Hive Minds Give Good Hugs

Natalie Maher

2022

Special thanks to FuyuDust for making the beautiful cover art and to Emma “nuew” Welker, who designed and typeset the ebook. I’d also like to thank my lovely proof and beta-readers: Rince, Merlin Spinger, Selkie Myth, Voracity “VoraVora” Maledictus, and Yasha, without whose tireless work this story would be nowhere near as good as it is today.

Copyright © 2022 Natalie Maher. All rights reserved.

No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher, except as permitted by law.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Front Cover Design by FuyuDust.

Book Formatting by Emma “nuew” Welker.

https://patreon.com/thundamoo

First Edition

To Jacqueline, my number one favorite blasphemer.

Contents

1 Far Away From Home

2 Overreacting

3 Predator and Prey

4 Eat or Be Eaten

5 Ripoff

6 Hunting for Two

7 Not Going Crazy

8 Living With Yourself

9 No Being Evil

10 Double Trouble

11 Trial by Acid

12 Aftermath

13 Plans to Focus

14 Speak

15 Defiance

16 Council of Evelyn

17 War is Hell

18 The Right Thing

19 Soul of Theseus

20 Cultural Exchange

21 Powerlessly Humane

22 Demon Mom

23 Social Skills

24 Culture Barrier

25 Peace Talks

26 Immortal Terror

27 Multitudinous

28 Digging Yourself Deeper

29 Avoiding Disaster

30 Once More, With Feeling

31 Creature, Demon, Monster

32 Parallel Paths

33 Reflections

34 Triple Trouble

35 Efficiency

36 Discord Ping

37 Fish are Food, Not Friends

38 Expand, Adapt, Overcome

39 Evelyn Medical Technician (EMT)

40 Girl’s Night (Plus One Alex)

41 Authority Figures

42 Prime Directive

43 Trying Her Best

44 Better Days

45 Prepared

46 What Do You Want

47 Diplomacy for Dummies

48 Doing What You Can

49 With Great Power

50 Innocence

51 Suffer No Tyranny

52 Tyrant

53 Last Contact

About the Author

1. Title Page

2. Cover

3. Table of Contents

1 Far Away From Home

“SAIL!”

Flailing like a beached fish, I tear myself out from under the covers and scramble over to my alarm clock, slapping it into silence. At some point I had the genius idea of making the alarm absolutely blast my favorite song from the other side of the room every morning. Does this help me wake up? Yes. Does this make everyone else in the dorm hate me? Probably also yes.

So to the continued dismay of everyone who lives in the same building as me, I tend to get up just before sunrise regardless of whether or not I have class. The alarm starts off quiet when the riffs begin, increasing in volume little by little until it eventually wakes up everyone in a ten-mile radius. I keep this terrible sin of an alarm because I’ve learned that no amount of horrible noise can rouse me as quickly as the utter terror of potentially rousing someone else. I’m normally up as soon as the song starts, but I suppose I was sleeping extra hard this morning.

…I really hope everyone nearby is sleeping harder.

My room is as tiny as one would expect a college dorm to be, but I at least have the upside of possessing my own. Whoever was supposed to be my roommate never showed up, so this year I get the place all to myself! On my dresser are a few bug boards, the macabre corpse boxes collectors like myself use to display our best catches. I have some pretty great ones, too! From the corner, my pet tarantula Mr. Bubbles watches languidly from her cage. Yes, “her.” I named her “Mr. Bubbles” when I was six, before I knew she was a girl. Whatever. Girls can be misters, too.

I should probably feed her, which means I need to go get her breakfast! After all, I’d never let my widdle baby tawantuwa eat anything other than the best and freshest! I throw on yesterday’s clothes, bra and underwear and all. There’s no point in showering yet, since I’m about to get covered in even more dirt and gunk. Such is the curse of a budding entomologist such as myself: all the best bugs require a bit of mucking about to find.

I finish dressing, tossing a granola bar in my mouth and grabbing my cages. There’s a few nets and things but I don’t really need them.

Yep… that’s how I normally start the day. I know it’s weird, but hey! Live and let live, right? So yeah, I started the day, and then… hmm. I started, and then I found something, right? I went bug hunting and then I found…

And then I found…

I found…

…

Hmm. What did I find, again? I can’t really remember. What happened? Where am I?

You’re in bed.

If the all-consuming darkness and exhaustion are any indication, I must be in bed. I certainly don’t feel like doing anything other than continuing to lie here in pleasant, cosy warmth. Besides, I don’t hear any opening riffs of an AWOLNATION song, so sleep should be in the clear!

I’m sorry, Evelyn, but you can’t sleep just yet.

Unfortunately I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep just yet. An instinctive dread fills me at the thought. Midnight anxiety quite commonly lasts all the way until my alarm goes off if it gets going, and the longer I have in bed with my thoughts, the more I risk a depression spiral. I need to distract myself, think about something else. But what? Maybe I should think about…

If you could change anything about yourself, what would it be?

If I could change anything about myself, what would it be? Gosh, I don’t know. I just wish I was more likeable, I guess.

Oh, Evelyn…

I mean, I’m just Evelyn, right? I’m the weird girl that likes bugs. What wouldn’t I want to improve? I want to be attractive, to be confident, to not… dissolve into a confused and anxious mess in every social interaction. That would be great!

I was thinking more along the lines of “super strength.”

Super strength seems interesting… but no, I’d never want anything like that. I don’t want to do construction work for a living, so the only thing I’ll be doing with that much capacity for hurting people is hurting people on accident and then crying. No thanks. I don’t need or want to fight anything. I just want to be hot.

…You want to be hot.

N-not for weird stuff! It’s a confidence thing, I just want people to like me! Why am I even thinking about this, anyway? Wait… have I been talking with someone? Are you laughing at me!?

Yes, absolutely.

What does that mean? Wait, who are you?

I’ll see you in a year, Evelyn.

You’ll see me in a… wait, what does that mean? Hey? Where am I? What’s happening? Why can’t I—

…

I wake up. Again, I think, or possibly just for real this time. It’s dark, and I still don’t hear my alarm. Unlike before, though, there’s no sense of warm, cozy comfort. My bed feels weird. Like… kinda wet.

Very wet, even. Gross, what happened? I try to move, but the wet something constricts me. I struggle and bump into a wall next to my face, opening my eyes only to continue seeing nothing. It’s completely and utterly dark. My panic rises higher, my struggles getting ever more ferocious, but I can barely move. I’m trapped on all sides by walls!

I pound on the inside of my dark prison, adrenaline surging through my body. I’m trapped, I need help! I try to cry out but only end up coughing a disgusting, viscous fluid down my chest. What happened!? Where am I!? How did I get here!? Can someone—

Crack. A bit of the wall gives in to my feeble punches and light streams in. I pound on the break over and over, slowly but surely widening the gap. Finally, my panic-fueled limbs burst free, causing me to tumble out of whatever contained me to land face-first on cold, hard stone. The impact hits my jaw and I bite my tongue, pain searing through my mouth. I’m cold, wet, terrified, confused, and… wait, am I naked?

I scramble up to a sitting position, looking down and immediately freaking out all over again. I see a woman with proportions I’d die for, but even more startling is the fact that she has stone-grey skin. It’s not even remotely a human skin tone, a thought that burns in my mind even brighter when I notice how much of that ‘skin’ appears to actually be armor-like chitin. But… that’s impossible. No living animal produces enough chitin to make a whole outfit, yet her arms, her legs, her pelvis and parts of her chest are all covered with a hard substance that couldn’t possibly be anything else. It may not be much of an outfit, but she’s wearing an outfit. …Or maybe more than an outfit. The feet and hands look… wrong. Mostly human, but with an insectoid thinness to the joints that makes it impossible for them to simply be gloves over fleshy fingers.

I can’t help myself. I poke the person… and I become poked. Yep, that’s actually me. What the hell? I… I’m some kind of bug girl now? I look around rapidly, panic mounting. I’m in a small cave, the mouth of which is just in front of me. Behind me… there’s an egg. An egg that’s shattered open on one side, exactly large enough to hold me.

I turn and run, a scream escaping my lips. My freakish, chitinous bug legs make a tap-tapping sound as they impact the stone floor, multiplying my terror well beyond sane levels.

“Ahhhhh! Help! Help, I’m a xenomorph!”

I’m soon out of the cave, absolutely booking it as my feet patter on something red and squishy, the sun hitting me in the eyes. I’m far too frenzied to care, only registering that I’m out in the wilderness of god knows where. I run and run and run, screaming for help and desperately searching for some kind of human contact out in the middle of nowhere, someone that could possibly save me from this terrifying dream-turned-nightmare.

By the time I am too exhausted to continue, I have already begun to accept that I am alone… and it’s looking increasingly possible that I will stay that way for a long, long time.

After all, I probably won’t find any humans outside of Earth.

Looking around me as the haze of adrenaline clears, I see a forest both like and utterly unlike every other forest I’ve ever seen. It has trees: large, stationary organisms that grow high to better collect sunlight for energy, but instead of branches and leaves this flora is bulbous, porous. They look more like mushrooms than trees, with a web-like mesh for a canopy, draped with alien moss and vines. It has grass: oddly fuzzy strands reaching upward for whatever glimpses of light could be found through the trees above. These bits of vegetation do not cover the entire ground, as the “trees” are greedy, but in tufts here and there they find enough light to survive. At least, I assume they seek light, but rather than the chlorophyll green I am so used to the leaves and fronds are a dark and intimidating red, like a forest of death and blood. Every plant is different, strange and unique on some fundamental level that doesn’t conform to the logic I thought nature was supposed to follow. Yet, at the same time, it has its own logic, its own pattern, its own possibilities waiting to be discovered. In some ways, it is a wonderful, beautiful thing.

In others, I’m still lost, confused, naked, alone, terrified, and now exhausted, hungry, and thirsty.

Okay. Fuck. So I might have overreacted there. …Well, not in the sense that it’s possible to truly overreact to finding myself transformed into a freaky bug lady and teleported onto a goddamn alien planet, but merely in the sense that my specific choice of reactions may have gotten me slightly lost. Although… I guess if I am on some other planet, or in some other dimension, or even on some crazy part of Earth completely unknown to me, I’m not really any more lost than I was when I woke up in an egg in a cave oh my god oh fuck oh fuck.

No, no no no! Calm down, calm down. Don’t have another freakout. There’s no one else around so… so I have to take care of myself, right? Oh shit, I only know the bare basics about wilderness survival. I already fucked up the first thing, which is probably “don’t freak out, start screaming, and run in a random direction.” Okay, okay… I need a landmark. Right? A way to orient myself. I’m pretty sure I ran downhill right after exiting that cave, so… maybe it’s a raised area?

…Too bad I ran away from it.

No, no! Bad thoughts! It’s fine! It wouldn’t be a good landmark in the first place if I can’t find it again anyway! After I figure that out I’ll need water and food, assuming my freaky alien body eats and drinks. …I’m hungry and thirsty, though, so that seems like a safe assumption.

I start heading back the direction I came from as best as I’m able. I don’t recall seeing any animals on the way over… or fauna, I guess? They’re not technically going to be in the animal kingdom if they don’t have any of the same evolutionary roots, but… well, anyway, I didn’t see any. I also wasn’t really looking, though. Hopefully screaming like a maniac scared them off rather than attracted them… if there even are any animals in this world at all. We could be barely Cambrian over here, maybe all the animals are in the ocean.

Ack, I’ve got to focus. I’m at least fairly sure I’m going the right way. The ground is soft, and both the dirt and the alien flora I’m just going to call grass are depressed in spots I previously stepped on. The fuzzy red plant is covered in miniscule fronds that would probably tickle my feet if my legs weren’t quite so… armored. Fuck, what am I now?

My forearms, legs, and some bits and bobs around my torso are covered in chitin. But on the subject of bobs, most of my chest is… not so covered. I have boob armor, and I’m not happy about it. Who the heck designed this? I’m going to be so angry when I figure out who decided it was better for me to be hot than well-protected. Why does the chitin cover my ribs but not my kidneys? Ribs are already there to do the protecting for my lungs and heart and stuff! Actually, wait, are they? Do I have bones? I think I have bones. I’ve gotta have bones, how would I even be standing up without bones? I have a lot of chitin, but not enough to support everything, right?

…Wait, with all this chitin in the way, how am I going to pee?

I lean over to tap my pelvis inquisitively, and out of nowhere I feel a sharp, burning pain on the nape of my neck. Instinctively I slap the area and my hand splatters into something painful and wet, eliciting a quiet hiss. I pull my hand away from the pain, watching in horror as my palm starts to dissolve.

Above me, a creature lurks. It has six short, stubby limbs, each tightly grasping part of the porous mushroom tree like an aggressive sloth. It has no apparent head, but from the end facing me drips the caustic liquid burning its way through the chitin on my spine.

It looks hungry.

2 Overreacting

Completely silent, the faceless, acid-dripping beast above me prepares another spray of caustic fluid. I know I’ve been trying not to panic again so soon but holy shit I’m on an alien planet and it’s trying to kill me and eat me I’m going to die. This acid sloth thing is twenty pounds of nope in a ten pound sack and I am out of here.

It’s not long into my second panicked sprint of the day that I realize the acid isn’t stopping on its own. The burning pain is just getting worse, eating deeper and deeper into the back of my chitinous neck. Not hearing anything chasing me, I stop. I have to deal with this acid now.

First things first, I wipe my burning hand on the grass. It helps a bit, so I do my best to gather up as many clumps as I can to try and wipe off my neck. The acid just devours the grass like cotton candy shoved into a waterfall, obliterating the organic matter at a terrifying speed. Still, it can’t be all-powerful or anything, right? Every little bit of acid doing chemical reactions on grass is a bit not doing chemical reactions to my spine.

This doesn’t seem very efficient, though. I lean back, pressing my neck against a tree, and start rubbing. It hurts. Oh god, it hurts so much. I feel the acid break through my freakish shell and start hitting muscle. It burns like death. Tears stream down my cheeks as I bite down screams, not wanting to attract any more of the horrifying monster that did this to me.

I don’t know how long I spend trying to rub the acid off my body, but by the end of it I’m sitting under a newly scarred tree, bawling my eyes out into my one good hand. The other still works, but I can see right inside the exoskeleton to the freaky bits within and I just… can’t deal with that right now. My neck hurts a lot, and there’s a huge hole there when I feel at it, but at least I’m not paralyzed. My body is in working condition. It just hurts like hell.

I get back up and begin heading towards my cave. I make sure to look up at the trees more for this leg of the journey. It feels like I ran in a blind panic forever, but thankfully it doesn’t take too long to get back to where I started. Not that the return trip wasn’t incredibly stressful, but I don’t encounter another one of those acid drooling tree monsters and I’ll take that as a win.

Passing into the clearing, I note my cave is at the top of a small hill, just barely tall enough to peek over the trees and make it visible around the forest. The spongy, fuzzy grass covers the hill, which is for some reason devoid of trees. Perhaps it’s too rocky? Either way it makes a great vantage point around the forest, plus potential cover from inclement weather thanks to the cave itself. I can’t think of a better place to set up camp than this, although I suppose I don’t actually have a camp to set up.

So. This is my life now, probably. The pain really helps my brain register how real all of this is. I need… oh fuck, I need so much. Food. Water. Some semblance of sane reality. You know, basic essentials.

But before that, before I can try to do anything else, I just need to sit down. At least for a bit. I need a moment to look around and really take this insanity in. How is any of this possible? Why did it happen at all, let alone to me? It’s just… totally beyond my ability to understand.

A calm breeze passes over the alien forest, wafting scents unlike anything I’ve ever smelled before through my nose. Though the brush of air against my wounds and alien body fill me with discomfort, I have to admit the weather is calm and the temperature is pleasant. I certainly hope it stays this way, since I don’t have the slightest idea how to make a fire other than “rub sticks together.” No time to be afraid of how cold it gets at night here, I suppose. I’m stranded on a hostile world that almost certainly isn’t Earth. I have no water, no food, no medical supplies, no tools, no knowledge of my environment, and I’m stuck in a nonhuman body that I don’t fully understand. That is… quite a checklist.

I do appear to be some kind of cute bug, though. At least that’s pretty cool.

I suppose it’s best to start with that last one, at least while I’ve still yet to convince myself to stand up. I do my best to poke and prod around my new body, taking a closer look at all these alien oddities that are now the sum of my physical form.

First and most obvious, my hands and feet have tiny baby bug claws. They’re a bit less dexterous than my old human fingers, though not by much, and in exchange I get possibly the most useless set of claws I’ve ever seen in my life. Seriously, the chitin might be at least a little bit of protection, but they’re barely above fingernails in terms of offensive potential. I guess they might help me out with climbing something soft, though, like those mesh-tree-mushroom things.

My exoskeleton is pretty firm at least, and I’m certainly glad to have it after that acid-spitting sloth bug thing attacked me, but I doubt it ultimately provides much protection beyond being a second, somewhat tougher skin. Which, hey, is better than nothing, but it’s definitely not filling me with confidence either.

It is worth noting, at least, that both my exoskeleton and my skin are gray. Specifically, they’re the same color gray as the rocks which comprise the cave I’m in. It’s probably not that handy though, since my hair is still a long, bright blonde, but hey, it could possibly help at some point, maybe.

Finally, I rummage about my head and notice that I have two big, long antennae. Startled, I grab one and give it a yank. This is possibly the worst decision I have ever made, as the resulting blast of intense pain quickly sends me writhing to the ground, screaming my whole vocabulary of words mom would be very disappointed in hearing. When the pain finally dies down from ‘oh god, please kill me!’ to ‘ow, ow, ow why,’ I decide to stop poking myself and start doing literally anything else, like figuring out how to not die.

I am no Bear Grylls, not by a longshot. I’ve got the basic outdoorsy knowledge of someone who enters national parks on purpose more than once a year. At the very least, I don’t think I’m in danger of doing anything Darwin-award-level stupid. I suppose I will start by looking around a bit before exploring? But, uh, y’know, maybe from the safety of this cave.

I am at the mouth of a small cave, maybe twenty feet in diameter. It digs into the side of a large, grass-covered hill, resting a short way below the top. The hill itself is maybe the size of a large house, and no plants larger than grass grow directly on it. Surrounding the hill on all sides, however, is the forest. This forest is massive and takes up the majority of what horizon I can see. The forest itself is not particularly tall by tree standards, maybe 20 to 25 feet at most, but I think I see much taller trees far, far away. I note multiple kinds of the weird mesh-mushroom-trees even directly around me, with different patterns to how their net-like branches weave and billow to catch the light. Overall the forest is dominated by one kind of tree, however: the kind I met my acidic nightmare on, with short, thin fronds speckling the white branches with red. I see now, in retrospect, how the acid-spitting monster’s body is shaped to disguise itself as one of those spiderweb branches, waiting for some dumb schmuck like myself to carelessly walk underneath it.

I wonder what kind of creatures it normally hunts, and what kind of creatures hunt it.

In the opposite direction from the mouth of my cave I spot a vast mountain range, though the sight of them only serves to reinforce that I’m not in Kansas anymore, metaphorically or otherwise. Carved out of the horizon in white stone, massive holes bored clear through them, they almost look more like a colossal skeleton than a series of rock formations. The highest bits are capped with snow, at least. That means there’s water here! Which, you know, I had assumed given all the life, but it’s really nice to see some confirmation. I might even be able to walk to the base of the mountains within a few hours, but I will probably be in trouble if there’s no other source of water closer to my hill.

