Counting Noses pt 1 (Patreon)

Well, it's been over three months since I've created much of anything.

Time to fix that.

Here's the first part of a story I intend to get done by the end of the week for FanOfMostEverything's Imposing Sovereigns IV contest. It's also canon for the CSPverse. (I guess that's going to be a thing now, what with this and the other bit of silliness I'm planning...)

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COUNTING NOSES

by Kris Overstreet

Chrysalis glared at the letter as if she could ignite the paper using solely the power of her mind. (She could ignite it quite easily with magic, but that didn't count.)

The letter, unimpressed, continued displaying the words of the being Chrysalis, on this particular day, hated fifth-worst in the world:

My dear Chrysalis,

With the final settlement of what the press likes to call the "space race," I finally feel free to bring up an ongoing issue that is creating some friction between your subjects and mine.

As you know, the justice system of Equestria strongly favors restitution and reconciliation over mere retaliation. As such, we have been releasing changelings caught in crimes into your custody with little in the way of punishment or negotiation. However, many of my little ponies are complaining that this leads to recidivism- or, to put it more plainly, that the same changeling is pretending to be a number of different changelings, to say nothing of pretending to be ponies, griffons, cows, dogs, zeppelins, etc. 

Furthermore, we have a small but growing number of changelings who, when apprehended, claim to be of hives other than your own, or to be outcast from your own hive. While this is none of our business in a strict sense, I wouldn't want to be responsible for allowing a criminal mastermind to evade your justice through these false claims.

With this in mind, I have ordered my law enforcement authorities throughout Equestria to retain custody of all changelings accused of criminal activity until such time as your hive institutes a uniform identification system. Once we can confirm which changelings are yours, we can resume returning them to you.

I know this will be an inconvenience to you, which is why I have waited until it would not be an interference in your space flight efforts. I am sure that a ruler of your wisdom and cleverness will have no trouble completing this task long before the first components of your orbital training facility are ready for launch.

Yours in friendship,

Celestia

Bah. Chrysalis had been issuing birth certificates for a year and a half, or at least signing the certificates where the pony clerk she'd hired told her to sign. Why wasn't that enough? And why did her subjects have to carry around documents that told people who they really were, anyway? Wasn't that self-incrimination? She was pretty sure there was a law somewhere that made that illegal. And anyway, why should a changeling be bound by Equestrian law?

Because, her better sense chimed in, tick the smiling happy princess off, and she just might turn the hive and Horseton Space Center into perfectly matching craters. And if you wanted that option taken off the table, then you should have stuck to your original plan when you were up on the moon.

Chrysalis hated her better sense. Yes, it kept her on the throne, but it never told her anything she actually wanted to hear.

So the question was, how much trouble was this identification thing really going to be? Could she just dump this onto Occupant, like she did with all the rest of the annoying bureaucratic stuff? Or was this going to be something too complex for a tiny little drone brain to handle?

Well, she thought, if I want to know about stupid pony things, ask the pony.

"To be honest," Cherry Berry said, slipping her flight scarf off her neck, "I'm surprised you got by this long."

"So we actually have to do this?" Chrysalis grumbled. "Are you telling me all you ponies carry pieces of paper around telling other people you are who you say you are?"

"Not all the time, no," Cherry said. "For day to day stuff we have our cutie marks. Those can't be faked."

"Except by shapeshifters," Chrysalis pointed out.

"Well, of course."

"And they go away if an evil necromancer sucks your magic dry."

"Well, yes," Cherry admitted, getting a little annoyed.

"And there was that time Starlight Glimmer-"

"My point is," Cherry Berry said, doing something Chrysalis would tolerate from nobody else in the world and interrupting her, "they're good enough for identification for ordinary ponies. But ponies in certain professions do have to have licenses showing that they have been properly trained and tested to do the things they're supposed to do. I take my pilot's license with me everywhere I fly." She reached a hoof under her flight helmet and pulled out a little card with a littler photo of Cherry smiling gormlessly at the viewer. "And every member of Celestia's guard and the E.U.P., from the Wonderbolts down to the greenest Manehattan traffic cop, has one to go with the badge."

