Chapter 1
The larvae squirmed and hissed, tiny tongues licking at the air, searching in vain for the love they’d never tasted but desperately longed for. The one who should have loved them walked past the line they’d been herded into, staring dispassionately at them.
“Nursery,” she said, shaking a particularly touchy larva from the hole in her foreleg. The caretakers nodded, likewise showing no emotion.
“Construction,” she said pointing at a pair who were already chewing a hole into the floor.
“Infiltration,” was her assessment of the four who stood very still, watching her intently.
“Recon,” she said about the one cowering behind a stray lump of hardened slime.
The last hatchling hissed loudly at her, and moved to interpose itself between her and the others. For the first time, she smiled. “Patrol.”
===
“Patrol is the most important job in the hive,” said the older changeling to the newbies. “Can anyone tell me why?”
Pharynx eyed him suspiciously. There were rumors about him. That didn’t stop him from being the first to answer, however. “Because we protect the hive!”
“Ha. No. Recon protects the hive,” replied their teacher. “Yes, we’ll get involved in the actual fighting, but knowing who we need to bring our hoof down on with overwhelming force makes the actual fight easy. Easy enough that we hardly ever have to actually fight.
“Recon protects us,” he continued, “Infiltration keeps us fed. Construction keeps a roof over our heads. The Nursery keeps the hive growing. But Patrol is the most important job in the hive, because we keep the hive loyal.”
None of them were stupid enough not to pretend to understand what he meant by that, and he wasn’t stupid enough to mistake their silence for understanding.
“When you’re standing guard, you’re not there to stop some outsider from getting past,” he explained. “You’re there to watch the other changelings. Is someone trying to go somewhere they don’t belong? Sick, injured or confused? Trying to shirk their duty? Any deviation from the norm is suspicious, and it’s our job to pounce on it, without mercy.”
“I’ve never seen any of the changelings on Patrol kill anyone,” Pharynx remarked.
“Good. You’re not supposed to. And don’t get me wrong – not every infraction deserves death. Sometimes a good changeling just needs a warning, or a reminder – the right kind of dirty look at the right moment can be enough to put someone back on the loyal path. But sometimes…” He shook his head. “Officially, if we suspect any sort of serious disloyalty, we’re to bring the suspect before the Queen for judgment. There she’ll listen to them whine and make their excuses, and then execute them by sucking out all their love. But Chrysalis hates doing that. We’re her children – she loves us. She doesn’t want to see one of us fall so far that she has to resort to the ultimate penalty.
“Fortunately, as Patrol, we’re allowed to deputize any changeling we see to come with us on our rounds.” The instructor shook his head. “And it’s a sad fact of life that not everyone who goes out on one of our deep patrols comes back alive. Do with that knowledge what you will.”
“So you’re saying we should take them out into the desert and kill them,” one of the other trainees asked, looking proud to have figured it out.
Pharynx rolled his eyes. What an idiot.
“Yes that’s what I’m saying!” snapped the instructor. “I didn’t want to actually say it though. You’re supposed to be smarter than that!” He slapped the offender on the side of the head, knocking him to the ground.
===
Thorax climbed into the burrow Pharynx shared with him, late again, looking dejected and tired. This wasn’t exactly unusual. “Brother, I don’t think I’m cut out for being a scout.”
“What is it this time?” Pharynx asked. Thorax doubting himself wasn’t exactly unusual either. “We managed to get your shape changing under control, so what in Chrysalis’ name is it this time?”
“We were doing threat assessment, and when it was my turn they asked me how many changelings I should summon to intercept a lost foal,” Thorax said.
“Let me guess – you wanted half the hive?” Pharynx snorted. “Can’t underestimate the destructive power of a high-pitched shriek.”
“No, I –” he sighed. “That’s just it – you’re just like all the rest of them! Why would we summon anyone to take out a foal? I said we just turn into a butterfly or something and lead them away.”
Pharynx laughed.
“And they all laughed at me, just like that,” Thorax said. “‘You’re not an infiltrator, don’t try to manipulate ponies, you don’t have the training’, blah blah blah. They want me to bring down the wrath of the hive to murder a foal!”
“Foals have eyes, and mouths,” Pharynx said. “They can give away our presence just as easily as any adult. Besides, we don’t kill ponies. We capture them and put them in pods to use as a love source. You like to eat, don’t you?”
Thorax was silent for a while, but just as Pharynx was about to officially call the nightly temper tantrum handled, he spoke up again. “Not really,” he said, in a whisper. “I can’t help but—”
“Thorax, stop talking,” Pharynx growled.
He didn’t stop. “I can’t stop thinking about the ponies in pods, or the ones our infiltrators trick.”
“Stop talking now,” Pharynx repeated.
“The ones we capture, the ones we kidnap, they never see their loved ones again!”
Pharynx growled, “Seriously, shut your mouth this instant.”
“I don’t want to be part of this hive anymore. We’re monsters, Pharynx. Evil, soulless monsters.”
Pharynx closed his eyes, and cleared his thoughts. “Thorax,” he said. “I think you need to learn to look at this from another perspective.”