Up above me, the sun makes its lazy arc around whatever planet this may be. Well, presumably the opposite of that happens and the planet makes it arc around the sun, but whatever. Best I can tell, it travels more or less parallel to the mountain range, and while I suspect based on the direction of travel that it is currently morning, I really can’t tell how long it will take for the sun to set. Also, though I don’t look at it directly since I’m not (that much of) an idiot, I think it might actually be a lot bigger than the sun I’m used to. Not to mention a lot… oranger.

As cool and terrifying as the implications of that are, though, I probably shouldn’t contemplate it any longer than I have already. Turning around, I figure that I’m probably going to sleep in this cave when the sun goes down. Because of that, I should probably explore it to make sure nothing inside is going to cause me to die horribly. Plus, maybe if I’m lucky, I’ll find something that I can eat instead of the reverse!

The mouth of the cave is oddly straight, traveling diagonally down from the entrance. In fact as I walk along I get the feeling that this cave is… a little too straight. Like it isn’t so much a cave as just a hole. In solid rock. I can’t imagine this is a natural formation. Something bored this with machine-like efficiency.

It isn’t a long walk before I see the remains of my egg, still sitting mostly upright. My. Egg. Something about that just hits home harder than I expected. I am not human anymore. I am not on Earth anymore. I’ve seen absurd amounts of evidence for that in a very short amount of time, but it’s looking at the egg my body spilled out of not an hour before that I really start to feel the crushing weight of what that actually means.

What’s left of the gross fluid that was inside the egg with me is splattered around the floor in goopy blobs. The shattered chunks of shell I managed to punch out are still scattered about. For some reason, the more I stare at it the more my hunger twinges, parts of my mind insisting on thinking about what it all might taste like…

I blink. Am I seriously considering this? Uncooked cannibalistic floor egg? I really am. I am absolutely ravenous, some part of my body wants to put that egg stuff in my mouth, and honestly? When I think about it, out of everything on this entire crazy alien planet, an egg that I just came out of is the number one most reliably not-poisonous thing that I know about.

…Actually, I don’t want to think about that at all. Screw all this thinking! It’s time to eat!

I pick up a shard of downed eggshell and bite into it. It tastes…well, it actually tastes like crusty chipped butt, but in seconds I’m tearing into it anyway. Before I know it I’m ripping off pieces of the egg, crunching them into powder with my teeth, and shoving down the next bit before I’ve even swallowed. The eggshell was big enough to contain my entire body, but even after I’ve devoured it all in the span of a minute, I’m still tempted to lick the gunk off of the floor, too.

Fuck it. I do that. It actually tastes better, floor plate and all.

I let out a satisfied exhale, too relieved from the meal to care about how absolutely disgusting it all was. I feel better. A lot better, actually. My neck doesn’t even hurt as much.

Looking down at my hand, I see a thin layer of exoskeleton starting to reform in the hole burned by the acid. It’s excruciatingly slow, but fast enough to notice is still pretty darn fast. So… I can regenerate. That’s… good? Definitely good. Kind of a holy shit moment, but I’ve gotten so many of those today I’m not going to question a good one. Is it passive or is it tied to eating? I’ll have to keep an eye on it.

Well, my first meal on an alien planet is done. That counts as an accomplishment, right? Food is checked. I just need to hope to magically encounter more eggs without any of the local fauna trying to take them from me!

I’m so fucked.

3 Predator and Prey

The rest of my unnatural, smooth-bored cave is entirely uninteresting. There’s nothing else to note inside its dull, grey walls. In many ways, this is fortunate. No critters are hiding within. I’m no closer to getting a source of food or water, though.

No sense sticking around, then. I head out of the cave, stopping only to look for and pick up a nice, sharp rock. I doubt I can really fight with it, but it could be a handy tool.

So. Let’s go over what I know. I woke up inside an egg on an alien planet, and I have a very vague memory of a conversation with… well, I don’t know what, but it understood English. Maybe I was brought here by aliens? Do I know any aliens? I don’t think so. Why would an alien even do this? This is all so messed up. I don’t have time to dwell on it, though. I’m so ADD that I’ll forget to find water if I don’t keep reminding myself to focus on it.

Oh shit, I don’t have my medication, do I? That’s… bad. Although, would my medication even work now that I’m some sort of bug monster? I’m kind of surprised I haven’t spent the entire day hyperventilating in a corner. I feel like that’s probably the type of thing I would do even if I had my meds. Maybe the imminent threat of death is helping to keep me on task. I certainly hope so, because as soon as it stops I’m probably going to… well, die I guess.

I’m actually going to die here, aren’t I? Oh god. Wait, no, I can’t think like that. I have to keep going. With my caves secure, the next sensible step is exploring the hillside. There doesn’t seem to be much here either, but frankly that might just be its best feature. From atop the hill I have great sightlines in every direction, making it difficult for anything to sneak up on me once it exits the cover of the trees. I should be able to see anything as soon as it enters… um.

Oh, fuck.

A large animal has the unfortunate timing to exit the treeline right as I think that, plodding along the ground. It reminds me of a giant pillbug, a huge armored oval with hints of legs underneath. It’s large enough to come up to my waist, and it looks longer than I am tall. The creature doesn’t seem to have a head, but two black bands of what looks sort of like tinted glass cover the front of its armor, one horizontal and one vertical, like an upside-down T. Two tentacle-like feelers prod at the ground in front of it, pulling up tufts of red grass and shoving them underneath the shell.

I hold my breath, body frozen. Thankfully, it either doesn’t seem to have seen me or simply doesn’t care. I definitely want to keep things that way, since I have no idea what the fuck this is or how dangerous it might be. Although, I don’t know how it could possibly not see me, considering that I’m standing up straight on a mostly featureless red hill. I guess for all I know it’s nearsighted as hell, or it navigates by sound, or really who knows what.

The important thing is that it doesn’t move to engage me, seemingly content to pull up and presumably eat the grass. It slowly makes its way up the hill, munching along. I think I see six legs shuffling underneath its armor, and I don’t see any obvious way for it to attack other than maybe tackling. Yet it seems too slow for that. It’s covered in massive, bulky armor plates, like some sort of alien turtle. It’s probably an herbivore evolved to hunker down and tank hits, being both too large to topple and too tough to smash.

Frankly, it’s pretty darn cute. I suppose I’m biased towards things with six or more legs, but this little munchy buddy really does seem to just be plodding around and living his best life.

A thought suddenly comes to me: if it’s a weird bug monster, and I’m a weird bug monster, is there a possibility it used to be human as well? I don’t know if that’s a chance I’m willing to take, but there’s an easy enough way to ask. If this thing attacks me… well, I guess I’ll run away again.

“Um, hello? Hi! Uh… my name is Evelyn. Do you have a name?”

The huge pillbug briefly turns towards the noise, but soon decides to go back to not giving a single shit and eating grass instead. Dang, instantly rejected.

“Um, okay, I’m going to name you Mr. Mooshi, then!” I declare, as all good bugs need a name. Even terrifying alien bugs.

“Nice to meet you, Evelyn,” I respond to myself, adopting a low, plodding voice because I’ve decided Mr. Mooshi sounds like Eeyore. “Welcome to planet Acidsucks.”

I giggle up a bit of a storm, promising myself that this isn’t me going crazy. I do this all the time! Lots of people do fake voices and talk to themselves while pretending to be their pets and that’s perfectly normal. Besides, I probably went crazy hours ago anyway.

That’s an interesting idea, though. A pet. Communication. As a monster bug person, maybe I have monster bug powers. I just want to be more likable. That’s what I asked for from the weird dream voice, right? So did I get that? I start to approach, slowly and carefully, my curiosity getting the better of me.

It focuses less on the grass and more on the me as I approach, but it still finds time to grab a clump to munch on as I walk. I’m making a serious effort not to scare this thing, already imagining riding it around. The thought is silly enough to make me giggle. There is absolutely something better or smarter I should be doing right now, but there’s a huge bug in front of me and I want to ride it.

If this huge bug is anything like earth bugs, it’s going to communicate with pheromones. I wonder: can I do that? Maybe I can make pheromones or detect them now or something. Is that any more ridiculous than anything else that has happened today? I close my eyes and try to take soft, subtle sniffs as my feet take me closer. I think… I smell something. Wariness, perhaps? A touch of confidence? It feels like this creature doesn’t know what I am, and it wonders how much it should actually care. It doesn’t think I look dangerous. Tall, maybe, but not in a way to worry about.

I finally get close enough to touch it, fully aware that this goes against every bit of protocol when it comes to dealing with wild animals. Warily, the creature stops standing and clunks down on the ground, its shell forming a seal against attacks. Confident I’ve figured this thing out, I go ahead and crawl on its back. As expected, a waiting game ensues.

Hmm… pheromones. Pheromones, pheromones, pheromones.

Even if I can smell how this creature feels, and even if it uses smell to communicate in the first place, being able to produce a scent on command seems impossible, let alone a smell that specifically pertains to this random species I just met. Really thinking about it now, I don’t know why I even considered it. Obviously I’m not going to be able to do something like that, the whole idea is dumb.

Right?

…No, that doesn’t feel right. For some reason I think I can just… do it.

I sit on the huge pillbug’s back, soaking in its scent. I feel for it, its fear, its confusion, its boredom and irritation, all wafting up from its shell. And I think, somehow, I know what a friend smells like.

I exhale, the scent of safety and familiarity on my breath.

Mr. Mooshi gets up. He seems moderately irritated by my extra weight, but not terribly burdened by it. I have a cute buggo friend now!

I start to laugh, and soon, tears start to roll down my face. How stupid am I? To just walk up to a huge alien monster and jump on its back? This is so incredibly dumb, and yet it is, without question, the best thing to happen to me all day. I lean over and give my new friend a big hug, laughing and sobbing on his back as he plods carelessly along, hoovering up grass like some kind of vacuum. I feel a lot better after having a good cry, excepting, of course, the problem of having become somewhat more dehydrated. I really need to do something about that.

The problem, of course, is that I have no idea what direction the water might be in. I suspect my best move is to head towards the mountains: I’m not sure I know how to make a fire so I definitely need running water rather than standing water, and rivers usually originate from mountains, I think? They have to start at high elevation and travel towards low elevation, so it stands to reason. I bet it would be easier to see rivers high up on a mountain than trapped in the forest where I can’t see very far, too.

…Of course, that’s a long way away, especially for a dehydrated bug girl who has no idea how to survive in the wilderness beyond the absolute basics. Maybe I can make the trip a little easier, though.

“All right, Mr. Mooshi!” I tell him, giving him a friendly pat on the back. “It’s time to get rolling and find some water!”

“But Evelyn,” I say right after in my most Mooshiest voice, “I just want to sit around and eat this delicious grass! Why should I have to carry you anywhere?”

“Because you’re too fat to roll over, Mr. Mooshi!” I say in my normal voice, barely holding back a giggle. “You can’t even try to shake me off! I’m afraid we’ll just have to be friends forever!”

“Oh no,” I respond to myself, “anything but that.”

Laughter overtakes me once more, but soon enough I manage to actually focus. I need to figure out the pheromone for “please go to the mountains.” Actually, wait! Better idea! Mr. Mooshi probably has to drink too, so maybe he knows where water is! Is there a pheromone for “I’m thirsty?”

The more I think about it, the more I’m fairly sure there should be. I don’t really have a great idea on how this all works, but I do think the need for water is something that I can communicate. I wonder if Mr. Mooshi’s species raises their young for a while like mammals and a bunch of random other things do. If they did, they’d certainly need some time to keep tabs on their offspring’s health, especially given his apparently terrible eyesight. I focus for a moment, trying to find the scent.

At first, my efforts are in vain. Mr. Mooshi definitely reacts, but he keeps trying to spit out chewed clumps of grass and waving them at me with his little feeder- tentacles. Eventually I figure it out, though. With the right scent on my breath, Mr. Mooshi finally stops chewing on plants and heads off towards the mountains at a bit of an angle. It’s sort of halfway mountain-ward, halfway sunset-ward. Ugh, you know what? I’m just going to call the direction the sun sets West, the mountains North, the direction the sun rises East, and the direction that isn’t any of those things South. There’s basically no chance that’s how this planet’s magnetic fields work, but until I get a compass that’s what I’m doing. I’ve gotta keep every shred of sanity that I can get.

I have a feeling that it’s going to be in pretty damn short supply.

As overjoyed as I am to have a ride rather than needing to walk, Mr. Mooshi is a bit… slow. Ridiculously slow. Like twice as slow as me walking while specifically trying to be slow, slow. I guess if I’m not walking then I’m not burning energy, and that is going to be extremely important until I figure out what I can actually eat.

So I do my best to stay productive on the ride as we plod through the forest. If nothing else it gives me plenty of time to check the treetops for acid-spitting beasties, of which I do absolutely spot a few of. I make sure to steer Mr. Mooshi well away from them, signaling scents of danger, and thankfully they don’t move to approach when I do. Considering how their acid burned through my exoskeleton like paper and how slow my cute little ride is, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Mooshians are the main snack for the acid sloths.

All the more reason to despise them.

A few hours later, I hear the beautiful trickle of running water. Soon after, Mr. Mooshi and I emerged from the trees to see a beautiful, crisp river. A few other Mooshians are lapping up water along the bank, and they pay us little mind as we approach. I am incredibly thirsty, and the sight of water is making me even thirstier.

“Thanks for the ride, Mr. Mooshi!”

“Yeah, yeah,” he ‘says.’ “It’s not like I had a choice.”

Water! Sweet, beautiful water! I hop off my friend and rush on over, keeping an eye out for anything more dangerous than the Mooshians, but I don’t spot much. A few small flying creatures hover around the water’s edge. Wait a second, those are bugs! Normal-sized, honest-to-god, probably-not-even-acidic bugs! I am so happy, I can’t even.

Before I admire the beautiful alien cuties, however, I’ve got to drink. The river is moving at a good pace, which should be relatively safe compared to standing water, but frankly I’m too thirsty to consider not going forward anyway. I cup my armored hands as best as I can and sip up some water, bit by bit. It’s probably good that I can’t do it very quickly, because I’d definitely be drinking too fast and overhydrating otherwise.

Eventually my thirst is slaked and I find myself looking down at the water. It’s moving too fast to show my reflection, but with a quick peek around I spot a rock outcropping that’s blocking the flow to a manageable level in an alcove downstream. I walk that way, a bit terrified. But I have to know. I don’t even realize I’m holding my breath until I look down, see myself, and let it out.

It’s my face. Yeah, my skin is gray now, I have chitin around my temples and weird antennae sticking out of my forehead, but the face is just… mine. The one I remember, every freckle and dimple and curve. Out of every part of my body that changed, my face—and only my face—remained exactly the same.

I remember, again, the dream I had before waking up as this weird monster. About how I thought, if I could change anything about myself, have one special advantage, it would be to be more beautiful. Which in retrospect, if that’s related? If that’s why I have a big, useless chest and curvy hips and all this useless garbage that I would have loved back home instead of super strength or something helpful? I don’t know if I can live with myself. You know, assuming I live at all since my stupid, depressed brain couldn’t think of anything more useful than “I wish people liked me.”

Yet if that’s all true, if this new body is a result of my wish, then why the hell is my face the same? I’ve never liked it! I find myself unable to think of much for a moment, lost in silent contemplation.

That proves to be a huge mistake as something long, thin, and sticky snaps out of the water, wraps around my neck, and yanks me screaming into the river.

4 Eat or Be Eaten

I hit the river with a crash, opening my eyes underwater to find myself face-to-face with a lamprey-like maw of teeth. The creature’s mouth is wide open, two long, thin tongues protruding from its gullet and strangling me. I manage to catch panicked glimpses of whatever has me dead to rights. It’s probably much too small to swallow a Mooshian.

…But it can certainly manage me. My split second of calm analysis vanishes instantly, replaced entirely by raw, primal panic.

Holy shit, I’m being eaten by a space monster.

I still have the sharp rock I picked up in my cave, and the thing around my neck is squishy and thin. Brandishing my cavewoman weapon, I bring the pointy end down on the tongue as I try to kick to the surface. I chop and hack and stab but the water slows my already weak arms. Cut, damn you, cut! Cut!

I finally stab it hard enough to draw blood, and the grip loosens. I untangle myself as quickly as I can and kick towards the surface, taking a huge gasp of air, but the second tongue is already reaching towards my ankle. I’m not strong enough for this! I don’t know how to fight, I barely know how to swim, and I am, without a doubt, going to be overpowered and eaten. I only have one option, and I know it.

“Mr. Mooshi!” I scream. “Help!”

Hearing, or perhaps more likely smelling the panic in my voice, he begins to plod over. …Slowly. Horribly, terrifyingly slowly. The monster’s other tongue hooks my ankle, squeezing tight, and I’m reeled under the water once more. Jaws snap down on my leg, teeth puncturing my exoskeleton, and I waste precious air to the river as a scream escapes me. I jab my rock at it, over and over and over again, trying to find some weak spot that will make it let go. My only reward is the first tongue zipping out to grab my arm and hold me down. My flailing becomes more and more impotent, blood mixing with the water surrounding me. This is it, huh? One little slip-up, and it’s over? What is this bullshit? I never asked for this, never wanted this. I don’t know where I am, or what’s going on, and now I’m just going to die in the mouth of some space alligator!

Dark spots fill my vision as something wraps around my other arm as well. Yet as I flail and curse my fate, this new lifeline pulls up.

It feels like I’m being torn apart. The whip-eel thing is biting down on my thigh, yanking and pulling as it tries to saw all the way through my leg. But despite its thrashing, I begin to rise. Chitin cracks and my shoulder dislocates, but my head breaks the water’s surface. I gasp for breath, biting down the urge to immediately release the air in another scream. Hope fills me as I see Mr. Mooshi holding my wrist with both of his feeding tentacles, and he has simply too much Moosh for this eel to stop. He begins dragging the both of us out of the water, and seeing this the other Mooshians start wandering over to try and figure out what all the commotion is about. While the eel is substantially less mobile on land, it does seem to have amphibious flippers and it doesn’t at all seem inclined to let go of my leg.

I inhale. I think about only fear, how terrified I am of death. I think about all my rage, and how utterly unfair my life has become out of nowhere, for no reason. I think about how much this goddamn eel needs to let go of my leg, roll over, and die, right now.

I exhale. The Mooshians sniff the air. They pick up the pace. And they charge.

Mooshians, I have learned, are not very fast. Until now I have never seen them move at speeds beyond a meandering toddle. Even now, they don’t reach beyond the speed of a brisk walk. But Mooshians, as I have also learned, are heavy. Sir Isaac Newton, meet alien jerk. Alien jerk, Sir Isaac Newton.

Force equals mass times acceleration, bitch.

Unwilling to give up on my delicious leg, the eel is smashed on both sides by furious Mooshians rushing full tilt. Their massive shells absolutely clobber the hungry animal, and with a wet horking noise the monster’s jaw is forced open by the impacts. As I scramble to safety, blackish blood oozing down my thigh, one of the Mooshians manages to get on top of the eel and from that moment on it’s already over. Unable to dislodge the indomitable mass of Mooshis, the eel flails uselessly as it is slowly but surely bludgeoned into submission. Eventually, the horrifying creature stops moving. My adorable army of Mooshians let out little huffs of triumph, and return to drinking or grazing. Slowly, of course. Very, very slowly.