Chrysalis took a moment to consider this information. It might go a long way to explain why all her attempts to slip an infiltrator into the Royal Guard had failed. (There had been one who'd got in literally by the front door, but he was an exile and didn't count.) "All right," she said reluctantly, "I can see a purpose in that. But why do I have to give one of these to every ling in my hive?"

Cherry pretended to try to remember something. "Refresh my memory," she said in a sing-song tone she just had to know annoyed Chrysalis, "but is the Badlands Hive not technically still at a state of war with the Kingdom of Equestria?"

"No," Chrysalis snapped. "We are in a state of undeclared hostilities currently in a condition of informal cease-fire. And I've gone to some trouble to keep it that way."

"What's the difference?"

"War has more rules."

"Riiiiiight," Cherry drawled. "So, mostly-war, then. And did you not also say, on multiple occasions, that every member of the hive is a warrior?"

Oh. In an instance Chrysalis saw where this was going, saw that she was going to lose, and decided she would go down fighting anyway. "I might have said that, but that doesn't mean-"

"And I'm quite sure, because I've had to put it on the forms for Cherry's Odd Jobs," the pink pony interrupted again, "that the entire justification behind you bailing whatever changelings you want out of any jail in Equestria is that, technically, they're all soldiers in your service. Right?"

"That only applies to the useful ones."

"Well, that makes it simple," Cherry said. "Just tell Princess Celestia that only the useful changelings are your warriors. You don't have to give any of the useless drones licenses- just the ones you want."

"I don't keep useless drones in my hive!" Chrysalis snapped.

"You don't? That's a shame," Cherry smirked. "I guess that means you'll have to give a license to all of them." The smirk grew a little broader. "Do you even know all of them?"

"Of course not!" Chrysalis roared. "I have something like thirty thousand of them! They're scattered across the continent! Some I don't see for years at a time! It's not a queen's job to know every single subject!"

Cherry's smirk went away. "Well, it's somepony's job to know," she said. "Which means it's your job to find somepony who can do it."

"Fine. How-"

"Not it!"

"Shoot!!"

Chrysalis employed other ponies besides Cherry Berry. She had a handful of lawyers on retainer, mostly employed through various cover identities. There were the employees of various space-related enterprises, of whom ponies made a majority of construction workers at Horseton Space Center and a minority of the temp workers managed by Cherry's Odd Jobs and Rocket Parts, Inc. And there were other enterprises, a surprising number of them legal, which also required ponies to fill in where changelings who could use their head for something besides a place to stick their horn onto ran in short supply.

And there were a few ponies on the payroll even inside the Badlands Hive itself, a place where a few short years ago no pony would have been allowed outside of a cocoon. 

This included the official hive clerk. Technically this pony, a pegasus by the name of Paper Plane, was the seventh pony to hold this role in the less than two years it had existed. She'd been in the role for about three months, having previously been a secretary at the weather factory in Cloudsdale. Her predecessors had been roughly evenly split between those who couldn't handle daily life in a sunless cave in close proximity to thousands of changelings and those who found themselves drawn into some other hive job. At this point Paper obviously wasn't going to be in the first category, so now Chrysalis, when she thought of her at all, mostly wondered when she would get headhunted, and by what part of the hive.

"As of today," Paper Plane said, after a ruffle through the middle drawer of the rightmost of a series of file cabinets, "there are six thousand, two hundred and twenty-four birth certificates on file." She frowned and added, "Not counting those who attempted to get a second or third birth certificate. Falsifying public records to generate a spurious identity is illegal."

"I had noticed," Chrysalis said dryly, to cover up her own bewilderment. On the one hoof, bravo to the infiltrators who saw the utility of multiple valid identities. On the other hoof, why would a shapeshifting changeling want to pose as another changeling?? Who, exactly, were they hiding from?