“What do you mean?” Thorax asked.
“Come with me on patrol tomorrow, and I’ll show you what we’re protecting.”
===
“Where are we going?” Thorax asked, as the two of them flew quietly through the clear sky of the badlands. They were shaped like falcons, of course – deep aerial patrols couldn’t be done in changeling form, for fear of giving away the hive.
“We’re on patrol, we’re not going anywhere,” Pharynx answered. Why was his brother such an idiot? Had they really hatched from the same clutch?
“You said you were going to show me something,” Thorax said.
Pharynx didn’t answer, and they flew on for a while, until they reached Ghastly Gorge, on the edge of the Badlands. It was close enough to pony territory that you’d sometimes see a straggler, and dangerous enough that the ponies didn’t think anything of said stragglers vanishing into thin air. Today they were alone, however. Pharynx lead Thorax down to the edge of the gorge, over the section where the Quarry Eels lurked, waiting to snap up any bit of meat that fell down into their jaws.
“I don’t like this place,” Thorax said, turning into a rock, reflexively. “I don’t feel safe here.”
“It isn’t safe,” Pharynx said. “I take changelings here when they have their doubts about what we need to do to protect the hive. When they start to see us as the bad guys. As the monsters.”
He kicked a rock over the edge – not Thorax. Not yet. A giant eel lunged out of the wall and crushed it to gravel in its jaws, then retreated as if it was never there.
“So you show them the real monsters?” Thorax asked.
Phraynx set a hoof on his brother’s… rock. “I guess I do,” he replied.
“And then they stop questioning Chrysalis’ orders?”
Pharynx laughed, bitterly. “I guess they do.” But he still didn’t kick his brother over the edge.
“Because you kill them,” Thorax said. He didn’t sound scared. He just sounded tired.
“Ha! I knew you weren’t as stupid as you look,” Pharynx said.
Thorax turned back into a changeling, and looked up at Pharynx, pitifully. “Do it, then. I can’t live another day as a monster.”
“Get out,” Pharynx said, turning his back on his brother.
“What?”
“Get out of here!” he snapped. “Turn into a bird and fly the feathery flock away.”
“You’re letting me go?” Thorax asked, incredulous.
Pharynx nodded, without turning back around. “Just don’t come back. Ever. Or they’ll kill me.”
There was the rush of flames as Thorax transformed, but before he left, he asked, with hope in his voice “Did you let the others run away too?”
Pharynx closed his eyes, and shook his head. When he turned around, minutes later, Thorax was gone.
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10318335
ACAB
Good bug
He does love his brother after all...
Great story, really succinct and well written. Sorry it'll get flamed by bootlickers
Ah, the lost art of subtlety.
I wonder if he regrets it.
Much better than I expected. Thumbs up (something I very rarely do).
10318369
Not all changelings are bad!
i.pinimg.com/474x/d0/31/8a/d0318a738aacd59e1ff71df1b064530c.jpg
Don't make Thorax sad. Give him tasty luvnomz.
Very interesting. You can really tell that the downvote brigade didn't actually read this one and just stopped at the title.
10318636
10 hardly makes a brigade. It could simply be they dislike idea Phrayx killed any one.
10318701
Possibly true, but every fic on the site posted lately that has even a hint of LGBT themes in the title/artwork has been seeing a large number of downvotes, usually shortly after being posted. The actual quality of the stories has varied but it's a pretty easy pattern to follow.
all cats are beautiful
10318738
I'm confused,what about this fic is remotely related to partner preferences or gender idenity? It's about Phayrax's position under Chrysals' Tyrannical caste based rulership. Where he was basicly forced into a caste that is essentially the Gastoppo.
Dawwww! Sweet little bugs!
10318787
The content of the story is not LGBT related (edit: to the best of my understanding), but the title is a play on the concept of Assigned Male/Female At Birth (AMAB or AFAB) which is used when talking about what gender someone was assigned at birth, which is commonly used by trans peeps. This is why I postulated that the group that is downvoting most every new LGBT story right now saw the title, downvoted the story en masse, and never bothered to actually read the story to realize that it's not talking about anything LGBT related, it's just derived from a term that is commonly used when discussing gender.
I could be wrong of course, there could just be 17 people who really did not like the content of the story, but usually with a Like/Dislike ratio this bad I'd expect the quality of the writing to be very poor or the subject to be highly controversial, and frankly this story fits neither of those categories. Therefore, I think the most likely scenario is what I described above. This is happening on nearly every story being posted for the Pride and Positivity event and it seems to me that the downvote brigade mistook this story as part of that due to the title. The downvotes on nearly every comment is also something that has been happening on all of those stories so that adds more credence.
Here's link the the event in question. The stories with any kind of pride flag in them get hit the hardest with the dislikes. This hasn't happened on every story but it's been quite a few, especially the early ones. https://www.fimfiction.net/group/214981/folder/71365/pride-and-positivity-2020?page=2
Wow. That was... damn. Pharynx showing one final act of mercy for his brother and then right back at it.
And yeah, I caught the undertones.