I’m in pain. I’m bleeding. I’m terrified. I’m full of adrenaline. Yet for some reason, staring at the corpse of the hideous, horrifying monster that nearly killed me also makes me very, very hungry.

Not even totally sure why, I creep up to the body of the eel. I suck up some saliva that had been dripping unbidden from the side of my mouth. I’m hungry, I’m so hungry. Shouldn’t this be disgusting? It’s a broken alien corpse, why do I want to… agh. It just… it looks…

Incredible.

I barely have the mental wherewithal to grab and pull the corpse away from the river, just in case another one of these creatures is nearby. Then I briefly wonder if I should attempt to cook it before I realize I’ve already put it in my mouth.

It is delicious.

No, this is far beyond flavor. It’s the single most incredible experience I’ve ever had in my life. I can’t stop. I begin by biting off the tongues for some karmic justice before just tearing into it. The meat is delectable, savory, an explosion of complex experiences the likes of which I have never even dreamed of. I roll the muscles around my tongue, feeling the delicate textures, the way the fibers are aligned, how they must tense and loosen and how much force they get from each expenditure of chemical energy. I pull out the teeth and chew them to powder, feeling the balance of calcium and phosphorus and all the other minerals I can only guess at which make themselves known in my mind as I swallow, analyzing where the composition is strong and where it is weak. I devour the organs, feeling the cells break down in my stomach, protein by protein, in a beautiful cataclysm of impossibly complicated patterns, most of which are exciting and new, yet others familiar and dear. I don’t know how long I do this. Hours, perhaps. At some point I vaguely remember some kind of… scavenging creature coming by, but I barely paid it any mind, simply calling the Mooshians over to halt its advance. As an afterthought. Because what is important now, is that I finally have something to eat. I’ve named it the whip eel.

And I now know everything there is to know about whip eel biology.

I only come down from my insane high as I realize I am meticulously licking the last remnants of blood off my hands and forearms, obsessed with not leaving behind a single drop. The more lucid I become, the more my thoughts start to rush, headache throbbing forward as I start to realize the full scope of what I’ve just learned. Maybe, just maybe ‘everything there is to know’ is a slight exaggeration, but as my mind races a mile a minute I find myself unable to comprehend any question about the creature that I don’t have a now-instinctive answer to. I see how it works. See how it all works, like god’s blueprints laid out before me in such excruciating detail that it’s painful to try to focus on too minute an aspect of the infinity now shoved within my head.

Yet while this leaves the rational part of my mind screaming questions like ‘how the fucking shit—,’ I just don’t feel like stressing out about it right now. As confusing and worrying as this all is, it has also given me a massive food baby and a blissful high from experiencing the single greatest meal of my life. Not to mention my super awesome adorable pillbug friends that I can rely on in case anything happens. I lean back against Mr. Mooshi (the first, the greatest, the one and only), and bask in the aftertaste of my triumph.

Eventually, Mr. Mooshi nudges me, apparently interested in leaving. I had almost fallen asleep, but looking up at the sky now, it seems as though night will likely descend within a few hours and it would probably be best to return to my cave before then. As amazing as that experience was, I did almost die back there. Focus. I have to stay focused.

My leg isn’t bleeding anymore, but I sure as hell don’t want to walk on it. Mounting my Mooshi, I glance around for something I could maybe use as a bowl or bottle to take water back to my cave. I direct him along the shoreline, still feeling wisps of that blissful contentment. Eventually, I see what looks like a large shell. I wonder if maybe it came from a Mooshian. Poor baby. Well, as macabre as it is, it does look like it will make for a very good bowl. I gather up some water, being extremely careful to look out for anything lurking underneath it, before directing my best friend and savior back towards the cave.

…I realize I have known Mr. Mooshi for probably like four hours, but none of my other friends count when I’m on an alien planet so Mr. Mooshi is my best friend by default. I didn’t really have any good friends at home anyway, at least not that I remember. I talk to people online but usually have to hide the fact that I’m a girl, and there’s this really nice person who is in a lot of my classes, that’s about it, I think.

…Right? I’m pretty sure that’s right. Am I forgetting someone?

Well, regardless, it doesn’t take much encouragement to get Mr. Mooshi to head back to my hill. I suspect he really liked that grass. The return trip is about as long and uneventful as the way over. It would probably take me under an hour to get to the river alone, but at Mr. Mooshi’s pace it feels like at least two hours until I see my cave again. In fact, the sun is just starting to set when we return, bathing the sky in a red much like that of the local flora. My neck is tender, my leg is sore, but my mind is alight with questions and possibilities. What am I? How did I learn so much, and why? It’s beyond cool, I’ve always wanted to be a biologist and this is absolutely incredible, but… I just don’t know what to do with it.

Also, I just ate an entire space alligator and I’m kinda low-key freaking the fuck out.

I dismount my bestest Moosh and haul my way up to the cave, putting as little weight on my bad leg as I’m able. Sitting down at the mouth of this huge hole in the ground, I lean back and look up to confirm once and for all what I’ve suspected from the start. I was already pretty darn sure I’m on another planet, of course, but one last thing helps me settle it once and for all.

The stars.

The sun dips down over the horizon with a brilliant display, purples and oranges staining the brilliant red. It’s a stunning end to an almost literally unbelievable day. My thoughts drift back towards the dream that started it, and the final words left lingering in my thoughts. “See you in a year.” Geez. One day in, and I’ve almost died twice. How am I going to survive a year?

Perhaps sensing my distress, or maybe just because he’s had an equally long and exciting day, Mr. Mooshi trundles up next to me and plops down for the night. I give him a friendly pat. He put up with a hell of a lot just because I smell nice, so I vow to make it up to him as best I can.

“Good night, Mr. Mooshi,” I say.

“Good night, Evelyn. Don’t fall into a river while I’m asleep, you dummy,” he responds.

I respond.

…It’s lonely out here. As the last of the sunset fades away, the stars come out, and I am dwarfed to nonexistence. They’re brilliant, utterly commanding the sky. Somehow, I forgot about light pollution. This… it’s beyond anything I’ve ever seen before. A masterful tapestry of the universe. I spend quite some time trying to find familiar constellations, but I can’t. Maybe they’re just lost in the massive spread of stars. It’s truly indescribable.

The moon, though… the moon is definitely different. It’s not even the right color, let alone the friendly pattern I stared at every night of my life. And it’s so big! I wonder how often I’ll get to see it during the day.

One last thing catches my eye as I turn in for the night. It’s not as beautiful as the stars or as striking as the moon, but it’s something I can’t get out of my mind. To the east, far to the east, I see a glow. A vast, wide glow that lights up a whole quadrant of the horizon. I don’t know what it is, but it flickers like fire.

That sounds like a question for another day, though. I lie against my friend, and soon I fall asleep.

5 Ripoff

It was a bug.

That’s right, I found a bug that day. Of course I did. That’s normal, I find bugs all the time. It’s why I go out to the forest, after all. But this was a very special bug. A kind I’ve never seen before in all my life.

It looks like a beetle, colored a stunning pale blue. On closer inspection, though, it can’t be a beetle. Maybe an arachnid? It clearly has eight legs, the two front legs tucked in behind the mouth, probably repurposed for grasping and shoveling food down its gullet.

Almost as startling as its color, its size is striking and immediately remarkable. It’s at least as large as my open hand. This is hardly Australia; I don’t know how the local ecosystem even supports an arachnid that size. Perhaps it preys on birds or eggs rather than fellow arthropods. Anyway, science aside, it’s beautiful. The incredible creature is just sitting there on a large rock, looking around and being wonderful. It might be the scientific discovery of the century! I carefully pull out my phone, open up the camera, and snap a few pictures. Aw yeah, nice shot!

This is so cool!

The bug, which I have decided to name Blubie, turns to face me. It doesn’t seem aggressive, waving its antennae towards me inquisitively. I can’t help myself. I’ve gotta catch it.

“Hey there, Blubie,” I say quietly, approaching with caution.

It’s probably too big to fly away if I spook it, and not big enough to outrun me if it wants to escape, but no bug grows that large without being able to fend off creatures many times its size. Other than its mouth, I don’t see anything dangerous, but a mouth might be all it needs. It could have nasty venom, or maybe the ability to bite straight through my hand. Its beetle-like carapace looks tough as nails, probably able to take serious hits from larger animals, and the smooth-domed top is probably difficult for most creatures to get a grip on. Heavy defenses like that indicates that Blubie might be more of an herbivore, as it probably lacks the speed and certainly the stealth needed to catch a lot of prey.

Nonetheless, I fish out some heavy-duty gloves and put them on as I approach. These things were designed to handle huge tarantulas, much larger than Mr. Bubbles and Blubie here, so they should do the trick.

“Aren’t you a pretty one,” I whisper soothingly. Blubie seems largely unfazed by my approach, neither backing away nor getting closer. He’s just chilling there, watching me calmly and being the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen in my life.

Wow. A new kind of arachnid. Well, probably anyway, a lot more detailed study will be needed to determine its exact classification, but no matter what it is, it is impossibly awesome! Only the fear of scaring him off contains my boundless excitement, and even then just barely.

I reach out a hand, slowly and carefully. I’m almost close enough to touch him. Blubie extends some inquisitive feelers in my direction, brushing over my gloves. I hold still. Slowly, leg by leg, it begins to crawl on my hand.

Ohmygodit’scrawlingonmyhand!!!

This is the best thing ever! Blubie lets me pick him up, cupped in both hands. He’s… heavy. Really heavy, way more than I expected. But it doesn’t matter he’s crawling around on me and oh my god he is just so cuuuuute!

Oh man, I’ve gotta take him home, but I don’t have any cages big enough! Will he let me carry him the whole way? Cautiously, I begin to walk back to my dorm, but Blubie seems as unconcerned as ever so I soon pick up to a brisk walk. He has stopped sitting in my palms and has begun climbing up my arm, his little legs gripping onto my bicep without digging into it, despite his weight. Oh man, I can’t wait to get a closer look at how its little feetsies work! This is the best thing ever! I am so not going to class today.

Mr. Bubbles hisses at my new friend when I finally scramble back into my dorm, but she hisses at everything. I’ll find a way to make sure they get along. But in the meantime, I have the coolest bug ever to play with. This day could not get any better.

…

…

The sun wakes me up. That’s odd. Did my alarm not go off? That thing is so damn loud, there’s no way I slept through it. I hope I didn’t accidentally break the thing slamming it into the off position or something. It’s chilly, and my blankets seem to have fallen off. Am I even in bed?

I open my eyes, dread clutching my heart as I remember that no, no I am not in bed. Blue sky and red grass stretch out in front of me. I flop back down, staring up at my cave ceiling. Right. I had been dreaming of the day before I got here again. I remember more of it this time, particularly Blubie. I’m too groggy to remember what comes next, but looking back? Yeah, that might be related. I probably should have been more suspicious of a crazy cool new bug nobody’s ever seen before.

Ugh. I’m even more sore than I was yesterday, my leg throbbing horribly. Sleep doesn’t seem to have been very restful, and I’m still loaded from having eaten nearly twice my body mass in one sitting. How did I even do that? Whatever. I’m just going to lie here. I wouldn’t have been using such an insane alarm back on earth if getting out of bed was one of my strengths.

My mind drifts to the whip eel. It’s hard not to, what with the insane amount of information about the thing stuffed into my brain, or processed or analyzed or whatever the hell happened. That, and it’s just so cool, even if it doesn’t happen to be a bug. The way the elements of its biology combine to give it its place in the ecosystem… it’s truly a work of art.

Like its two prehensile tendrils! Initially I thought they were the creature’s tongues, but they have no sense of taste and are more likely a distant evolutionary offshoot of Mr. Mooshi’s mustache-esque feeding tentacles, modified to retract inside the creature’s mouth and extend to incredible lengths. They’re pretty vulnerable to attack, as evidenced by my ability to hurt it with the rock despite my wimpy baby strength, but I can’t deny the effectiveness of their speed and ability to rapidly grab hold of just about anything.

Other notable features include the creature’s three pairs of amphibious flippers, designed to allow for travel on land and stability in the water. Of course, they’re not great for the ‘travel on land’ bit, but they do technically work. I realize that the fact that it has flippers sort of disqualifies it from being an eel, but the way its body and mouth are shaped just reminds me too much of a lamprey. …Wait, I think lampreys aren’t technically eels either. And this creature isn’t even a fish, it uses high-capacity lungs instead of gills. Really more like a crocodile than anything.

…Look, I’m not the best at naming things.

More importantly, I love this creature’s muscles. Not… not like that, I’m just overwhelmed by how much more efficient they are than my own. Sure, they require greater energy expenditure, but the force they can output in return is many times more than the increase in energy consumption. They’re way better than my muscles.

Now that I’m thinking about it, it’s apparent that this experience has also given me greater understanding of my own alien body, somehow. Learning everything there is to know about the whip eel taught me so much about biology in general that I can now intuitively understand some things that were far beyond me before.

Although, the more I think about it, the more it feels like intuition rather than truly learned information. I’ll probably struggle to write any of this down, or explain it to someone else, and not just for my usual anxiety-related reasons. It’s a good rule of thumb that if you can’t explain something to another person, you don’t truly know it. I’m finding it difficult to reconcile that with the feeling of certainty I have in my understanding. It’s probably just my brain trying to trick me. Maybe this whole thing has been an enormous hallucination.

Still, when I think about myself, I’m now starting to glean much of the same insight as I had with my meal. My new body has a number of interesting features, the best of which is clearly my pheromones since they directly correspond to my actual best feature, Mr. Mooshi’s invaluable friendship. Beyond that, I’m remarkably unimpressive compared to the whip eel. In a fight I can bite or scratch things with my tiny baby bug claws. My exoskeleton might offer some decent protection, as long as my aggressor is kind enough to actually target a part of my body covered by it. The color of my skin and armor seems optimized to hide inside my cave, and with any luck my weak and nonthreatening demeanor will make it easier to approach prey animals… but who knows.

Lastly and most prominently are the two huge antennae sprouting from my forehead. These guys are particularly annoying because I don’t have the slightest idea of what they actually do. None of my intuitive insight seems to apply to them, all I know is that I am absolutely overwhelmed by pain if they are even slightly damaged. Other than that, I’ve got nothing. They don’t seem to do any of the normal antennae things, they just… are there.

My mind starts to wander, as it always tends to do. Ugh, the whip eel is just so much cooler than me! Why can’t I have body parts like that? I bet things would be a lot easier. I wonder what some kinda Evelyn-eel combo creature would be like? I used to think about that kind of stuff all the time as a kid and okay… maybe a lot as an adult too, but so does everyone! You know, griffins, sphinxes, chimera…! Combining animals is a well-respected hypothetical across all of history and not weird at all.

Hmm… where do I start? I guess the basic body type would be a logical beginning, and as hilarious as it would be to put my face on the whip eel’s body, that would also give me nightmares so I’m going to try and forget about that immediately. A humanoid base is pretty much my only option here. It’s funny; just yesterday morning I was thinking to myself how I’d rather have an attractive body than super strength, and here I am now wishing for the exact opposite. Of course, before, I was thinking about how I would live a normal life on earth and nab myself a boyfriend or postgrad job interview or something like that. I didn’t know I was about to get tossed into Woman vs. Wild over here!

As funny as it would be to just imagine myself with alien alligator strength and funny tongue-tentacles before calling it a day, however, I am a biologist. Well, a freshman prospective biology major, technically, but I’m a biologist at heart! Thinking about this with all my newfound knowledge is basically impossible without my mind jumping to exactly how the specific elements of whatever nonexistent creature would be put together, and how such elements would actually function in real life.

I can’t just slap all the best traits together and expect it to work. Every single thing in the body requires energy to maintain. More powerful muscles require more energy. They also require more space, which necessitates a larger body, which also has to be fed and maintained. If the creature is covered in an exoskeleton, it is going to be heavier and slower.

Oh, screw it. This is just a fun hypothetical! So while I keep mentally reminding myself that a larger creature needs more food so it would be bad since I don’t have very much food, I decide to ignore that. I’m going to make a big strong Evelyn-monster hybrid and it’s going to be cool. So how big can I get it?

It’s difficult to try to imagine something above nine or ten feet tall, because I inherently know that would be super impossible with whip eel biology thanks to that big meanie, the square-cube law. I keep running simulations in my head and big me can barely balance itself above that amount. So, fun imaginary giantess thoughts are over, I guess, but this imaginary me is at least going to be crazy good at basketball.

As for its other cool powers? I’ll make it strong! I’ll put chitin all over it instead of having a weird chitin bikini! Ooh, what if it has flipper feet and the super lung capacity of the eel monster? And the eye structure of that monster was way better optimized for catching movement than my normal eyes so I can implement a lot of that as well. And hey, I may as well have tentacles come out of my back, because why not? They should be good for catching prey or something.

Then there’s my antennae. I want to remove them, frankly. They don’t seem to do anything other than be painful. But the moment I start thinking about not adding them to this hypothetical me, I just feel a sense of wrongness. In the end, they remain on my design as I give up on fighting the feeling. Who cares, anyway? This is for fun.

The best part about all this, even if it is super distracting, is the way my mind starts actually putting it together, cell by cell and protein by protein. It’s incredibly fun, like some sort of four-dimensional Lego set. I barely even understand what my own brain is doing, yet on some level I feel as though I understand it completely. It’s like a dream just out of reach, my waking mind scrambling to remember it before it fades away.

Once it’s done and I feel satisfied with the design, I suddenly feel a lot better. Like some sort of instinctive weight has dropped off my shoulders, a dread I didn’t know was there satisfied and removed. I stretch a little, and briefly stand up before immediately getting so lightheaded I have to sit down again.

Something feels wrong, very wrong. I’m suddenly super bloated. Wait, holy shit, I haven’t gone to the bathroom since I got here! Is that what’s going on? But how do I go to the bathroom? I don’t seem to have a—

“Agh!” I yelp, clutching my tummy. What is going on!? This doesn’t feel like gas. It’s around my intestines, kind of, but not quite. I…

I feel something growing inside me.

No. No, no no no! I try to stand up again, a wave of dizziness forcing me back to the ground. Fucking hell, I should have guessed. Why am I so stupid!? That wasn’t a bout of fantasy, that was my freaky alien brood-planning instincts and now I’m going to have to deal with the fucked-up kid I just accidentally willed into the world. Shit! I can’t be a mom! I can’t even take care of myself, let alone a baby! Literally yesterday I almost died! No, no, no, no—

Something pushes into my side, and I look over to find myself being nuzzled Mr. Mooshi. He probably doesn’t understand, but… well, I’m clearly distressed. And hyperventilating, which is bad. Wrapping my arms around him, I do my best to take slow, deep breaths as I try not to cry. I have to calm down.

I can feel it growing inside me, and it’s growing fast. What am I going to do with it? Or… him or her, I guess? A horrible temptation in the back of my mind whispers permanent solutions, though admitting the thought pushes waves of revulsion through me. I’ve nothing against abortion in principle— and I very literally cannot think of a worse situation to have an unplanned child— but me? Right now? In this damn cave, with nothing but my own hands and… no. No, no, no. Not possible. I don’t think my sanity could handle it.

