrator school was worse. Why should I copy a pony when the pony's already doing the same thing? Dull, dull, dull."
Chrysalis hadn't thought to ask the teachers if they'd known a Paussus. But then, she noted, neither had Pharynx, and he ought to have gone to them first thing. Black mark for him. "I went through it, dull as it was," she said. "So don't try to tell me you're too good for it."
"It's not that I'm too good for it," Paussus protested. "It's that I'm no good for it. I'm no good at repeating things. I just really can't stand doing things twice, you know? So I kept looking for something new to do. I tried all the warrior squadrons, but they were all the same. The engineers were interesting until I figured out they were just math and shovels. And did you ever notice how same-samey intelligence reports are when you read them? They put a bug to sleep, don't they?"
The queen who more than once had destroyed vital intelligence documents with her drool while she slept changed the subject. "Why didn't you put in a request for a transfer? Or even tell anyone you were moving?"
"Who was I going to tell?" Paussus said, shrugging again. "You know, I watched your eyes when I dropped the disguise. You do it too. Everyling does it." He smiled a little sadly. "People forget me. They forget Paussus. I was in my last molt before I understood why we disguise ourselves, because I never had to be disguised to not be seen. Occupant was the first changeling to even notice when I changed jobs. With everyone else I just showed up and said I'd been transferred, and that was all I needed."
Chrysalis sighed and rubbed a temple with one hoof. If the previous two years of her life had taught her anything, it was the concept of "idiot genius". Paussus had a talent that every other infiltrator in the hive would have merrily killed him for if it meant taking it for themselves. But it was hitched to mental flaws which made that talent utterly useless not just to the hive, but to the bug himself.
And even in the conversation Chrysalis could see it. Maybe other changelings couldn't focus on Paussus, but Paussus had difficulty focusing on anything. His brain wandered, and his body followed, and with his utterly forgettable nature, he'd disappeared almost without a trace, except for a name on a few pieces of paperwork.
Except... "And yet you've been doing the same thing here, over and over, for at least a year and a half," she said aloud, not really intending to.
Paussus grinned, and with a flash of fire he was the tan unicorn again. "But it's not the same thing!" he shouted. "It's never the same thing! I play two or three different characters a day! Or when I get tired of acting, they let me write scripts! I write half the commercials we produce now, did you know that? There's this one campaign I'm doing for a Manehattan restaurant that's opening locations in Canterlot and Applewood! They told me how five percent of Manehattan ponies have eaten there, and I thought, well, what about the other ninety-five percent? And-"
Chrysalis clapped her forehooves together. "FOCUS!"
"Oh, yeah, sorry," Paussus said. "I do that."
"I noticed."
"But it's different products, or scripts, or sometimes I build sets. Something different every day, right?" Paussus said. "And then when it comes around to doing the same thing again, it feels new again, because I've been doing all this other stuff! So it doesn't feel painful at all! Queen Naiad's coming back in the season finale, we film that in about a month, and I've left the script in a drawer because I don't wanna spoil it for myself!"
Chrysalis made a mental note to clear her schedule for that air date.
"And you know the best part?" He gestured at his unicorn disguise. "Everybody forgets Paussus. Paussus is just a bug in the crowd. But people see Short Pause! People remember Short Pause! When I'm Short Pause, I EXIST!" He grinned one step short of manically- a disgustingly accurate pony expression, in Chrysalis's eyes- and said, "I never existed before, and I really, really like it!"
Chrysalis stood silently, watching and thinking. As she watched, Paussus began to fidget. Even on things he felt strongly about, he obviously found staying focused very hard going. Some part of him was an eight-year-old pony foal on a sugar rush, and from all appearances would be so forever.
It would give her some mild amusement to make Paussus her personal guard and keep him under her constant watch, to force him, to break him into focus. He'd be miserable. He'd be in pain- even just this waiting looked increasingly uncomfortable for him. It would be a fitting punishment for wasting her time tracking down the spy that wasn't.
It would also be a colossal waste of a hive resource which had stumbled into the place it could be most useful. And half the hive owed its breathing privileges to the fact that Chrysalis, whatever he other faults, detested throwing away valuable resources unnecessarily.
That number now included Paussus.
"Congratulations on your existence," she said dryly. "In future make sure I don't have cause to revoke it."
Paussus' horn lit up, and the notepad floated back up to his face, along with a pencil. "Not bad, but a bit awkward," he muttered. "Maybe I'll improve it when I read the notes again."
Chrysalis sighed. No, this bug would never have made an infiltrator. He might have only taken a half share when they handed out attention spans, but he'd skipped the line entirely for survival instinct. "Don't tell people to their face that their witty lines could be improved," she said. "Especially not people who can rip off your head without a second thought."