"That number," Paper Plane went on after only a slight hesitation, "includes all hatchings within the Hive since midsummer of 1006. I am told that this group..." She pulled out the bottom drawer of the leftmost cabinet for a quick look. "... twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine... yes, twenty nine... I am told this is an unusually low number for the time period in question."

It was. Changeling drones could have children, but that generally depended on two of them liking one another quite a lot more than most changeling drones ever did, and when they did it was usually only one or two eggs at a time. Raising entire generations at a time was a queen thing, and it was among the least pleasant and most annoying duties Chrysalis ever bothered to perform. She'd put it off during the space race, but now she'd have to find time to track down some disposable mates and then arrange a month or so in her schedule in which she could stay at the hive.

But not right now. "Interesting but irrelevant," she said with an imperious wave of her hoof. "The larvae can wait anyway. I only need the address for the other six thousand."

"Six thousand, one hundred and ninety-five," Paper Plane said, without hesitation this time. "And unfortunately I cannot provide that information."

"What?" Chrysalis had to suppress the urge to react as she would have pre-moon shot to a subordinate who told her something couldn't be done. "Those certificates were provided only to those changelings working outside the hive. Why do we not know where they are?"

"All requests for certification of birth have been processed through Cherry's Odd Jobs and Rocket Parts," Paper Plane said. "Each certificate was presented to each changeling in Appleoosa or in the branch offices at Manehattan or Canterlot. When new copies are required, we receive the individual requests here, but you never told us to keep track of where the requests came from."

No, of course I didn't, Chrysalis stopped herself from saying. Because I didn't feel like dealing with idiotic pony bureaucracy if I didn't have to. "Very well," she said quietly. "So I suppose Cherry's Odd Jobs would know their locations?"

Paper Plane shrugged. "For those changelings still employed there, I suppose," she said. "But I would point out the very large number of former C.O.J.R.P.I. employees who have left for permanent job opportunities elsewhere in Equestria. I believe the factory in Appleoosa only employs some four hundred changelings, for example."

Chrysalis groaned. This job just became a lot more trouble. All those private-sector changelings would have to be tracked down so she could give them their identification. And if the changelings in question decided they didn't want Chrysalis to find them, it would be a royal pain in the abdomen to do it. "Point taken," she grumbled. "But I do need to track them down, regardless."

"Have you tried the post office?" Paper Plane suggested. "Any changeling who formerly received mail through the hive postal service would have a forwarding address on file if they moved."

Doubtful. Occupant and his obsession with glossy color catalogues and the schlock to be found therein aside, most of her changelings regarded letters as something to dodge, not to encourage. But she hadn't any better ideas. "I may as well," she sighed. "Carry on, then."

"Er, as it happens," Paper Plane muttered, showing signs of being more than a talking file cabinet for the first time, "I suppose this is as good a time as any... I'm giving my two weeks' notice."

That was another of the many things about ponies Chrysalis didn't understand. If you no longer wanted to be around certain other people, why do it for another two weeks when you could leave immediately? It's not like they were going to be any less annoying in that time. "Two weeks' notice of what?"

"I've been accepted as a junior clerk in the Commissary Division at CSP," Paper Plane said. "It's my dream job, Your Majesty. In fact, it's the reason I accepted this position at all."

"Your dream job?" Chrysalis blinked. "Your dream job is spending all day doing sums in a kitchen??"

Paper Plane spread her wings, which admittedly looked a little small and scraggly. "I've always been a weak flyer, Your Majesty," she said. "My reflexes are poor. I failed all my practical exams in flight school. But I am quite passionate about space flight." She straightened up and added, "And I decided when I took this job that, if the only way I could play a part in space exploration was to be the mare who counted all the beans for every bean burrito that goes onto a flight, then come Tartarus or high tied, I would be that mare."

Chrysalis, unable to even respond, nodded and left the room, convinced yet again of the total insanity of the entire pony species.