With a twinge of humorless amusement, I note that I now understand why my body doesn’t have chitin anywhere on my belly: it needs room to stretch and expand. Holy shit, I can barely recognize this as me. It’s so big, so… wrong. I put a hand over where my belly button would have been if I had one, feeling the resistance as a shell already starts to form. I’m about to lay a fucking egg. A big one. Well, whatever made the egg I came out of (and isn’t that a weird thought) decided this cave was a good enough spot for it. It can’t be too bad, right?

Ha! Can’t be too bad! Why did I design the body to be so big!? Why is it growing so fast? How is it growing so fast? There’s no way I can even get this out, right?

To my dismay, my body seems to have an answer to that. One firm reminder that I am no longer human later, I lie dumbfounded on my back next to my egg, a massive grey ovoid nearly half as large as I am.

“Sorry, mom,” I groan up at the ceiling. “I got pregnant in college.”

Nothing responds to me, of course, given that I am alone on an alien planet unimaginably far from home.

“…It’s kind of a huge ripoff, considering I never even got to have any sex.”

6 Hunting for Two

“I can’t believe my pelvis unhinged itself,” I mutter, too shocked to care very much about how I’m clearly suffering from shock. “A pelvis isn’t even supposed to have a hinge, Mr. Mooshi.”

And as intellectually interesting as that is, the process of experiencing it probably ranks higher on the Trauma Scale than nearly getting eaten alive, so it’s probably best that I don’t think about it even a second longer. I can just save all of that panic for my future nightmares.

So! Now I have this huge fucking egg. It’s just under half the size of the one I came out of, sitting on the ground without a care in the world. There’s a baby inside of it, presumably. My baby. So I’m going to have to take care of the child. That’s fine, I’m sure it’s fine. I got this.

Yeah, no. I don’t got this. What the fuck am I going to do with an egg? I guess I could… make a nest? Birds lay eggs, and birds make nests. I don’t think I’m any sort of bird, but I am willing to bet that birds still know a lot more about taking care of eggs than I do. Glancing over at my ovoid spawn, I do have to worry about the fact that it could just kind of fall over and start rolling around if I leave it as-is. That’s probably bad. I should at least secure it in place.

Slowly, I wobble to my feet, carefully exiting my cave and creeping over to the treeline. Snapping off bits of the odd, net-mesh branches is surprisingly tough, but eventually I get a nice handful of sticks. Carrying them back to my cave, I drop them all in a big pile on top of my egg, letting them clatter to the ground.

I now have a really shitty nest.

I can’t handle any more than this right now. Whatever, the sticks will make it harder to roll around. That’s good enough. What I really need is food. What the hell am I going to do about food? Not only is my baby going to be hungry, but now I’m starving again after accidentally putting all my energy into creating an entire other living being. What am I going to eat? The only food I’ve ever had on this damn planet nearly killed me.

“…Although,” I mutter to myself, licking my lips. “It was totally fucking worth it.”

“This is an exceptionally bad idea,” Mr. Mooshi grumbles back, my Eeyore voice as perfect as ever.

“But Mr. Mooshi,” I whine, “I don’t have any other options! I have no idea what plants are edible, I’m terrified of those acid sloth things, and I could never ever harm a single bit of chitin on your wonderful shell!”

I start patting and pampering him, showering my bug buddy with affection and hugs.

“Isn’t that right, Mr. Mooshi?” I coo. “You’re my bestest fwend in da whole wide world and nothing bad will ever happen to you, ever!”

“Well, now you’re just asking for it,” Mr. Mooshi grumbles back.

“No, Mr. Mooshi! It will be fine! Those mean eels can’t hurt you at all! We’ll just lure one back onto land and then… ooh, a lure! Great idea, Mr. Mooshi!”

“I didn’t even say anything.”

I ignore that, hopping on his back and directing him towards the river. My egg will be fine, hopefully, but even if it isn’t I don’t really have a choice. I need food or else I’ll die anyway.

Speaking of, while I’d never harm the perfect and wonderful Mr. Mooshi, the same does not go for this big empty shell I picked up yesterday that’s probably from one of his dead relatives. I grabbed it in order to carry water, but now I’m wondering… eating the eel gave me super ultra biological knowledge about the thing, right? And then I laid an egg. So I’m pretty obviously some kind of horrifying alien bio-terror, right? I’m a little dense, maybe, but I’m not that genre-blind. I’ve played StarCraft, I know what a fucking Zerg is. In fact I pretty much only played Zerg since they’re an entire species of adorable bug people, but I digress. Could I gain the perfect and infinite power of Mooshi if I eat this shell?

I have to try. I give it a nibble.

Hmm… I kind of feel something, like I’m breaking down compounds that the shell is made out of, but this doesn’t give me any insight on how to make one. I have the end result, but I need a more complete picture. Maybe I need to munch on whatever the alien equivalent of stem cells is, or more likely I think I need a mostly-intact specimen of the entire creature. If these things have DNA (or an equivalent of it, I guess) I don’t think I can read it like code and figure out the whole body from a single sample. Just a hunch, I guess. Eating this shell is probably useless.

…It is kind of tasty, though. Nibble nibble. Wait, no, I need this for water I should stop.

Thanks to Mr. Mooshi’s somewhat sedate pace, I have plenty of time to search around for a nice long branch I think might be good for fishing. I don’t have any idea how to make a fishing line, unfortunately, but maybe I can get the basic effect anyway? The whip eel’s eyes are fantastic at seeing things outside the water from under the water. That’s how it nabs its prey from hidden locations, and once it grabs onto something it instinctively refuses to let go. If I could just get something that looks tasty stuck to the end of this stick I should be able to lure it to nom on that instead of my weak, fleshy body.

The morning seems much more vibrant than the evening here, as while the forest is mostly quiet I see flashes of movement and hear the occasional chirp or buzz. Things are clearly alive around me, so I very much hope none of them are large and hungry.

Eventually, we reach the river. There are maybe half as many Mooshians drinking this time around, which is disappointing. I also spot some other creatures, however. Some sort of bird- or maybe bat-like beast rests in a nearby tree, about the size of an eagle. It has no feathers, its wings being a simple membrane stretched across its forelimbs. It’s kind of fuzzy, and has big, long ears, like a cross between a cat and a bunny. I can’t figure out where its eyes are, but the black, shiny dome of a head turns to follow me as I approach the water. It’s a bit creepy, but thankfully not aggressive. At least for now.

None of that is important, though, because my eyes catch a tiny flitter of movement above the water. My well-honed instincts kick in, zeroing in my vision on what I excitedly know must be here. It is!

Bugs! Alien bugs!

I suppose I can forgive myself for missing these yesterday, considering the nonstop life or death panic my life has suddenly become. But there are cool space bugs on this alien planet that no human has ever seen before holy shit.

“Shhh! Be quiet, Mr. Mooshi!”

Mr. Mooshi continues to not make any noise, same as he always has, as I engage ENTOMOLOGIST MODE and approach the bugs immediately. I don’t have my tools, and my fingers are not exactly the same as they used to be, but years of experience catching cutie crawlies serves me well and I acquire one of the creatures without issue. It reminds me somewhat of a robber fly, kind of a long-limbed dragonfly-esque creature that—oops I’ve already put it in my mouth.

…Mmmm.

Even on such a minuscule scale, life is obscenely complicated and endlessly beautiful. These creatures aren’t quite the same as insects from Earth. They have four legs rather than six. They have no head, possessing two body segments instead of three, but parallels quickly start to be drawn from there. A dazzling compound eye structure grants the creature full 360° vision with phenomenal motion and depth perception, although its ability to make out details is borderline nonexistent. Muscles in the way I understand muscles are not present anywhere within the creature, its motion dictated by a pneumatic system of pumps and pressure. Needle-like claws designed to spear and hook prey tip its forelimbs, and its dragonfly-like wings grant it unparalleled mobility in the air. All of this knowledge oozes into me, bit by bit as my body carefully separates and dissolves each piece of the unfortunate insect in sequence, constructing a perfect mental model of its every detail.

The experience is delicious and educational, though not terribly filling. I quickly nab and eat a second one, just to savor the wonderful feeling again, but the second time around it doesn’t really taste good. My body identifies the creature immediately, still dissolving it piece by piece but noting only the tiniest of variances, none of which are interesting enough to be pleasurable. Really, it just feels like eating a bug.

…Not, um, that I eat bugs. Normally, I mean. Who would do that?

I catch a few more of what I’ve decided to name the spear fly, because I’m discovering the species so I can name it whatever the heck I want. …Wait, should I name it the Evelyn fly? No, there’s probably an even cooler bug that I’ll regret not naming the Evelyn fly. I’ll save that name for a special occasion, like that megaelixir I always save until I’ve already beaten the final boss.

Anyway, I don’t eat my new catches, instead sticking them on the end of my… well, my stick. Then I cast it out over the water to wait. After the disappointment of eating my second spear fly, I’m starting to think that fishing for another whip eel just isn’t going to be worth the effort. On one hand, the fact that it just isn’t going to taste as good is apparently a deciding factor in my decision-making process which should probably be a warning sign. On the other hand, I don’t really have any other good ideas. I suppose if there is a huge, person-sized predator in the river, there’s probably a bunch of smaller fish I could try to nab instead. They probably eat the insects around here, since… well, okay, I guess these alien bugs aren’t technically insects, but I’m going to ignore that for now. My priority list is still currently on ‘don’t die,’ so taxonomy is way, way, waaaaay down below it right now. Just, so far down. In order to accurately categorize anything I’d need to study a huge variety of different species and try to figure out where they evolutionarily diverged, and which divergences warrant different phylum, classes, families, and so on and so forth, and then I’d have to think up some name for all of those things which is going to be really weird and different because I don’t know Latin and actually this is sounding pretty fun now that I think about it, maybe I should do this.

Hmm.

Fishing is boring.

I’m just sitting on a rock, holding a long stick with a dead bug on it. Will this even work? I really have no idea. I went fishing once or twice as a kid, but I spent all of my time trying to free the worms when my parents weren’t watching.

A slimy, tubular creature suddenly shoots out of the water like a torpedo, chomps a bug on the edge of my stick, and splashes back down into the water.

Ah. Yeah. I don’t have a hook. The eel might get stuck because it refuses to let go, but a creature that size also probably isn’t interested in eating bugs so I would have to use a whole fish as bait, but if I somehow managed to catch a fish I may as well just eat the fish. Mmm… fish.

I put my stick down, slapping both hands against my cheeks. Which… hurts a lot, actually, since I have a partial exoskeleton, but oh well! Gotta focus! I need a new plan, but I’m hungry and tired and stressed and just… not really up to it right now. It’s funny how I know I will literally die if I don’t figure something out, but I’m still struggling to work up the attention span to get anything done.

And by funny, I mean altogether too expected for my bullshit mess of a brain. Things are just going to keep getting worse, aren’t they? I have an alien baby, sitting in an egg in a cave. I am so insanely not ready to handle that I can’t even comprehend how not ready to handle it I am. If I’m some kind of Zerg queen, for all I know the baby will turn out to be an aggressive warrior-hunter and start annihilating the environment, bringing me a bunch of food and making me make more and more creatures… gah! I’m way too young to destroy a planet!

No, no. Calm down. Even if it was entirely by accident, and even if there is a chance that it’s going to destroy the world, I still made a life and dammit I have decided to be responsible for that. It might not destroy the world! It might be super nice, or maybe it will be loyal, or maybe it will just be a normal baby! No matter what, I need to get food for myself and my freaky child aaaagh oh my god I have a child.

Stop! Breathe. Focus. I need food, but I can’t seem to catch any. Other strategies. Trapping? It might work, if I knew how to make traps, but I don’t even know how to make rope. Something about braiding fibers, I think? I can barely braid my own hair. I could dig a pit trap, maybe, but digging would require a lot of energy and therefore food. I have a limited ability to control the Mooshians, but I am pretty sure the only thing they hunt is grass. Can I eat grass? That would certainly be convenient. I don’t have any idea what I can and cannot eat, I’ve just sort of been putting things into my mouth. …I’ll put grass in the “maybe” category.

There is one thing I’m really good at hunting, though: bugs. I am great with bugs. I know where to find bugs, and if this world is anything like the earth there are probably a gazillion of them, all hiding in plain sight. Bugs are not going to be very filling, but if I catch enough of them I can make up for that. It will have to do for now. If nothing else, it will prevent starvation while I figure out other plans.

Also, it means I get to hunt bugs, which is fun.

I start digging around in the mud and grass, skillfully snatching every bit of movement I see and swiftly tossing it into my mouth. The experience is… interesting. Although I get a wide variety of various species, most of them share a substantial amount of their fundamental traits with the spear fly. The bugs of this world have four limbs, usually, contrasting with the six limbs that the whip eel and the Mooshians have. It’s kind of backwards, and six limbs feels like overkill for larger creatures, but perhaps they just haven’t been removed by evolution yet. There must be some advantage I don’t understand. Anyway, I pick up some interesting things. Different wing shapes, variations on compound eyes, a proboscis, a few toxins that probably won’t work on anything larger than my hand… it’s not super exciting, but it files itself away in my brain regardless. As before, each kind of bug tastes drastically better the first time I eat it.

My body has a built-in incentive system to push me into consuming more species, huh? That’s not ominous at all. Eventually, I start running out of new things to eat and instead begin collecting and killing bugs to put in my bowl and bring back to my cave for later eating. I don’t know when my child is going to hatch, but it will be best to have plenty of food when that happens. If they are going to turn out as the creature I designed in my head like I suspect they might, they’re going to eventually be very big and they are going to need a lot of food. Way more than this pathetic pile of bugs that I’m amassing. Damnit, this isn’t going to be enough! I have to do something else.

I briefly consider using myself as eel bait. Then, I briefly consider that I briefly considered using myself as eel bait, and decide to stand up and walk around. Clearly, I need more blood flowing to my brain. Okay, I can’t really hunt, but I can apparently eat everything that I do hunt. Whatever I am, my body seems to want me to eat as many different creatures as possible. So this implies that my body is probably good at that; poison and disease, if they affect me, should at least be something I’m somewhat resistant to, right? The worst that could happen if I eat something I shouldn’t probably won’t be death, as long as I’m careful. And there are a few things I have seen in abundance that other creatures are eating without negative effects.

This line of logic is how I find myself sitting and holding a clump of grass up to my mouth. I sigh. Am I hungry enough to eat grass? Am I really this desperate?

Yeah, that’s not even a question, really. Bottoms up.

7 Not Going Crazy

A rush of ecstasy fills my body, one that is quickly becoming all-too-familiar. The grass’ fuzzy fronds tickle my tongue as they dissolve, decomposing cell by cell, protein by protein to tell the story of how they germinate. It’s pollen, kind of. The fuzz holds the gametes, which pass their way onto the ankles of animals, brushing through the fields and pollinating as they travel, none the wiser to the stowaways. The long, red blades blow in the breeze, catching glimpses of sunlight that they metabolize into precious, precious glucose.

Ah, photosynthesis. My good friend 6CO2 + 6H20 + (energy) → C6H12O6 + 6O2. Such a well-respected method for sedentary creatures to slurp up energy basically for free. The interplanetary convergent evolution here is hardly surprising, although considering the red coloration, planet Acidsucks clearly hasn’t opted for chlorophyll to be a component of the process. I wonder why. Perhaps it simply turned out this way, or perhaps the star this planet orbits is a different enough color for the red pigment to function better than any other.

As incredible and revolutionary as this is, however, the best part of it all is the fact that I can apparently eat plants! I can feel it: I get nutrients from these! I’m not going to starve! I can’t help but dance a victory dance at this revelation, cheering and whooping in joy as tears of relief fall down my face. I’m! Not! Going! To! Starve! My happiness is apparently infectious, and a few of the Mooshians start to wiggle their adorable bodies alongside me.

…Eventually, I realize it’s pretty darn late in the afternoon. I have the food I need to survive, a bowl of dead bugs, and an egg that I have no idea how to protect or raise and for all I know it’s hatching right now oh shit here comes an anxiety attack. Trying to breathe deep, I climb on top of Mr. Mooshi and convince him to head back home with some fresh grass, headpats, and a concoction of pheromones. Now that I think about it, the pheromones are probably making him think I’m his kid. The Mooshians don’t seem to be herd animals, since I only see them en masse when they are drinking from the river. They probably only have social instincts for parenting and breeding scenarios, so… yeah. I am probably brainwashing my friend into thinking that I am his freakish, deformed daughter or something like that. Oh boy. I resolve to never think about that again, and then inevitably continue thinking about it.

How do Mooshians raise their kids normally? Mr. Mooshi is kind of big, slow and (though I would never say so to his face) dumb like a cow. Do Mooshians make milk? Does Mr. Mooshi? Is Mr. Mooshi even male? I don’t know how to determine the sex of a Mooshian and I have no intention of ever trying. Any such organs are probably on the underside of the Mooshi anyway, and I have no hope of lifting his fat butt off the ground in the first place. Maybe her fat butt? Whatever, girls can be misters too.

Of course, all this thinking about Mooshian parentage reminds me that I have a kid. Fuck. Am I going to have to name them? Name her? I suppose it might as well be her, considering that I’m apparently a biologically asexual species. Which sort of makes sense, I suppose, considering I get genetic diversity from… elsewhere. God, what am I gonna name her? I can’t believe I didn’t think about this. What about… Bethany? Rousseau? Rusalka? Rebec—

Woah.

My antennae start to twitch, and a wave of disorientation causes me to fall right off Mr. Mooshi, clutching my forehead. Concerned, he stops his blistering pace and takes about thirty seconds to turn around to face me. Something is wrong. Way wrong.

I feel… I don’t even know. Trapped? No, not trapped, I’m still lying here on the ground, clutching my head. I’m stuck in the fetal position, so I stand up… except I don’t stand up? No, I do, I mean I’m definitely standing. I blink and look around, seeing the forest, except I just see blackness. I’m restricted, trapped in cold, wet gunk, yet I sit back down onto Mr. Mooshi’s shell without issue. What… what the fuck is happening!?

I stay still, yet I strike out at the darkness with my fist. I hit the inside of my eggshell. That’s me. I feel it.

I’m my child.

Okay! All right! I can deal with this! It’s fine, this is fine!

I press on the inside of my eggshell. It feels pretty much the same as it did the first time, with the exception that I’m also a few miles away, simultaneously sitting on a friendly alien and trying not to go completely batshit insane.

Holy shit, I’m two people now. Or am I just one person with two bodies? Oh god, oh god! How does this even work!?

I don’t want to be in this egg anymore. I pull back my fist and give it a solid punch. One, two, three, four hits later, it finally cracks. I see with two sets of eyes at once.

Holy shit, this… It’s so weird. It’s too weird! I look at my hand in front of my face and I look at my hand in front of my face. One is brown like the silt of the riverbed, slightly glossy, covered in gunk. The other is grey, covered in chitin, the hand of the monster I’ve come to know as myself. Both are me! At the same time!

My thoughts have doubled. But it’s still me thinking the thoughts. It’s loud and confusing! But at the same time, I don’t have trouble understanding it. It’s just… different.

Disturbing.

Yet kind of exciting?

It’s terrifying. This is a drastic change to my mind. My mind is who I am! If that changes without my consent, that’s a corruption of my very being.