Paussus blinked. "You've never been in a writer's conference, have you?"
Chrysalis yanked the pencil way, then levitated it back along with a census form. "Just fill this out, will you?" she asked. "And for the record, if you want to put down Short Pause as your real name and Paussus as an alias, I will permit it."
(note: insert this bit before the visit with Gandy Dancer's wife)
Trottingham wasn't a particularly large town, and its jail, from the outside, looked to Chrysalis more or less like a dozen other small pony town jails she'd seen both inside and out...
... except for the one cell which had curtains on the barred windows and the nameplate PARASOL bolted to the cell door. That was unusual, as was the fact that the prisoner occupying that cell pulled a key out of one of the holes in her leg, unlocked her own cell door, and let herself out to greet the queen on arrival. "Good morning, my queen," she said, giving a proper kow-tow to her. "What brings you here today?"
"You know I can't let her out right now," the town sheriff, who contrary to Chrysalis's hopes appeared to be a disgustingly decent and honest earth pony. "Politics from Canterlot, and all that rot. But the deputy's keeping up her apartment, keeping the flowers watered and so forth."
"I'm not here about that," Chrysalis said. Parasol was possibly the hive's most eccentric infiltrator, which was saying quite a lot indeed. Although her contributions were sometimes late, they were always above quota, despite the two major handicaps of (a) having been revealed as a changeling to the town for almost three years now and (b) being a clinical unconscious kleptomaniac who spent as many days in jail as out. "The hive is doing a census, and I'm collecting the data from the problem cases personally." She looked down and said, "You may rise, problem case."
"Thank you, my queen." Parasol stood up, smiling pleasantly. "How may I be of service?"
Chrysalis gave Parasol a form and a ball-point and said, "Fill this out. If you have any confusion about these very simple questions, ask before you write."
"Yes, my queen!"
The sheriff cleared his throat a little awkwardly. "Really, you don't have to treat her like that. Parasol is a very intelligent person for a changeling. No offense meant, of course."
"I would have to take your word for it," Chrysalis said, choosing to ignore those last few words. "Intelligent changelings might get outed, but they don't remain afterwards."
"Oh, but Parasol is a pillar of the community," the sheriff protested.
Chrysalis silently gestured to the nicer-than-regulation jail cell.
"Oh, I mean besides that tosh," the sheriff said. "She's quite useful, you know. Takes messages when I'm out. Keeps the other prisoners in line. She does community service and then locks herself in, all right and proper. Why, she even solved that rash of burglaries last month without even leaving her cell. "
"Of course I did," Parasol said, not looking up from her writing. "It's bad to steal things."
Chysalis looked at Parasol, then at the sheriff. "Pillar of the community, is she?"
"Well, there's always some little idiosyncrasy in any pony," the sheriff said. "But apart from that one thing... and being a monstrous bug-pony creature, of course... apart from that, she's perfectly normal."
"Not from my side of things," Chrysalis said, then turned to Parasol, who was mostly done filling out the form. "By the way, you wouldn't happen to have heard of another drone named Paussus, would you?"
"No, I don't think so," Parasol said. "Name doesn't ring a bell. Here you go, my queen." The form levitated back to Chrysalis, who tucked it away under a wing.
"Very good," she said. "And the pen too, please. It's not like ball-points are disposable."
"What pen?" Parasol looked blankly back at her. The pen was nowhere in sight.
Chrysalis sighed. She'd been warned, she admitted in the privacy of her head, but... "The one I just loaned to you to fill out that form."
"Oh, did you? I hadn't noticed." Parasol began rummaging around in her holes. "You know, the strangest things just fall into my holes for some reason."
"Yes," the sheriff agreed with the lightest touch of long-suffering endurance, "we know."
With a yank Parasol pulled out a cluster of about thirty different writing implements. "Maybe it ended up in here," she said. "Is it one of these?"
The sheriff gasped, then looked at the writing stand on his desk, where a pen holder lay conspicuously empty. "My fountain pen!" he shouted. "That was a gift from the township for twenty years' faithful service! I signed the expenditures docket with it just this morning! How did you get hold of it?"
"Really?" Parasol looked as purely innocent as any changeling ever can. "Which one is it?"
Chrysalis snatched away her ball-point (and a couple of other nice-looking quills, with deliberate malice) and eased towards the door. "I'll leave you and your pillar of the community to work this out," she said. "I've got the train to Manehattan to catch."