10318904
Uh... no. The dislikes have nothing to do with LGBT causes. I mean, I assume. They most likely come from two things. Firstly the actual story being bad, with blatant and nonsensical propaganda in place of character development, and a shoehorning of political messaging so blatant it's painful. The other is the painfully and hilariously on-the-nose message of "All cops are bastards." Which, while it is painfully obvious that police units are a bit out of control and need serious reform, the idea that ALL cops are bad is just... like so disgustingly black-and-white that it;s insulting to people with a brain.
So, yeah. A lot of down votes are for political reasons, but not due to LGBT issues.
As an aside, I just love it when shitty stories are written about a controversial political message or opinion, and then all criticism of said story is dismissed as "lele trolz whu didnt evn red teh fik!!"
10318975
You know what, I'll admit I hadn't considered the political angle. Not sure I fully agree with your analysis of the story, but you're right that absolutely could be where the dislikes are coming from. I do still think my original post has merit, as I've seen this happening on quite a few other stories, and the title is a reference to gender issues as well as political ones, but on a second look I would agree it's probably not the main reason.
10318975
haven't finished the story yet, but this is outside of the story's context.
The idea behind ACAB is more in the fact that, while not all cops aren't bad at all times (in my experience, as a cis white dude in a small town, most aren't), if you find a cop who's willing to acknowledge the need for reform, admits it, supports necessary reforms, calls out bad behavior by other cops... They tend not to be cops for very long after that. Whether fired (as with th officwrs who called out their chief's blatant racism in Oregon a year or two back) or set up for falls (Serpico style). Or, at best, they learn quickly to keep their mouths shut about what they see and just plead ignorance. To rationalize what they see as "job stress" or "I can't judge his decision because I wasn't in his head." To minimize and deny the existence xistence of a problem as lojg as possible, and then to call the problem an isolated bad apple rather than acknowledging that there seem to be a lot of bad appls if QC is doing its job.
The "thin blue line" mentality forces good cops to become bad ones whenever they have to support their "brothers." Because what is a bad cop if not one who ignores criminal behavior because they know the perp? All the rationalizations in the world still come down to breaking their own rules.
Therefore, when push comes to shove... ACAB is really hard to argue with.
And I say this as somebody who knows several cops as semi-professional acquaintances. Don't know any of them who won't defend a "brother in blue" to the bitter end, which incidentally was video footage of the officer they stopped defending planting a gun on the guy he'd just shot. Right up to that moment, they were still insisting it was a "good shoot," just a matter of a snap decision that had to be made, and tney weren't there to say how they'd have made it.
4 am and so I'm not catching whatever subtle themes this is depicting that warrant the hate, but ah well. Well-written and fairly in-character is good enough for me.
The title made the political angle clear, but viewed independently of that, it's still a well-told little story of the horrors of Chrysalis's regime.
And thinking about it, Chrysalis might actually be more mad at the waste of love than being bothered to execute the flawed herself.
10318636
Perhaps I downvoted it because I hate this insipid injection of poorly written real world politics into a fantasy setting I've enjoyed being a part of for damn near a decade.
Right-wingers sure are fragile snowflakes, lol. Faved because I'm not a moron.
Political garbage of any sort doesn't belong on this website.
I wasn't really sure what to expect from this story, but I don't feel surprised. The length and title are really blatant that this wasn't a well-worked out story. The scenes are quick and suffer from being overly preachy. The content is ill-suited to the everyone tag since it covers Thorax's own brother being instructed on democide and almost carrying out on his brother. The role of the changeling authority feels unnatural and ill-suited to the allegory that you're aiming for. Not spending a lot of time on your content means it doubles-down on the preachiness.
The reader is left with a story that is very forced and has a pony veneer, even if imagined as a grimdark AU. To echo the comment here
10318509 it is painfully obvious that there isn't any subtlety to this. The reader is left feeling frustrated at how bad the point was gotten across and that the story was only a point. Its poor structure makes it for an easy downvote. I'm also genuinely not sure why readers from one of my stories had this in the also liked section.
The story is a good, sympathetic look at Pharynx. He was the best sort of bastard he could be.
The title was a ballsy choice. If you's called it literally anything else, the downvote brigade wouldn't have come pouring out of their clown car angrily honking their red noses and throwing cream pies everywhere.
Honestly I was completely shocked when I got to the comments and found people arguing about politics on this one. I just thought it was an interesting story of how Thorax got out of the hive when he seemed to lack any of the required skills. I don't really see the political parallel that so many people apparently think is painfully obvious, not even when I scrolled back up to read a second time.
Maybe they're reading too much into things, or maybe I don't read enough into them. I enjoyed the story nonetheless.
Actually now I think of it, wouldn't this story be more against ACAB? Pharynx is literally ordered and expected to be a "bastard," yet makes the decision not to be one to his brother. If anything it seems like the moral here is that all cops are not, in fact, bastards.
Those last lines gave me chills. Dang.
10318975
If you willingly uphold a corrupt system, you’re a bastard. Ipso facto all cops are bastards.
10320976
Okay Boomer
Ember: Stop talking!
Thorax: *actually stops*