But I’m in two places at once, doing two things at the same time. My chances of surviving this place have just gone from hopelessly abysmal to genuinely significant. The possibilities of what I may be able to truly do with this fill me with hope.

I step out of my egg while I rest atop my friend, trying not to hyperventilate. I have my bodies each pat their bellies and rub their heads at the same time. I’m pretty bad at it, but each body is no worse than when I only had one of them. It’s beyond strange, beyond surreal. It’s like… an epiphany, a true moment of clear and perfect understanding, while at the same time being more confusing than anything I’ve ever experienced in my entire life. …Yeah, that didn’t really explain anything, did it?

I look down at my new body while my old body stretches, gets up, and walks beside my first and only friend on this planet. It’s easier to walk while I walk, but I don’t have to. I look around for threats, investigating the tree canopy as I simultaneously examine my new self.

There are definite similarities to the design I made in my head, but this freshly-hatched body doesn’t seem to be fully developed yet. I’d wanted to give this form chitin over its entire body, but instead I don’t have any, presumably because I am also under 4 feet tall, by my reckoning. I have a lot of growing to do, so perhaps I will start getting armor once I’m large enough that I won’t have to just molt it off again. Still, there are pieces of me that I know I changed myself. My vision is sharper, like I’ve needed glasses this whole time and hadn’t realized it. Wide flippers replace my feet, and both my arms and legs are thicker and stronger than the bug limbs I have been slowly getting used to. Most notably, two tendrils much like the whip eel’s pseudo-tongues extend from above my shoulder blades, moving as I will them to. The muscles controlling these new limbs are both alien and instinctively usable, a disturbing juxtaposition of feelings that at this point I probably just need to start expecting. It’s becoming a bit of a trend.

After all, I am starving but I also feel full. One of my bodies desperately needs food, while the other has spent all morning and afternoon stuffing her face. I move my new self back to my cave, consuming the eggshell and left over egg goop for nutrients. When I finish that off, I head out to the hillside to stuff my face with grass.

Calling myself ‘myself’ or ‘my body’ is probably going to get real confusing real fast. I need names for my mes. Hmm… How about my original body is Evelyn Prime, because that just sounds awesome, and my new body can be Evelyn Experimental, since I pretty much made it entirely on accident and I have no idea what to do now that I have it. I will call them EP and EE for short. Er, I mean I’ll call me EP and EE for short? Gah, whatever!

Lost in general pontification and a mild background level of unceasing existential panic, I… er, as in the EP me, finally make it back to the hill alongside Mr. Mooshi, where I find myself munching happily on the grass that I am currently munching happily on. …Jesus christ.

I look up at myself, seeing both of my existences in third person simultaneously. I am a mirror that watches back. I note that the face on my new body is still the same. I guess I forgot to change it.

I approach myself. And, I approach myself. Both of my mes squat down in front of each other. I inhale, then exhale, watching the rise and fall of each of my chests as I feel the air flow within me. I raise my hands, palms forward. Mr. Mooshi watches my ancient, alien ritual with rapt attention, chewing on grass as I chant the ancient words handed down through generations of my people. I clap my hands together to that timeless beat.

“Pattycake, pattycake, baker’s man!”

“Bake me a cake as fast as you can.”

“Pat it, and prick it, and mark it with B.”

“And put it in the oven for me and me!”

The nursery rhyme complete, I engage in a staring contest with myself before busting out laughing, both of me sprawled full-body out on the ground. God, that was so dumb! But just like that, a bit of home is brought to this alien place. Looking myself over, I know there’s one more thing I have to do to make myself feel better.

I give myself a hug.

It’s awkward and strange. Being both halves of the hug is nowhere near as soothing an experience as having another person. Not to mention, I’ve always felt a little weird hugging someone in their underwear, which is at best all I can claim to be wearing. Still, it’s about the best self-hug I could possibly ask for. It calms me down a bit, and I wipe a drop of water from my eye that accumulated from my laughing fit.

“Hey, Evelyn,” I say. “Nice to meet you.”

“Yeah,” I agree. “Nice to meet you too, Evelyn.”

“You’re literally going insane,” Mr. Mooshi chimes in. “You need to see a psychiatrist.”

Yeah. He’s probably right. But if I’m going to find one of those, I’ll probably need to figure out how to not die on an alien planet first. Retrieving my bowl full of bugs, I devour them all with EE so I’m no longer starving. Still, I want something new. New things taste the best. But where am I going to get something new? …Hmm. I suppose I can eat plants, so why not eat a tree?

First, a test. Heading back to the phenomenally shitty nest I made for my egg, I pick up and chow down on one of the branches.

Hmm.

Hmmmm.

It’s very… fibrous. I haven’t had to poop since I got here, but if anything was going to evacuate my bowels, it would be this. The amount of mass on this thing compared to the amount I can actually helpfully digest is not feeling like a great ratio to me. Still, I pick up another branch and start chewing on that too. The more I nibble on these things, the more I kind of want to down an entire tree. The branch has the beginnings of some neat stuff; bark is a super-cool structure and I’m starting to wonder if the trees have any other cool things like sap. Maybe they have nuts or fruit in some season or another… Damn, I really do want to eat a whole-ass tree.

If I’m going to accomplish this, I will definitely need to dig the tree up. The roots are just as important as all the bits above ground. Now that I know I can eat plants, however, I should be able to afford the effort required to dig a hole, and it will be so, so much easier to focus on farming harmless autotrophs than to try to hunt down an animal of some sort. Plus, I can maybe cover up the resulting hole and hopefully catch something in a pit trap! Two for one!

Thankfully, while digging up an adult tree would be an insane, many-day undertaking, I’m pretty sure a sapling will work just as well. It’s the same composition, just substantially smaller. Getting some nice rock chunks, me and other me start our task of digging up one of the ambitious young trees struggling to grow at the edge of the clearing. It takes a couple hours and some grassy snack breaks (after which Mr. Mooshi seems incredibly relieved, now that his apparent daughters are finally eating something sensible) but eventually I have a small yet deep hole and a delicious, intact shroom-tree sapling. Down the hatch!

Rigid yet sturdy bark, straight and deep-reaching roots… these strange trees and their lattice of net-like branches seem to hint at the possibility of an aquifer far below, as otherwise I’m not sure how they’d get enough water to survive. They make nuts when the season is right, which are no doubt carried by countless creatures I’ve yet to even see and spread around the land. Truly, this tastes like the miracle of evolution.

I sit down, back to back with myself, hugging my knees to my chest. EE burps loudly, the last of the wood dissolving in my stomach. This is it, huh? This is what I am now. I feel like, normally, I would be panicking a lot more. This is absolutely fucking insane, after all. I just cloned myself and ate a god damn tree. Yet all my dumbass brain can think about right now is…

…Did I technically get isekai’d?

I mean like, I did, didn’t I? I am on another world. Normally people get isekai’d to a fantasy world, I guess, so maybe I’m in one of those. My wacky-ass eating habits sure feel like magic, but somehow I think it’s more likely that I’m still in the same universe. I’m like a hyper-advanced organic bio-lab, or something. God, I’m so tired. The sun hasn’t quite set yet, but between digging this big hole and giving birth, I am about as pooped as a creature that can’t poop can be. I guess things aren’t all bad. I have food, I have water, and I have shelter. I’m not going to die, not unless some alien monster bursts out of the forest and eats me. Which might happen, I don’t know, but it can’t be that bad of an idea to just take a little nap here, right?

Yeah. I should keep my stamina up. Trudging up the hill, I collapse down in my cave and prepare for rest. I also trudge up the hill, collapse down in my cave, and prepare for rest. This double-body thing is… I don’t even know what it is.

At least it’s warmer to have someone to hold, even if it’s only me.

8 Living With Yourself

“Blubie!” I chastise, lifting the huge bug from the terrarium I scrounged together for it. Mr. Bubbles wasn’t happy I took her big tank, but she is never happy so she can deal.

“Blubie, you can’t eat that much, you’ll get sick! Give those back!”

Blubie is profoundly uninterested in giving anything back. The huge, beetle-like arachnid immediately devours everything I put in its tank, so long as it is small enough to fit in the fat bug’s mouth. A lot of creatures will eat far too much if able to, potentially making themselves very sick, and I’m not about to make the rookie mistake of overfeeding the scientific discovery of the century.

…Okay, sure, so I maybe made the rookie mistake of taking it home instead of recording it in the wild but it’s just so cuuuuuuute! Eeeeeeeee!

I can’t help but pick Blubie up and admire it more. This creature is just so docile… I suppose it can afford to be. It’s a lot heavier than it looks, and it is both small and sturdy. I doubt many animals can reliably crack it open to eat… with the exception of one pretty major predator that makes me wonder how this thing can exist at all.

Raptors. Big, carnivorous birds, especially eagles, would absolutely genocide this species. The clever things would just grab poor Blubie, fly a couple hundred feet up, and drop it. Crack! Blubie is heavy, but if I can lift it without trouble an eagle sure as hell can too. They do the same thing with turtles, and unlike turtles Blubie sticks out like a neon sign in a cavern. Raptors couldn’t not see this cutie, and once they watch it crawling around for long enough they would definitely want to see what is inside. Even if Blubie is deathly poisonous like its coloration suggests, many kinds of birds learn to eat around poisonous glands and ignore that defense entirely. It’s little wonder to me how a creature this beautiful and obvious could go unknown for so long; the question is how the heck one managed to survive at all.

I leave Blubie to crawl on my arm for a bit, and notice Mr. Bubbles looks kind of jealous. I grab her too, letting her clamber about my other arm. She hisses at Blubie again, so I give her a little poke to shut her up. Such a rude little spider.

I’m so caught up in the joy of my big buggy family that I don’t even register the knock on my door until the person behind it calls out to me.

“Yo! Eve! You in there? You weren’t in class today so I was worried you might be sick!”

Oh yeah, class.

“No, I’m fine!” I say. “Come on in, it’s unlocked!”

“Oh, you’re okay? Really? I figured you’d never ditch— FUCKINCHRIST!”

My maybe-friend and classmate Samantha jumps about twelve feet into the air as I walk out of my room with a massive spider crawling on my face. Oh, right, she’s not a fan of Mr. Bubbles. I blow on my favorite buggo a bit and she scurries off my head and back down my arm, where I hold her more firmly so she can’t pull any shenanigans.

“Hey, Sam! Sorry about that, I just found this super cool bug and—”

“Cool bug!? Eve, you have a fucking Pokémon on your shoulder!” She backs away further. “Can you please put those back in their cages?”

“Terrariums,” I correct, pouting a little. “‘Cage’ makes it sound like I’m keeping them behind bars. Which would be dumb, because Mr. Bubbles would just crawl right through them and end up in my bed or something.”

“Oh my god, please don’t say that ever again.”

I return to my room and begin securing my nonhuman friends as Sam follows behind at a cautious distance, curly black hair bouncing as her fight-or-flight response dies down. Sam is pretty cool. My tendency to hang out with the dark-skinned girl just kind of happened. Both of us came to school from out of town and had no other friends, so we started relying on each other for study groups. Since I’m getting a biology major and she’s going premed, we ended up in a lot of the same science classes. She’s very nice and doesn’t try to bring anyone else into our study group, which is great for my anxiety.

She does not like bugs, but I forgive her.

“What even is that thing?” she asks. “It looks like a crab fucked a beetle.”

“That’s Blubie!” I helpfully inform her. “I found him this morning. Some kind of new species, I think. I’ve never seen or heard of anything like it!”

Samantha blinks in disbelief.

“Wait, seriously? Isn’t that like, an ultra-super huge deal?”

“Yeah, kinda. I’ve set up my camera and stuff so I can record everything Blubie does. We won’t know everything since I can’t really observe it in the wild, but… honestly I don’t think it would have lasted very long out there. There are too many birds around.”

And that’s not just what I’m telling myself to justify capturing a potentially endangered species.

“Besides, I’ll make sure Blubie loves it here!” I continue.

“Well, okay, enjoy your weird bug I guess,” Sam says, ever the supportive person. “I just came by to give you a copy of my notes. Are you gonna be here all day?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, then I’m gonna… not be here. But let me know if you want to hang out somewhere without any insects.”

“Well, technically Blubie and Mr. Bubbles are both probably arachnids, so—”

“Okay that’s great buh-bye!”

Sam drops off her notes and swiftly absconds. Oh, well. I get it, not many people like bugs as much as I do. Or at all, really.

“Sam’s nice, Blubie, I promise. I just wish I could talk with her about stuff I like, you know?”

“Klu…lie,” Blubie hisses back.

Hold on, back that one up. What?

“Uh, Blubie?” I ask, leaning over to get a good look. Blubie’s mouth twitches, clacking together to imitate the sounds as best it can.

“Klukie,” the mystery bug says.

“Uh… yeah. You’re Blubie,” I say, pointing to the incredible creature, my eyes as wide as saucers. Then I point to myself. “And I’m Evelyn.”

“Klukie,” the creature repeats.

Then, carefully and deliberately, it points a single claw towards me.

“Hevelan,” it hisses.

Oh. Oh, holy shit.

…

I wake up, yawning as I hug my pillow a little tighter. Something seems to squeeze me as I do, so I try to adjust my body only to find my pillow suddenly squirming! Eyes shooting open, I look myself in the face and scream in stereo, my two bodies leaping backward and scrambling to opposite walls of the cave. The day before rushes back to the forefront of my mind, and I slowly review it while I spend the next ten minutes coming down from my panic attack.

This is getting out of hand. Now there are two of me!

Mr. Mooshi trundles down into the cave, pawing at me with his feeding tendrils to make sure I’m okay. I give him as big a hug as I am able, which is pretty big now that I have four total arms. Well, six if you count my tentacles, which is even better! Having tentacles is a bit ultra fucking weird but I can’t think of a better use for them than Mooshi hugs! Clearly, I should be expanding myself as much as possible so I can supply the optimal hugging surface area.

…Huh. I meant that as a joke, but immediately my mind starts spinning about possible new ideas for a body. I really want to make one! …Why do I want to make one? The first time around was horrific and terrifying and now there’s two mes and I have no fucking clue what to do with any of this knowledge. Holy shit, what do I do now? That’s… actually an extremely valid question. I have water, I have food, I have shelter. So now what? I filled the bottom layer of that hierarchy of needs, so I guess I need a new goal! What is the biggest problem I face right now?

“You’re lonely,” Mr. Mooshi reminds me.

He’s right. I am so fucking lonely. I walk out of the cave and check the sky, noting that the sun is on the complete other side of the sky from yesterday afternoon. I guess I slept right through the sunset and the sunrise after. I’ve barely been here three days now, but I’m already so homesick I can barely stand it. Perhaps it’s the knowledge of where I am, the dread that I may never get home, certainly not at any point in the foreseeable future. I may not have been alone for long, but the sheer scale of how absurdly, impossibly alone I currently am crushes down with a weight far greater than time. I am in fucking space. I have no chance of rescue. Odds are incredibly high that there isn’t another sapient species on this planet, other than possibly whatever entity put me here. I don’t know what such an entity would want with me, but if they’re kidnapping me and dropping me on alien planets I’m not sure I want anything to do with them either. What did I hear that voice say in my dream? “I’ll see you in a year?” Jesus Christ, if I have to stay here alone for a year I will absolutely go mad.

If that’s the case, I have to believe I can find other people here. Maybe there is intelligent life other than myself, and maybe I can make friends with them. I have to try. I remember seeing glowing lights at night to the east, so… maybe that’s where I should look first? Seems as good of a clue as any.

Okay, so if that’s the case, should I be making more bodies in order to explore better? I could cover more ground if there is more of me, but something about rapidly evolving into something progressively less and less human pings my sci-fi danger sense. I feel like that’s a real steep slippery slope towards accidentally becoming the Zerg. Or the Sequids. Or the Tyranids. Or the Buggers. Or the Xenomorphs. Or the Scourge. Or the Borg. Or the Flood. Or the Rachni. Or the Bohrok. Or the Aparoids.

All of which are evil.

This is how they get you! Absolute power corrupts absolutely! One minute I’m going to be making perfectly reasonable judgments about modest quantities of me to put in the world, and the next minute I’m eating planets! I refuse to eat a planet! I am a biologist, a conservationist, and a pacifist! Not to mention, I don’t even know how my body works yet! I need to be very, very careful with— ooh, what’s that?

Wandering next to my pit trap, I notice a tiny movement at the bottom! Wow, I never expected this thing to actually work! I haven’t even covered up the top yet. I head over and look down. There is indeed a small creature in there, but it looks more confused than trapped. I don’t even think it fell in there; based on the fact that most of its body is inside a tunnel of its own making, I’m pretty sure it dug its way into my hole.

It’s an odd creature, long and flat against the ground, made of armored segments. It sort of reminds me of a centipede in that way, but instead of a quintillion legs it only has four. In addition to those legs, it has two claw-like forelimbs, as well as long, thin tendrils protruding in a manner that reminds me of a mustache. Like the acid dripping beast of my nightmares, its body has no apparent head or eyes, but its mustache frames a fairly obvious mouth. It’s relatively small, about the size of a weasel, and I can probably just reach down there and grab it.

…I’m not going to do that, though. I have a much better idea. After all, I’m a human, and humans use tools. Well, okay, I’m not actually a human anymore, but I’m still me.

I have to be.

Anyway, I keep an eye on the creature with EE, moving with Evelyn Prime to grab a big ’ol rock, sized nicely for the hole. I notice now that the weird trilobite weasel thing has a bunch of smaller whiskers to complement its… tentacle mustache. It wiggles them curiously at me, making no moves to advance or retreat. Which works for me, I guess! Evelyn Prime finally returns with the rock and I give it a solid chuck right on down there. Face the evolutionary revolution that pushed my species to dominate the Earth, pathetic alien! Throwing!

A sickening crunch echoes through the clearing as the rock hits home. The crack of the exoskeleton followed so closely by a squish of the soft internals it is smashed into a single sound. On the low chance that the curious creature survived that, it won’t be pleasant or for long.

I rub the regrowing chitin on the back of my neck. No doubt I can probably get killed just as easily. What will happen to me if one of my bodies dies? I guess plan A is to not find out, and plan B is to excessively panic when I ultimately do.

But hey, I can be existential later. God knows I will be. For now, I want food! I retrieve the rock from its hole, revealing dinner underneath. One of the creatures legs twitches in death throes, causing me to shriek and toss the rock again. The second time I dig it out, the animal is motionless.

Dead in my hands, I will myself to look the creature over instead of instantly succumbing to voracious hunger. The claws on its forelimbs are shaped to function as shovels. Combined with its lack of apparent eyesight and long whiskers, I’m pretty confident this thing spends most of its time underground. It actually has a lot of whiskers on its butt as well, growing out of the segmented chitinous shell and possibly aiding it in traveling backwards through tight tunnel networks. Or maybe they detect dangers from behind? I’m not sure, maybe both. The shell looks sturdy but also a lot more flexible than mine, allowing the creature to curve and bend in every which way without sacrificing too much protection. The rock shattered a fair chunk of these segments near the middle, of course, a cloudy liquid oozing out of the cracks. Barring the wounds I inflicted on it, it’s honestly a pretty cute little thing, at least for people like me who think bugs are cute. I could see myself owning one as a pet.

“…Not that I’d ever replace you, Mr. Mooshi,” I reassure him.