She was looking forward to that, and to the book she'd left on her assigned seat. Whoever researched that book about ancient griffon kings had skipped the begats and gone straight to the spicy and scandalous stuff, and he hadn't been afraid to name names. She could think of some romance novelists who could take pointers from that historian, whoever he was...
(final bit)
Time passed, and paperwork flowed, and eventually an official number was produced. Pharynx's estimate had actually been fairly close, if for the wrong reasons; the Badlands Hive of Queen Chrysalis had thirty-one thousand and ninety-seven subjects, plus one queen and never forget it.
And now, on this day, Chrysalis was present in the grand cavern of the hive to witness as the first official Changeling Kingdom photo identification cards were made and given out. She was there for three reasons. First, it was a historic day, which meant the queen had to be there. Second, there was certain to be some squabble over something unimportant, which mean the queen had to be there.
And third, she was determined to have License #1, and for everyone to see that she was #1, which she did before ordering three lines be formed in front of Beancounter and his two assistants as they began taking instant photos, clipping them to size, and sealing them in plastic on top of the cards themselves.
Most of the cards had been pre-prepared from the census forms, with name and address (which for two-thirds of those involved was Box 1, The Badlands) and, of course, the ID number. And, as Chrysalis had anticipated in a petty and selfish way, this caused trouble almost immediately.
"What number did you get?"
"6199."
"Hah! Mine's only 3621! I'm higher than you!"
"Hey look! Cricket got number 711!"
"Lucky Cricket strikes again!"
"Hey, who got number 10101? I'll trade ya!"
"I wanna trade! I don't like the number 2, and my number is 21221!"
"Hey, Beancounter, what number did I get? I wanna change it!"
"Yeah, Beancounter, gimme 12345!"
"12345? That's the stupidest number I ever heard in my life!"
"Oh YEAH?"
Sighing, Chrysalis prepared to get off her throne and begin beating changelings over the head with other changelings... only to stop as the rising volume of changeling voices cut off almost instantly.
The three lines, and the crowd of new ID owners mingled with them, parted at a point next to the main entrance to the great cavern. The gap slowly rippled through the crowd, and with it came whispers.
Whispers of one name.
Whispers of a forbidden name.
"Kevin."
"Kevin!"
"Kevin..."
As the opening got closer to the clerks, Chrysalis saw a little changeling with a little smug smile, carrying a piece of paper in its fangs.
Her vision went red.
It got even redder as the last couple of changelings moved aside to allow the latecomer access to the middle counter. The little changeling presented the paper to Beancounter, who looked at it, then looked at the person on the throne, who was not so much immobile with rage as vibrating hypersonically with pure demonic fury. Finding no help there, he shrugged, and he spent a minute or so pounding on a secondhand pony typewriter.
There was a flash.
There was a ratcheting noise, amplified by the tense silence of the room.
There was a brief rustling as Changeling Kingdom Certificate of Identification #32000 was assembled.
The smug little changeling accepted the card, gave a cherry wave to the throne, and then trotted out at the same slow, confident pace he'd come in.
The crowd of changelings, in unison, watched him leave.
Then, in unison, they turned to look at Chrysalis, and each one made a mental calculation as to when their sovereign, their liege, and for about half of them their mother would explode.
Then, coming to the correct answer with an acceptable margin of error, every single changeling- the drones, the clerks, the guards, even Elytron and Pharynx- bolted for any and all available exits with much less confidence and much more haste than Kevin.
That way they could all pretend they hadn't heard the order, the order which could be heard from Appleoosa some two hundred miles to the north.
"SEIZE HIM!!!"
The rest of the IDs did get issued... eventually.
Comments
Andrew Denton
"Little fluffs got left in" Flubs? Maybe a new character, a detective that rambles a lot, gets the baddies to lower their guard. Yeah, and we'd have him look kind of messy, like he's this total screwup, maybe with a rumpled trenchcoat-" Columbug! This idiot posed as a changeling queen so successfully that I have believed they actually got a rival queen to be in the show?? He honestly almost forgot what I asked him ten seconds ago! "Yes!" she snapped. "Get on with it!" Is some of this internal monologue? "Oh, duck, Macula, duck!" Because she was blonde... (Do doo do) Whoever researched that book about ancient griffon kings had skipped the begats and gone straight to the spicy and scandalous stuff, and he hadn't been afraid to name names. She could think of some romance novelists who could take pointers from that historian, whoever he was... I want to say it was Greengrass. :) ...the Badlands Hive of Queen Chrysalis had thirty-one thousand and ninety-seven subjects... There was a brief rustling as Changeling Kingdom Certificate of Identification #32000 was assembled. Where'd the other 902 come from? gave a cherry wave Cheery?