“You couldn’t, with that thing,” Mr. Mooshi insists. I’ve moved my EP body to hide behind him, so as to better simulate his voice. “Without me, you’d be dead within the hour.”

“I wish I could say you were wrong, Mr. Mooshi, but you’re probably not.”

I turn back to my meal with my EE body as EP jumps on Mr. Mooshi from behind, legs kicking in the air as I lie on my stomach and hug his back. Mr. Mooshi is not sure what to do with my rambunctious antics, so he eats some grass.

Well, cuddles aside, I suppose I’m not getting any less hungry. I may as well eat this corpse I made. I start to chomp it down, anticipating the glorious flavor. In some ways, this is the most delicious one yet. In others, it is by far the worst. Because this time, I’m watching myself do it.

I’m a monster.

Of course I knew that, intellectually. I literally just listed all the evil hive minds I could think of off the top of my head, and I’m certain there are countless more in all sorts of stories I’ve never read. Fiction aside, I am a terrifying, rapidly evolving bio-monster. I got to this planet three days ago, killed a major river predator more or less by accident, and scoured its flesh from its bones in order to create a superior version of it. Yet I never felt scary until right now. I guess it just never really sunk in.

I watch as my lips twist into a sick smile, revealing my waiting teeth. Before I even take the first bite I look like an impending horror flick, but once it begins…

I’m not sure what I expected myself to look like. Animalistic, maybe? Like a scavenger picking at a carcass. Or possibly something insane? Bestial and wild, a frenzy of hunger and blood. Yet I am none of those things. I watch with one body as my instincts take over the other completely, and those instincts are cold. Exact. Calculating. I don’t tear the creature apart with my fangs, I peel it, layer by layer, sinew by sinew, organ by organ, savoring each bite with a rapturous look of pleasure. In a detached sense, it is utterly horrifying. In any other situation, I know that watching something like this would fill me with such primal revulsion that I wouldn’t be able to breathe.

But not here. Because here, as I lay in silent horror of the monster, I am the monster. I am feeling it, experiencing it, so I cannot truly fear the smile on my face. Fear is of the unknown, and there is no question about why I look like I’ve found heaven. I am in it! Each bite is filled with an endless complexity of flavors and experiences combined into a perfect, harmonious whole. This creature is even better than the eel. Oh, better by a longshot.

Out of all its organs, I have to say my favorite is the brain. It’s drastically more complex than the whip eel’s, which was pretty flat and somewhat bland. This brain is a neural network folded, layered, and sectioned to a level of complexity I still feel myself trying to unpack and understand. The creature really is blind, to my amazement, but its whiskers are incredibly refined and complicated sensory organs, capable of scent, echolocation, vibration mapping, and so much more! It all seems to be optimized for confined tunnels, still somewhat useful aboveground but definitely fuzzier on the details. I immediately fall in love with its flexible, multilayered chitin which I consider a flat upgrade to my current configuration. The mustache thing is also almost like a better version of the whip eel’s prehensile tendrils! Although the whip eel’s are of course faster and stronger, this creature’s tendrils split at the ends into smaller, soft finger-like structures for fine manipulation. I can probably combine the two without much issue and create a version superior to both. Too bad that EE has already hatched.

But that’s not even the best part! This meal has quite the spicy component: an organ near this creature’s mouth generates acid. It doesn’t seem to be as strong as the acid from the nightmare sloth, but it still has quite a bit of kick when I chomp it down. Based on my understanding of the creature, it is probably used for melting packed dirt or stone, allowing the creatures to make tunnels in areas no other animal could.

Still… acid? I’m becoming more like a xenomorph by the hour, aren’t I? I hate acid.

I lick the last of the blood off my fingers and face. There isn’t much, because I didn’t spill. Mr. Mooshi suddenly snorts at the me on his back. Huh? Oh. That body is shivering.

Thank goodness part of me feels afraid after all.

9 No Being Evil

Well. That happened. Nothing remains of the creature I smashed with a rock. I have to give myself this: if nothing else, my body is not wasteful.

I dismount the best of all Mooshis and walk over to myself. I’ve got a lot going through my head right now. I still feel like me, mostly. But I am more than me. I’m thinking in parallel, more rapidly and more convolutedly than I ever have before. My ADHD is normally pretty bad, but this is getting ridiculous. I need to slow down for a moment, and find a way to get my conscious mind up to speed with my raging, hyper-multitasking subconscious.

So, I return to an old standby. I start talking to myself.

“I am a monster,” I begin. But… no. That’s not really right.

“I am afraid I’m a monster,” I correct, “or that I will become one.”

“Yeah.”

“Because being a monster is not really about what I am, it’s about what I do.”

“Yep. Like Beauty and the Beast.”

“Or I guess Beauty is the Beast?”

“Heh. Yeah. Like that.”

I stand there in silence for a while, Mr. Mooshi’s chewing the only noise on the wind. Fuck, I look so weird. It’s like my head has been grafted onto some disturbingly perfect supermodel’s body, dressed in bug parts. There’s a distinct level of unease to the sight, just barely touching the lip of the uncanny valley. My gross face is on that thing. It might be hot if it wasn’t so personally distressing.

“So… what is and isn’t okay, then? What are our rules? Er, I mean, my rules.”

“Well, no eating people. That’s a duh.”

“Yeah.”

“What about… eating more than we need to survive?”

“It sounds good, but I don’t know how to even define that. There’s a monster here that can burn a hole clear through my body by drooling. Who knows what other things might be even worse? Gaining more advantages might be necessary to save me from something I don’t even know about.”

“…Fair. But let’s be real here, on the Zerg scale we are one hundred percent StarCraft and zero percent Toy Story.”

“The Toy Story guy is named Zurg. With a ‘U’”

“Okay, but you get my point, right? If we err on the side of eating more than we have to, we might be literally apocalyptic.”

“I mean, that might be true in theory, but if I was currently a threat to the planet rather than the reverse this would probably be a much easier conversation. Our only goals right now are to find someone to talk to before we go mad, and to not die in the process. We should worry about the apocalypse stuff in the abstract, but until I am anything more than two naked hobos in a cave we’re probably safe to table that for future Evelyn.”

“Valid.”

“But no eating people! That is rule one.”

“Duh.”

“And no hunting things to extinction! If I’m really out for self-preservation I should be eating one creature of each species and not more!”

“It’s not like I could hunt something to extinction without laying a lot more eggs anyway.”

That quickly shuts both of me up. I don’t want to make any more of me, because that sounds fucking terrifying. But also… I do. Holy hell, I do. As my dad always used to say when he dragged me to help with chores, “many hands make light work.” The more of me there are, the easier everything will become, especially since I can just eat trees! There’s no way I’ll run out of trees, my food problems are plenty set. It would be absurdly useful, and the only real downside is… well, the awkward process. And, of course, potentially detaching myself from humanity that much more.

…Whatever. Now is not the time to think of this. The triloweasel wasn’t enough food to get EE growing to full height, let alone make another one. It’s a moot point if I haven’t actually eaten enough trees to do anything with them. I start by making more holes, pulling up saplings within them. If all triloweasels are as curious as the first one, that’ll be some good eats. If not, well, at least I’ll have a pit trap out of it. The manual labor also helps me think, giving my bodies something to do that distracts me from the fact that there are two of them in the first place. I gather more plant matter as I dig it up, stockpiling food because it is the sensible thing to do. I try to keep my holes away from large patches of grass, however, because Mr. Mooshi likes to eat those and he is the most important one.

Still, getting food is sensible and simple enough. I can eat sticks? Great, I’ll collect sticks. I keep them inside the cave where they will dry and not rot… although, I could probably eat the mold just fine if it comes to that. I’d just rather not.

I start running into two problems, though: the first is that I’m munching on sticks as I work, and the more I do so the more aware I become of how genuinely terrible of a source of nutrition they are. I can eat trees, yes. But I should definitely be supplementing this diet with other stuff.

The other problem is that the bigger a food stash I collect, the bigger an urge I have to just eat all of it. Because let’s face it, thinking up custom bodies is really fun and getting to be them is crazy exciting. Yeah, sure, there’s all sorts of weird freaky bad stuff, so much so that I’m kind of losing my mind. But the pressure is there. The temptation is ever-present. I know I should resist it, I know I should think of anything else. But I have always struggled with maintaining focus on the things I know I should be focusing on, and this is no exception. I’m hungry, I’m terrified of being constantly in danger, and I am equipped to fix both of those problems at nothing but the low, low cost of my already wavering sanity. And so, while I work, I find my thoughts drifting off to what sort of thing I will try making next.

I want to make a scout. I want to see more of this planet and I want to be able to prepare myself for it before it becomes a danger to me. I want to find more food, and I want to find somewhere I can live without constant loneliness and fear. I have to believe a place like that exists.

So, first things first, I should decide on the body’s size and shape. While it would be simple and easy to simply create a clone of one of the many creatures in my memory, I don’t need to and it would be kind of boring anyway. I have an insane amount of biological knowledge at my disposal. I can apply cosmetic tweaks and changes to any of the forms I know at my leisure. I can move the position of limbs, sensory organs, and the like to different places on the body with but a whim. What I probably can’t do, though, is add more limbs. At least not yet; I barely know what I’m doing. I’m sure I don’t need more than six limbs for anything anyway. So, for a shape, I feel like I don’t have any real need to make the body look like anything other than me. I’m sure I could create some inhuman abomination, but that kind of feeds directly into one of my major fears so I think I’m just going to not.

As for size, that’s also an easy question. This new body is going to be absolutely fucking tiny. Way less food consumption, way less on hinging of the pelvis, and most importantly of all…

WINGS!

Wings, wings, wings, wings, wings! I mean come on, how the hell could I possibly not make flying bug Evelyn? Self-propelled flight is pretty much everybody’s dream, and I am no exception! This is going to be awesome! I just need to finagle out a way to form it all. Just make a tiny me, slaps some extra back muscles here and here… hmm, no, that’s way too heavy. I can’t just scale down my bones either, they’d be brittle toothpicks. Yet without bones, my standard musculature won’t work. Okay, so instead of scaling down my normal body, I will modify one of this planet’s insect bodies into something shaped like me. I’ll adopt the pneumatic musculature and wings of the spear fly, with a mix of that cool flexible exoskeleton the triloweasels have and the more rigid standard exoskeleton to make the body work. Then I just shape it so it looks like me. What else? I need to save on energy consumption wherever I can, because the body won’t be able to hold much energy in storage. My pheromones don’t cost much energy at all relative to my big body, but they’re taking up significant space on tiny me. I can axe them. I also supplement a lot of energy loss with photosynthesis. Not enough to negate my need to eat, but every bit helps. With red wings, I should hopefully also camouflage well in the trees. Plus, I’m going to get plenty of sun flying above the trees with my awesome bug wings!

Yup, this is a pretty darn cool design. Now I just need enough food to—wait no I feel funny I should sit down. I guess since this body is tiny, it doesn’t take much food or time to make. EP returns to the cave and I do my business, creating a single tiny egg. D’aww.

Well, now I suppose I just need to wait. Since I have all these sticks and plants and stuff, I figure I should probably advance my tech tree past literal cavemen. I should probably learn how to make fire. Downside: I don’t have more than a really vague idea on how the hell to make fire.

I know the basic principle. Friction creates heat. With enough friction, you can literally set sticks on fire by rubbing them together. There’s also something called flint that can make sparks when you strike it against… I don’t know, a rock or something I think? But I don’t have any of that, so friction it is.

Okay, I think I’ve seen a video about this once. Or maybe a cartoon of it? No, wait, let’s back up and think fire safety. The absolute last thing I want to be doing is setting my hill on fire. So I need to make my fire inside the cave, close enough to the mouth that I don’t suffocate myself but not so close to the mouth that the fire could reasonably escape. Then I get a bunch of sticks together, along with some dry leaves and grass and stuff… although, I don’t really have those things. The ground here isn’t super dry, so it probably rains with a decent frequency. But that’s okay, I think! Nothing is soggy, either, it’s just not dry and brittle. Maybe it will still work?

Yeah, no. Moisture level notwithstanding, I barely have any idea what I’m supposed to do here. Take stick between hands and move hands back and forth really fast so the stick spins against another stick? I think that’s the basic principle, and I feel it working. I spend a fucking hour spinning this damn thing (thank fuck chitin can’t get blisters) and it does get pretty darn warm but I don’t get a single flame. So I try new stuff, different sticks, different possible kindling, different spinning techniques… but I don’t know, I guess I’m stupider than a caveman. Or maybe this is actually way harder than it looks. I’ve decided I’m going to believe that second one, regardless of whether or not it’s true.

…Woah.

I feel it, suddenly. A third existence in my mind. Three brains, three sets of eyes, three different perspectives, three parallel lines of thought. I crack the egg for my smaller self, stepping out into the open air for the first and also technically fourth time. I look up at myself, a terrifying giant of unfathomable proportions. I looked down at myself, an adorable leaf fairy, spreading her soggy wings to catch the afternoon breeze.

“This is so awesome,” I whisper.

“It’s kind of—pfft!”

I start to respond to myself with my itty-bitty body but immediately double over with uproarious laughter. My tiny voice is barely above a whisper in volume, but it sounds like I guzzled an entire balloon stand’s worth of helium. I just can’t keep a straight face when I listen to it. Oh my god.

“Huh-huh!” I squeak. “I’m Mickey Mouse!”

I crack up again. It’s so dumb it’s perfect. Holy shit. This must be why Tinkerbell never talked, Peter Pan would have laughed at her until the end of time.

“That’s your name now,” I inform my tiny body. “You are Evelyn Tinkerbell, ETB for short.”

I play with my stupid voice for a while as I dry my new body off in the sun, feeding myself twigs and bugs as I sit on my own shoulder. I want to fly, I’m itching for it, dying for it, but I have to wait for my wings to dry off. They’re just too heavy. Plus, it’s getting late, and the sun will be down soon. This isn’t like Earth where there’s light everywhere, even at night time. I will basically be blind, and flying blind sounds incredibly stupid.

Tomorrow, though. Tomorrow I’m going to fly. I’m going to fly all the way to that glowing mystery in the East, I’m going to find people there to make friends with, and everything is going to be okay.

I work a little longer with my original body as EE eats as much as I physically can and fawns over my adorable tiny self. I’m nibbling on a leaf the size of my torso, and it is just the absolute cutest thing. A bubbling feeling in my tummy confirms my suspicion that trees aren’t exactly a balanced diet, but they will do for now as I set up more traps.

The sun begins to set, bathing the sky and brilliant reds and oranges. It is as stunning as it was the first night, this time viewed from three sets of awed eyes. As the night descends in full, I wrap up the last of my work for the day and sit at the mouth of the cave, all three bodies enraptured by the stars. Even Mr. Mooshi waddles over, sitting down next to me with a friendly huff. I pat his shell as I try to think about tomorrow. Or possibly tonight? I have three bodies. Do they all have to sleep at once? Can I keep some of them awake while the others rest?

It’s food for thought, but I decide against it for now. None of my bodies can see at night anyway, and all three of them are completely exhausted. I spent the whole day either digging holes or beginning to exist in the first place, both of which are a bit energy-intensive as activities go.

Clearly tired, Mr. Mooshi extracts himself from my cuddles and trundles into the cave. I crawl on to either side of him and cuddle up, leaving mini me to rest on his back. He’s nice and warm in the cold night air, and it helps that any predator who wanders by the cave won’t be able to nab any of us without waking the whole lot.

Tomorrow, I’ll learn to fly. How ridiculously cool is that? And even if I mess up and can’t do it, I can just refine the body and try again. It’s insane! I imagine a buzzing army of mini-mes devouring the landscape like locusts, and it makes me smile. …Because it’s a funny mental image, not because I want to devour the landscape like locusts.

I hope I find a civilization. It’s incredibly lonely here. I miss my family. I haven’t actually seen them since heading off to college, and now I wonder if I’ll ever get to see them again. I miss my mom’s go-getter attitude, her warm hugs, her hair that always smells like fruity shampoo. She would know how to survive out here, how to build a shelter and stay safe long enough to live normally. I miss my dad’s stupid jokes, his keen wisdom, and his incredible cookie-baking skills. He would know what to say to make me feel better about myself, make me more confident that I could get through this mess without becoming something horrible. I even miss my dorky little brother, although he’d probably be no help at all.

I miss my grandma, even though I haven’t actually seen her in a year. I never knew either of my grandpas, but I hear they were pretty cool. One of them died in some war or another, I don’t even remember. The other had a heart attack when I was three.

I miss my friends, although I’ve never had many. Among everyone I used to talk to online, a wonderful few were special to me, though. People I could tell anything, people who shared my love for the things I found most interesting, people that would support me on those unpredictable days when my mind would insist that nothing was going to be okay, and people that would absolutely kick my ass at StarCraft. Though, despite my good friends, I’ve never had a boyfriend (or girlfriend, for that matter), and yet I definitely miss…

I miss…

Someone. Someone important. Someone I cared about very much? No, wait, it was someone I’m incredibly angry with. No… that’s wrong too. I think. I don’t remember.

I just don’t remember. What, did I hit my head when my egg dropped from orbit or something? Maybe I’ll dream another memory tonight.

But maybe, I will just dream.

10 Double Trouble

“Blubie… did you just talk!?”

I’m more than a little incredulous about the prospect of a talking arachnid. They don’t even have lungs, at least not ones that expand or contract or otherwise make any noise. Mr. Bubbles hisses by rubbing her pedipalps together, not by expelling air.

And yet.

“Klukie,” the creature deliberately parrots. “Chid. Hyoo. Tus. Kalk.”

Slowly, carefully. As if… memorizing. Lacking lips, the mispronunciations are unavoidable. If anything, the degree of accuracy shown is absurd.

I’m not always the fastest girl on the uptake. I’m well aware that situational awareness is not exactly on my list of specialties. I can, and have, bumbled my way headfirst into problems that are very obvious in retrospect.

But this? I know where this is going. This is no longer a scientific discovery. This is a science fiction discovery.

…Well, okay, it is actually a scientific discovery. The essence of science is, after all, observation. If observations are contradicting established views of the universe, well, it’s time to clench your anus and expect to either blow everyone’s minds or find out that someone just fucked up the experiment somewhere dumb. But either way, you are wrong, not the universe. So while there’s nothing strictly unscientific about discovering a completely new phylum, it’s unlikely enough to render competing explanations—like aliens or genetic experiments or what have you—not really that silly in comparison.

Of course, I’ll need to do a much more thorough examination of Blubie to determine if they really are unlike any other known species. For all I know, this vocal stuff is just some weird muscular adaptation to book lungs. Yet just in case, before I do any of that, I’m going to figure out how smart this thing is, and I’m going to be very, very nice while I do so. Maybe it’s just parroting, but… well, I’m not going to be the idiot scientist that abuses some hyper-intelligent alien and starts an interplanetary war. What would even be the point of reading fiction if I can’t learn that much?

I reach down into Blubie’s terrarium, offering my arm. Blubie obligingly climbs onto me. Heading over to my counter, I set the creature down, pull out a pan and hotplate, spray some oil on, and carefully observe Blubie watch the process. And it is watching, I notice, always turning to face me without being aggressive, as if it’s genuinely interested in what I’m doing rather than just keeping an eye on a potential threat. I drop some dead crickets I recently caught into the pan, fry them just enough to kill any potential parasites, and then set them down on the counter.

I pick up a fork, skewer one, and eat it. …Crickets are really good for you, don’t judge. Then, I quite deliberately set the fork down by Blubie along with the other cricket I fried.

Blubie stares at me for a bit. Then, it extends the front legs it had been curling up under its shell the whole time, grabs the fork with hidden finger-like structures, and stabs the cricket. Awkwardly, wielding a utensil almost as long as it is, Blubie eats the meal.

Then it puts the fork down, and stares back up at me.

“…You sure aren’t any kind of Earth bug, are you?” I ask.

“Heeeerrrrrthhhhh.”

“Yeah,” I say, pulling out my phone and bringing up a picture of the planet from orbit. I show it. “Earth.”

Blubie taps at the phone. The surface-capacitive screen doesn’t register its chitinous touch, but I set the phone down and poke at whatever the little thing pokes, allowing it to explore at its leisure. It is very clearly intelligent. At least as intelligent as an ape, and if I were a betting girl I’d bet on full sapience. There’s no way this thing is natural, and if humanity has been sitting on the genetic engineering tech to make something like this I’ll eat a bottle of shaving cream.

I am in the same room as an alien.

I can not fuck this up.

…

Consciousness shocks me back to the present. My body is cold on my right side. I must be on the ground. No, wait, I’m sleeping with my left side to the ground, not my right. Or… no, am I sleeping on my back? My back feels really funny.

I open both of my eyes, and then also four more eyes. One of my bodies freezes in confusion while another leaps backwards in terror, knocking my head on the cave wall and waking up Mr. Mooshi in the process, who proceeds to stand up and jostle my third body into adrenaline mode as I nearly fall clean off the giant Mt. Moosh. What the fuck is going on!? So many things are happening at once! Who is this other girl that was sleeping next to me, and why does she look like—

Me. Right. There’s three of me now. EP, EE, and ETB each stand up to get a good stretch, shaking off as much panic as I can. I pick myself up (literally), and head to the mouth of the cave where I can get tinkerbell-me some sunlight. Now that I’m all dry, it’s time to start practicing flight while EP checks the traps for breakfast.

As tempted as I am to just leap off a high place, spread my wings, and gleefully soar into the sky, I suspect I might accidentally do all that without the soar part and with more of a sore part. Gravity is… you know, dangerous?

So, I’ll practice from the ground. Up, up, and away! I attempt a standing jump, which actually launches me crazy high! Then I start beating my wings, and immediately smack myself flat on my back as the thrust launches me parallel to the ground. Thankfully the tall grass— well, tall compared to this me, anyway— catches my fall and things don’t hurt too bad. It doesn’t hurt at all, actually, which is lucky. It’s a good thing I didn’t make that leap! I’m glad I can maintain realistic expectations of how badly I will inevitably screw up.

Yup, believe it or not, flying is really hard!

Maybe I can start with some gliding. Enlisting the help of my own taller self, I lie flat on my own palm, stomach-down, and beat my wings to get a feel for stuff. Then, after mentally preparing for the inevitable consequences, I grab my tiny torso like a paper airplane and flick!

For a few brief moments, I am elated as the air flows by and the ground rushes past, but less than a second later the ground starts rushing towards me and it’s all I can do to twist around and land on my butt instead of my face.

This is going to take a while.

In the meantime, I finish checking all of my traps. Unfortunately, none of them seem to have captured a wayward critter. Though while I get up from checking the last one, out of the corner of one eye I spot a sudden small movement from the ground.

It’s a triloweasel! It quickly ducks back into the hole it had dug in my clearing. I rush over to check on it, but it’s already long gone, only a small tunnel remaining where it used to be. Huh, I wonder what it was doing above ground. Based on its biology, I assumed they’d be exclusively subterranean. That’s also the second one I’ve seen around my cave in as many days. Well, that one was good eats, so I should probably keep an eye out for them.

I cover my pit traps back up. They didn’t work this time, but they might work eventually. In the meantime, what should I do about food? A girl cannot live on trees alone! Or rather, even if I can, I really don’t want to. Although, it would be a lot safer to stick around and stick to sticks. This clearing is a really good spot. Should I stay or should I go?

…Wait. Something about that question seems off. Oh, right! I can do both now.

I can do both! I can do multiple things at once! Like, I know that, obviously. I’ve been doing it, mostly without even thinking. But now I am thinking about it and it’s just… it’s wild. It feels so natural. I can let myself do things now! My mind churns like crazy and I’m still not really focused on anything, but also I am because each body has a brain and each brain can think and execute tasks and I’m just… ahh! I don’t know if this is going to be the best possible thing for my focus issues or the worst possible way to exacerbate it and I’m afraid to find out.

Let’s just save that terror for later, though, shall we? I have a busy schedule that I just made up and wouldn’t you know it, there isn’t any room to pencil in dreading over my mental problems today. Doing my best to fool myself that it’s that easy, I make my choice and divvy up my party. I have Evelyn Experimental mount Mr. Mooshi and direct the both of them towards the river while Evelyn Prime and Evelyn Tinkerbell stay at base to practice flying. Even if that part of me isn’t fully grown, I’m interested to see how EE does in the water, and since I am also running out of water I make sure EE brings the Mooshi-shell bowl. Walking around as EE is super weird, what with the webbed feet and the kind of gross, slimy skin that hadn’t grown into chitin yet. The weirdest part of all is having tentacles, though. Honestly, I keep forgetting about the dang things and surprising myself with them more than anything! What did I think I was going to do with tentacles!? At least EE’s superior perception makes that facet of myself the ideal choice for avoiding acid sloths and other undesirables.

I head out, spending the next hour or so practicing flight with the home team as the away team plods along at Mr. Mooshi’s personal pace. My EE body is still smaller than EP, but now that I think about it, I suppose once I eat enough food that version of me will probably be too big to ride on Mr. Mooshi’s back. This is an unforgivable design flaw.

I make sure to steer my friend far, far away from any acid sloths I see, snatching and munching on any bugs or cool plants I spot along the way. I eat nothing interesting, unfortunately, but as we travel along I suddenly start hearing a rustling noise coming from the south, one that quickly swaps into a cracking, smacking sort of sound as if something is breaking apart a great many branches. It’s far enough away that I can’t see anything moving through the dense forest, and I can’t tell if it’s getting closer or further away.

Shit. Do I give into curiosity, or caution? Well, curiosity or terror, really. Part of me is panicking like crazy, but the other two parts of me are still having fun practicing flight so it feels sort of… distant. It’s a very strange experience, as it’s not like either emotion is lesser, I’m just fully capable of experiencing both simultaneously. I can just do some of the thinking with brains that aren’t currently terrified. I suppose that’s why I find myself creeping closer, despite one of my hearts nearly beating out of my chest. It’s dangerous, but I’ve ultimately concluded it won’t stop being dangerous just because I avoid this opportunity to figure out what it is.

I’m also dimly aware I seem to be noticeably more courageous during any matters regarding potential food, but let’s squash that line of thought for now.

Soon, the noise intensifies, punctuated by disturbing, high-pitched whines from some kind of animal. I collect myself a long and sturdy stick, just in case, before pushing any further through the trees. Eventually, as I know I’m getting close, I peek through some brush and spot a large animal, flailing on the ground and bleeding from dozens of long, shallow cuts. The creature is bipedal, with thick, powerful legs that end in nasty-looking claws. It has no head, its body simply hosting an enormous mouth, lined with gnashing teeth and large enough to swallow me whole. The creature’s four arms are simple and brutal-looking limbs that end in long, spear-like barbs hooked for sticking in prey. They frame the massive mouth in an X pattern, no doubt designed for stabbing into meals and shoving them down the creature’s gullet.

I feel like I am staring at a dinosaur, a tiny and pathetic human utterly helpless against the massive, muscular beast before me. And yet, that horrifying mouth is currently not doing anything other than squealing like a frightened pig as the wounded creature thrashes and spasms on the ground. Each time it shakes, the trees around it shake too. The branches litter the area, and sometimes, during particularly violent throes, more snap off… though I see nothing connecting them to the creature. But there must be something. This massive dinosaur is clearly stuck in a trap.

Up until now, this planet has been mostly peaceful and calm. I mean, there was that time I nearly died, and also that other time I nearly died, but other than that it really hasn’t been super dangerous. I haven’t been attacked by space bears rushing into my cave when I sleep or anything like that, I just accidentally stumble into dangerous territory. I was sort of hoping that there weren’t going to be big scary land predators.

There are very clearly big scary land predators here. I have, up until now, apparently just been lucky. Well… it’s probably not all luck, considering that people run around forests back home all the time and rarely even see a bear or mountain lion, let alone get attacked by one. There’s just a lot more forest than there is hungry bear. Yet here I am now, witnessing a horrifying struggle between some massive predator I’ve never seen before and some sort of force I can’t see at all. One wrong move here could spell swift and painful death.

…Hmm.

Imma throw a rock at it.

It… it’ll be a good idea, I promise. Hiding away from the clearing the monster lies in, I locate a decently-sized stone and give it a hurl. It flies true, but seems to smack into something invisible along its path, causing a tree to shake and the rock to spin a bit off course. It still smacks into the unfortunate, captive monster, which grunts in pain and begins to struggle with new vim. As it does so, the cuts around its body seem to gouge deeper, and milky blood starts to coat a small thread.

This trapped creature is large and intimidating, a head or two taller than my EP body and is certainly much larger than EE is right now. It looks strong enough to stomp a hole in my chest if it wants to, and it’s certainly angry enough to try. Yet looking at it before me, slowly bleeding to death, my terror wars against an intense desire to eat it.

I don’t want to fight. Yet at the same time I can’t bring myself to leave. It’s right there. So vulnerable, so delectable. I want it. My knuckles pale as I clutch my stick with fervent pressure.

I continue to wait, observing the situation as the creature thrashes harder and bleeds more. It reveals more and more threads as it does so, threads so thin not even my superhuman perception can see them from this distance until they become slick with blood. These threads seem to be anchored between the many trees around the area, converging at a point below the trapped creature. I suspect the threads were slack up until the monster walked over them, at which point they tightened into a deadly trap.

Threads this thin and this strong would be as powerful a cutting tool as a sword, yet the trapped monster’s hide is still taking only surface damage. I am clearly out of my league.

I stay anyway. It continues to thrash, and I continue to wait. It’s a struggle of endurance. The monster is too tangled to escape as is, but it’s successfully snapping branches. Either it will eventually free itself enough to escape, or it will die of exhaustion, thirst, hunger, or if it’s too reckless, blood loss.

Snap. More branches fall. Snap. Snap. Snap.

Bonk!

I faceplant yet again. My ETB body is getting better at flying, bit by bit, but I’m staying about the same skill level with landing. It’s okay, though: I’m so incredibly light that hitting the ground doesn’t really seem to hurt very much.

I pick myself up again, both personally and literally with the assistance of my larger body so I can do more “air tunnel practice.” Which if you want to be really technical means I run in a circle with EP and flap my wings with ETB while making airplane noises. Which… make me more aerodynamic. Yes.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see another triloweasel pop out of the ground. It wiggles its tendrils at me, then zoops back underneath. Huh. I wonder what the little guy is up to.

A long way away, I continue to watch the enraged predator struggle in the trap. I’m content to wait… but the more I think about it, the more I realize it’s probably safe to shorten the amount of time I’ll need to wait, as long as I’m careful. With some more skilled rock tosses (I played softball one time), I do my best to piss the creature off a little and get it to struggle harder. It starts cutting itself deeper and deeper, but more and more of the branches start to break as well. It’s hard to count how many of them are even on the ground now.

I toss another rock and it nails the monster right in the tooth. It roars with furious anger, and with a particularly hard spasm snaps off at least ten branches at once, freeing one of its legs! I step back, breath caught in my throat as I fear I may have just royally fucked up, but for all its increased fury a single leg doesn’t seem to be enough to free it. At least for now.

It’s probably not a good idea to devote too much of my mental attention to the triloweasels back at the cave. I am more than a little distracted and more than a lot stressed watching a giant grabby murder mouth with T-rex legs try to escape its bindings. Besides, they’re just cute little bug weasels. Honestly, I hope a bunch of them start hanging around so I can catch some! Maybe for dinner, maybe for a pet. Who knows? I don’t want to hurt them or anything, animal cruelty is super bad, but sometimes a girl has to eat.

Although… now that I think about it, my current plan with the scary monster is basically to torture it in hopes that it will kill itself as a result. As sound of a plan as that might be, it’s also kind of a pretty fucked up one, isn’t it? Why am I doing this? I continue running around in a circle making funny noises as I think about my motivations here. It’s a powerful monster that I can maybe catch for dinner, and that will make me stronger. That’s a good reason, but holy shit it’s also a suffering animal. Why did I forget that? Am I really that ravenous? Do I—

As my thoughts stray, the ground under my foot suddenly isn’t where I expect it to be. EP’s leg lands in a small hole, but the body keeps going. With a sickening crack, pain explodes through my ankle. I fall flat on my face and drop myself, flinging ETB a good distance away.

On one hand, the screaming pain in my body indicates that I have just broken my ankle. On the other hand, at least I landed pretty well this time.

My tiny body looks backwards at my larger self, which is swearing and screaming bloody murder. The pain is horrendous, yet only present in a fraction of what I am. Even as I sob and desperately try to extract my shattered leg from the hole it fell in, the totality of my mind analyzes the situation with a misty calm.

This isn’t one of my pit traps. Those are all on the edge of the clearing where I have, in a display of uncharacteristic intelligence, decided to not run anywhere near. It also isn’t either of the holes I recently saw a triloweasel pop out of, although based on the width and sudden nature of this hole, I can only imagine that it’s triloweasel-dug regardless. Perhaps most damningly, I know for certain that I was looking where I was running, and there was no hole when I stepped there. None that I could see, anyway.

Did… did the weasels set up a pit trap for me?

Yet I don’t have time to focus entirely on this pain! There’s still a giant monster right in front of me, thrashing and struggling as it slowly but surely frees itself. Its free foot catches on threads and kicks, ripping out branch after branch. It’s bleeding harder, but I think it’s winning against whatever holds it down now, and when it escapes it will no doubt be rather pissed at me. Do I run? Or do I try to end it before it can free itself?

I raise my stick, snapping off the tip to try and make it as sharp as possible. I need some food so I can help my body heal its ankle, after all. I move hesitantly forward to stab the giant monster as I crawl hesitantly forward to extract myself from this hole.

Something sharp clamps down on my leg, and I feel it burn like acid.

11 Trial by Acid

Panic shrieks through me, and I have to take a split second to confirm which of my bodies actually got injured before I understand what just happened. It’s Evelyn Prime, my original body back at the cave! Evelyn Experimental is potentially about to free a giant angry space dinosaur, which maybe isn’t my best decision of all time, but even more immediately is the sharp realization that I am getting attacked by subterranean acid monsters.

I feel it start to happen, my ancient enemy rearing its ugly head. As the fear of death fills me my heart beats painfully, my breath catches in ragged gasps, I start to feel dizzy enough to vomit… I’m having a panic attack. And you know what’s fucked up? It’s almost comforting to realize that, like an old friend from home meeting me to say hello. Sure, this is hardly the first time I’ve reacted with panic since I’ve gotten here, but this? This is primo, grade-A panic material because I am going to die. I hate this. I hate this! Why am I here!? Why do I have to do any of this!?

With a scream of agony, my body moves more or less on its own as I pull my shattered ankle out of the hole and quickly begin scrabbling up the hill as fast as I’m able. I’m not thinking straight, and I know it, but I take a step back and start shunting logical thoughts into two other brains, instinctively working to solve the problem. These things are diggers, and while they might be capable of digging through rock it’s going to be a lot slower than digging through dirt. The hill is dirt; grass grows from it. My cave has no plant life within and is solid stone. That is where I need to flee. My three working limbs do a desperate crab crawl in the direction of my home, and while I can be pretty fast when pumping with adrenaline, having all these points of contact with the ground turns out to be a problem.

My arm smashes through a thin layer of dirt and grass and lands hard in another hole, where it is immediately doused with acid. It burns like hell, though thankfully I didn’t break the limb this time so I manage to extract myself and keep fleeing. This acid isn’t anywhere near as fast at burning through my body as that tree sloth acid was, but burn through me it does.

EP isn’t the only me in danger here, though. Evelyn Tinkerbell may be currently unharmed, but unlike my primary body she’s outweighed by the weasels nearly four to one. If that me falls in a hole, I’ll be threatened by a lot more than acid. If there’s a time to get her in the air, it’s now. Come on, wings! Fly! Fly, damn you!

I jump, trying to get into the air. I beat my wings but even if I’m now more skilled than I was five minutes ago, I just end up back on the ground. I jump again, making it a little higher, and then again, soaring above the grass for a heart-stopping moment before falling all the way back down on top of another pit trap.

Despite my light weight the dirt collapses beneath me, and the fun, exciting fairy world I’ve been enjoying collapses with it, crushing me in the dread reality of scale. Clumps of earth I wouldn’t even notice at my usual size smash into my wings as I fall, pelting me painfully as I ultimately crash into the ground half-buried in soil.

It’s dark. I can barely see down here, but I can tell I haven’t fallen into a simple pit with no exits. It’s a tunnel. A crossroad between two tunnels even, each leading off into a pitch-black lattice maze of angry, hissing space monsters. At this size, they are not adorable wiggly trilobites, but enormous and deadly clawed predators. I hear them moving in every direction around me.

One of them hisses furiously, and countless others join in on the sound, advancing from all sides.

A massive crashing noise snaps my split attention all the way over to Evelyn Experimental, a body previously paralyzed for the few moments that have passed since the attack on my home began. Shunting her back into my physical awareness, I realize I have no time to be messing around with giant predators while I can’t even survive ones only slightly bigger than my hand. I need to go back, I need to support myself. I take one last regretful look at the massive, dying beast, rein in my hunger, and start to sprint.

Hopefully that giant fucking monster won’t hunt me down later for throwing all those rocks at it.

It took over an hour for me to get here riding Mr. Mooshi, but if I sprint back I’m going to guess I can cover the distance in ten to fifteen minutes. Is that going to be fast enough to help in my current situation? No, probably not. But I have to try, I can’t be letting myself just do whatever while the rest of me is fucking dying. Evelyn Prime is one of the bodies in danger, after all, and there’s a good chance that might mean when that body dies, all of me dies. A lot of hive minds in fiction work like that, so there’s no way I’m leaving it to chance. Besides, let’s say my original body dies and then the rest of me is fine. What does that mean? Are all the other mes still me if none of the original me is left? Who am I at that point?

Wait, shit, this is not the time for philosophy! It’s time for running, you stupid fucking ADHD brain! Leaving a trail of pheromones so Mr. Mooshi can follow, I book it as fast as I can through the forest. I can’t let myself die! Running at absolute full-tilt, I rush home.

…Heh. “Home.” It isn’t really one, but it’s all I’ve got. Hmm… all I’ve got. What all have I got, anyway? I mean really, I seem to be an alien weapon or something, right? I’m a god damn supertech bio-lab in a woman’s body, a multi-brained hyper-intelligence capable of being three unique individuals at once, minimum. I know everything there is to know about the entire biological structure of animals which just a few days ago I was certain did not exist. Can’t I do better than this? Can’t I beat a few fucking chitinous naked mole rats!?

What else have I got!?

ATP. Serotonin. Adrenaline. Testosterone. It’s a common refrain on the internet, and I’ve heard it before: people are just sacks of chemicals, brains controlling meat mechas. It’s half existential, half meme, poking fun at our fear behind that very real truth. I’ve always figured it was the case. I don’t really see much room in the world for a soul, and certainly no evidence of an intrinsic purpose to any of us. It always felt to me like the soul is just a lie we tell to help convince ourselves that we are not a bundle of biases designed to avoid acknowledging its own meaninglessness. I’ve never believed anything else since I was a child.

I’ve been medicated my entire life. Missing a day of pills means missing a day where I can even feel like a person at all. I remember trying out a new drug back when I was little and literally going insane, becoming in a very real sense a totally different person. I would scream and throw things and try to hurt people for absolutely nonsense reasons, like I was in a dream. I still remember that, and I always will. Sure, they took me off the medication and I was ‘normal’ again. But where is the soul in that? Where is what I define as me if that something is so comically fragile as to be worthless without modern medicine? If the way I think and how I feel and what I do and why I do it are all determined by whatever chemicals float around in my stupid, disgusting body… what else is left for the soul to be in charge of?

The answer is “nothing,” of course. I feel and I understand every chemical in the sack I call myself. I see how they work. Reactions to the environment release preprogrammed compounds into the bloodstream which encourage certain responses, affect certain physical tendencies. Most notably from my current situation, I know that animals on earth react to danger by releasing adrenaline, empowering numerous physical attributes. It functions as a command from the brain to the muscles to go full tilt, consequences be damned, because shit has officially hit the fan.

The use of chemicals, however, is instinctive. Uncontrollable. Normally, the body has to guess how much danger it’s actually in, reacting to both learned and evolutionary variables. A person is not capable of peeking behind the curtain and enabling the sort of recursive self-modification that consciously altering their own brain chemistry would cause.

But I can. I can choose. It’s so obvious now. I am a machine that can build and modify itself at will. I know every chemical, and I can use whichever ones I want. I can feel anything I want, care about anything I want, hate anything I want, love anything I want, and fear anything I want.

I should probably fear this capability more than anything else, if I’m being honest with myself. It is not as though I need to be consciously aware of every process that leads to every thought, and indeed I lack the mental capacity to fully comprehend my own motivations in their entirety. But the potential is there, and in this single moment of clarity, as I dash desperately to save myself from death, I choose to use it.

EE’s limbs fill with power, every limitation normally instilled to regulate energy usage and self damage gone in an instant. My speed nearly doubles, though I will no doubt pay for this when the crisis passes. I shut off EP’s pain receptors entirely, clearing my thoughts and forcefully flushing the panic out of them. Adrenaline pumps through ETB’s mind, granting precious seconds of clarity with which to decide how to avoid impending and otherwise inevitable death.

I make a decision. Out of either efficiency or numb terror, I decline to consciously follow the exact physiological reactions which cause the decision to be made, simply allowing it to arrive out from behind the usual curtain. Perhaps I’m sentimental, perhaps the adrenaline is making me cocky, or perhaps I just don’t want to fucking die, but I make the choice to abandon my prime body’s dash for safety, turn sideways, and roll down the hill.

The roll prevents me from accidentally getting another limb stuck inside the ground, letting me line my body up on an interception course with ETB’s pit. I have an instinctive understanding of where all of me is in relation to my other parts, and with my focus working on a razor’s edge I shoot my hand down the hole, grab onto myself, and pull my tiny body back up to relative safety mere moments before the triloweasels converge on my winged self’s position. Little me pops on big me’s back and I scurry back up the mountain with forearms and knees flat to the ground. The wider surface area prevents me from falling into any more weasel-sized holes, although they do occasionally open up the ground beneath me to spray acid over my body. Still, I make it back to the cave in record time. The higher up I get, the fewer holes I encounter, until eventually I’m safe on the solid stone floor of my shelter. Even if they could open up a hole here, I’d easily be able to see it. And if those tiny weasel bastards want to crawl up on my level to fight me on the surface? I dare them to try.

Many tiny heads (or at least what passes for the heads of triloweasels) pop out of the earth near the mouth of the cave, hissing indignantly. Perhaps they hiss at me, perhaps at each other, perhaps at the world. But soon after they retreat back under the earth.

For now.

…

I just wanted to fly today. God damnit, I just wanted to fucking fly today! Is that too much to ask for? I don’t want to be some horrifying alien fighting to survive on a hostile planet, eating raw meat and plopping out copies of myself! I want to be Evelyn, catching bugs in the forest behind my backyard, posting on entomology forums, getting my ass kicked at Starcraft, making normal human friends and at most maybe watching a movie about terrifying alien death weasels! But now all of a sudden I’m just here and everything is terrible and just when it was starting to look up, just when I had something about this horrifying monster nightmare to look forward to, I can’t do it and then I nearly die in three different places at once!

I start to cry. Tears flow, wasting precious water, my hiccuping sobs probably alerting every horrifying nightmare in the forest to my exact location. Or so my brain insists on thinking, despite the fact that just a few minutes ago I was making a bunch of dumb airplane noises and nothing showed up but I’m hysterical and sad and can’t think straight and that’s just how I always am!

Except… I guess I can change that now.

I can feel it. Back when the threat was imminent, when my body was running by instinct more than anything else, that was somehow the moment when I felt the most clear. When I looked into myself, saw the totality of my being, and found nothing but a sad machine perpetuating its own existence. That’s… a bit number now, a bit less immediate. But it’s no less true. My whole endocrine system, flushing its chemicals around and about, it’s at my command. And as-is, it’s… inefficient. Almost insultingly so. Yeah, I’m panicked, shaky, sad, and useless, but I can clean that all up easily. A few endorphins here and there, and…

No. No! That’s… a bad path.

I’m injured, I’m in pain, and I’m coming off an adrenaline high because I just almost died. Crying is totally normal here. If anything, it’s a good sign, a spark of humanity still flickering in the monstrous body I’ve been given. Even if it’s inefficient or a bit problematic, I don’t want to become the kind of person that just shrugs off near-death experiences, and I certainly don’t want to be getting into the habit of fucking with my own brain during intense emotional meltdowns. That sounds like a quick way to drive myself insane.

Eventually, as I blubber and sob, my third and least hysterical body returns to the hill, muscles torn and burning from being pushed beyond their limits. I get down on my hands and knees again, crawling the final body up the hill to safety. A few weasels send spiteful acid sprays up whatever holes I crawl over, which sends searing pain through my still-growing EE body, devoid of exoskeletal protection as it is. Thankfully, though, most of the triloweasels seem to have left, and the attacks stop completely by the time I make it back up to the cave. All three of me are finally together again. Grass and sticks are all I have to eat, and tears are all I have to drink. Every one of my bodies is sore, exhausted, hungry, and significantly injured.

But they are alive. I’ve made it out alive.

I hope Mr. Mooshi makes it back okay.

Evelyn Prime’s leg is in bad shape. I’m no longer completely shutting off pain from that body, but I’m still numbing most of it because without that it hurts like nothing I’ve ever felt before. Both my internal and external skeleton were shattered before I numbed myself, and afterwards I only fucked my leg up more by using it. My ankle is a wretched mess, my foot is at a completely wrong angle, and my joints are completely shattered. It is pretty damn bad.

I splint myself as well as I can with sticks and grass, but I’m an amateur first aid technician at best. Hopefully my body has some kind of advanced, self-correcting form of regeneration, or I’m probably never walking on that foot again. Knowing what I know about myself though, I probably have pretty good odds for that. Hopefully, EP will be up and moving soon.

I mean… hopefully I’ll be up and moving soon. Like, that’s my original body, my prime body. Sure, I came out of an egg, but it’s still the only body I had at some point so that’s… me. Right?

Ugh. I’m too tired for this ship of Theseus shit. It might not be a good idea to sleep here now that all these tunnel traps are everywhere, but I can’t think of anywhere better. At least the cave itself should be safe. I barely manage to keep my eyes open long enough to wait for Mr. Mooshi to return, watching carefully to ensure he isn’t attacked and safely guiding him inside. He sniffs, smelling my sadness and fear.

He sympathetically barfs up some grass for me.

I smile as much as I’m able, cuddle up to my moosh, and start drifting off to sleep. The sun hasn’t quite set yet, but it doesn’t matter. I can’t keep my eyes open for a single second longer.

12 Aftermath

Ugh… what’s going on? Where am I? Oh yeah, I’m in bed. Nice and warm. Actually, it’s kind of cold. Where are my blankets? What time is it? Oh shit, what time is it!? Damnit, I was up too late last night playing with Blubie and I slept through my alarm! I can’t miss ANOTHER day of class! I burst out of bed and sprint all the way there. Geez, why is it so cold? I slink into class, entering my seat quietly, hoping nobody notices me. Nobody seems to look at me, but they’re all judging me anyway. The teacher is talking about something, probably. I don’t have any pants on.

Unease, slowly mounting to fear. That’s what I’m feeling, largely because it’s the ONLY thing I’m feeling. No sound. No touch. Nothing, so far as I can tell, but an infinite void in all directions. I don’t even feel my own body. I have nothing to do but think. What should I make myself think about? What do I need? I’m hungry. I want to think about food.

I’m flying, high above the trees, the wind soaring past me. Ah, what a beautiful feeling! The wind in my hair and the sun on my wings. I’m a magical faerie, a mighty dragonfly, a free woman, anything I want to be. Because I’m flying, and I can go anywhere I like. My wings buzz, cutting the air and pushing me up, left, right, upside-down and any way I could want or imagine. I’m free. My work has paid off. Finally, I can fly.

I try my best to pull the bottom of my shirt down and cover up my nakedness. For some reason, I decide to start thinking about many kinds of food, and where to find them. I understand the problems I was having before. It’s a good thing nobody saw me come in, even though everyone did. Roots and tubers are good, but they are difficult to find. My wings are designed to attach closer to my body’s center of mass, but that’s not how my human shape works. Sitting right in front of me is that hot guy whose name I don’t know yet. By searching shallow soil near the surface, I can find them, but sometimes I just don’t. My wings attach to my upper back, like the faeries from my childhood had. He turns around and looks at me with a grin, smiling in that way that normally makes me all aflutter, but in this context is just horribly, horribly embarrassing. Worms are plentiful and nutritious. They fly upright, legs dangling down, wings moving them like a hummingbird. He gets up and walks over to me, even though it’s in the middle of class. All the best and largest food is found by hunting. Yet my wings don’t work that way; my wings are designed for a horizontal flight style. “Eat me,” he says. Unfortunately, I am not any good at hunting, though I wish I was. But a woman’s body has a low center of mass, so my wings are trying to hold up a big, dangling weight they’re not designed for.

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yioesfahchooiuuglrudsebeseasmmioomrraeeyfoaopsctwuiesmlealdliossnotwlahubythiiicomaninwn’ottuhfleedcebhleeatsnotynitotht’iulnslgebwmehyeeharusemiiaesnrmoiyifbdhobedodydo?yeiasitnma’mltelsdititraiutsgehglolyresretivobeplrtyyhioinnneekfeiflnisgceaiibenoncutltfatoshrsamstytwoahbrajeteswcaattsimiveteihsnirhnrokerifrniognraeibrsoehuvotiu?slnedoaptnrhdoirbneagibatlteyarklailtlieltct’ohsnetsmiutmmoeeott,ohsseotmtoahpsetsrhaeinandrkteirnny’gatagalanliytnwowigitetnthehbsee—

I wake up screaming. I wake up petrified. I wake up confused. Hunger assaults all three of my selves with equal intensity, drawing a connection between my disparate emotions. Dawn has yet to rise, the world outside my cave still dark. Yet I doubt I’m going to be getting any more sleep, especially considering that I’m still screaming.

Mr. Mooshi waddles over to Evelyn Prime, nuzzling the version of myself most engrossed in the mindless panic of post-nightmare waking. He nuzzles me with the front of his shell, prehensile food-grabbers soothingly caressing my shoulder. He really is just like a big dumb alien dog. A Xenomorph’s best friend. I chuckle a little.

“Thanks, Mr. Mooshi,” I whisper, patting him. “I’m all right now.”

“No, you’re not.” I try to use his Eeyore voice with Evelyn Tinkerbell and it comes out all squeaky. Oh well.

“You’re right, Mr. Mooshi. But… I’m not screaming anymore, so that’s pretty good, right?”

“It is good,” Mr. Mooshi responds in his proper voice. “You were probably attracting something nasty. It would be a shame if we lived through all that just to die because of a nightmare.”

And what a nightmare it was. I can barely remember it now, which all things considered I’m quite thankful for. I think I was dreaming three things at once, but the longer it went on the more muddled and jumbled they all became until it was an incomprehensible dream mush. I really hope that doesn’t keep happening. I have a massive headache.

…Although that might just be dehydration. I never got to drink anything yesterday. EP’s ankle is still a complete mess, and agonizingly painful as long as I let it be. My stick and grass splint broke during the night as well. I remake it as best as I can, then eat most of my stockpile.

With EE, I crawl over towards the cave exit. This body is sore pretty much everywhere, but at least it’s still in working condition. Walking around at night is most likely a profoundly stupid idea—I’m pretty sure acid sloths don’t even have eyes, and the bug weasels definitely don’t, so I would be the only one affected by the darkness—but I’m in such a terrible situation that I might not have a choice. Waiting in the cave is just a slower death, so I very carefully crest the mouth of it to see how much I can see at night.

The answer is ‘not much,’ but what little I do see is beautiful. Lights, flickering on and off in a nebula of colors, fluttering through the air. Fireflies. Dozens and dozens of them, heading west. They’re beautiful.

Quietly, I laugh. Fireflies, of all things. They’re the first bug I ever caught. I mean, why wouldn’t they be? Every toddler wants to catch fireflies. Most adults want to catch fireflies for that matter, but I could never get enough of them. How did they glow? How did they fly? Where did they come from? Where were they during the day? I wanted to know everything about them and their cute little butts and wiggly legs and pudgy faces.

These… things, these aliens, they are not fireflies. Not technically. But looking at them flicker, I still feel that spark of wonder and joy I’ve had since I was two years old. That desire to catch and admire them… that’s me, that’s purely and completely Evelyn. Sure, now I want to eat them too, but…

This is still me. I have to believe that. And watching this, at least for now, I can.

Screw those stupid weasels, I need this. I need to go out and just be myself for a while. No matter how thirsty or sore or inefficient or what have you, this is my moment. How could I possibly not take this? EE and ETB head out together, my tiny self on EE’s shoulder. I recall, one of my dreams was about flying, I think. I don’t… quite remember everything. I remember chastising myself, being frustrated with my poor performance and properly simulating correct body movement in my head… along with some other stuff, I think.

Maybe that was just a dream, like any other. But I’m weird enough that maybe, just maybe, that was real. So let’s see how that dream holds up. Kicking off my own shoulder, I thrum my wings, boosting myself forward. I feel the kick, the imbalance I was struggling with all day yesterday. I compensate immediately, and I… remain airborne.

I hover there for a moment, smiles very slowly creeping up three sets of lips. Up, down, left, right… I zip around the mouth of the cave, wings responding to my will. I’m doing it. I’m doing it! I’m flying!

Laughing, both because I want to and because I couldn’t help myself if I tried, I rush out of the cave and into the swarm of fireflies. While my grounded body grabs them slowly and carefully, trained by practiced movements and years of experience, my airborne self is death on wings. My needle-like claws and vastly superior mobility carve the sky clean of beautiful, glowing bugs. By the time the swarm clears, I have assembled a sizable pile almost resembling a legitimate meal for all three of my bodies. Almost.

I bite into them immediately, of course, and enjoy the feeling of learning bioluminescence.

Munching on bugs like popcorn, I massage my sore self and do my best to think about yesterday without wasting any more water from my eyes. I’m not sure what to do. I suppose, as soon as it’s light out, I need to take Mr. Mooshi and all my selves and head to the river. I lost the bowl I was using for water when I sprinted back to try and save myself, so to give all of my bodies a drink I’ll need to take them all to the river. Besides, splitting up didn’t work well for me last time.

“I’m scared, Mr. Mooshi,” I confess. “Not just of all the evil acid monsters on this stupid planet. Although I’m definitely scared of those. I’m scared of me. I’m scared of losing me. The epiphany I had yesterday… it’s too much. I don’t know what to do with any of it.”

“Then don’t do anything with it,” Mr. Mooshi answers.

I blink.

“What?” I ask him.

“Well, you’re scared of what will happen if you change yourself like that, right?” Mr. Mooshi asks. “You don’t know the right way to use something dangerous and powerful. So don’t use it. Who says you have to?”

Huh. That’s… a good point. Is it really that simple though? I’m not so sure. Still… it’s a plan for now.

“Thanks, Mr. Mooshi.”

He doesn’t answer this time, since he hasn’t actually been answering at all. I think it’s important to keep reminding myself of that. At some point, there’s a good chance I’ll forget. Which is why as soon as I can, I’m going to go east. I have to go east. Surely, surely, there are actual people making that glow. I never thought someone as anxious as I am would so desperately be looking for someone to talk to, but here I am.

Wherever this is.

Eventually, dawn breaks, sending the sky from a gorgeous array of stars to a beautiful painting drawn by a single star, the sunrise comparably gorgeous to the ones I know from back home. I’m not sure what that means, really. Maybe the atmosphere here is comparable? It’s not like they’re exactly the same, but sunrises are often quite different from each other. I have seen many, and the things that make this sunrise stand out are the sea of blood red trees between the horizon and I more so than any part of the sunrise itself. I secure EP onto Mr. Mooshi’s back as best I can, since that body can’t walk, and together the four of us move out.

A now-deeply-rooted terror grips me as we walk down the hill, but no underground acidic horrors strike at us as we leave. For now, things seem safe. Yet I know my home is always a threat now. I will have to deal with the triloweasels at some point, and the sooner the better. That cave is the closest thing I have to a home, after all. I was born there. Three times!

The trip to the river is agonizingly slow with how I feel myself screaming for moisture, but I don’t really have a choice. Mr. Mooshi is the only one strong enough to carry EP all the way there. So I take it slow and safe, avoiding sounds and sloths, before eventually making it to the river. Extra careful to keep a lookout for eels, I drag myselves over and finally get a good drink. As I munch on the plentiful morning bugs and think about what I want to do with the day, a fish jumps out of the water and nearly snaps me up. Not a giant fish, to be clear; it’s ETB that’s almost devoured. But that reminds me: I built EE out of parts from the whip eel. Could she catch me some fish?

I buzz around at a safe altitude, doing my damnedest to ensure that nothing dangerous is nearby in the river before deciding fuck it and taking a running jump.

“Cannonball!”

Ker-sploosh! Frigid water washes over me—over two of me, in fact, as I also manage to soak EP and Mr. Mooshi, eliciting a yelp of surprise from myself. Even Mr. Mooshi seems slightly perturbed, taking a few incredulous steps backwards.

My butt promptly bonks against the bottom of the river. The current is moving at a noticeable clip, but not so much that I can’t sink myself down and blend in with the silt at the bottom. Evelyn Experimental’s body may not have fully formed chitin, and she’s certainly not as large as I expect she will grow to be, but between her camouflage, tentacles, claws, and incredible lung capacity, I hope I can figure out how to actually catch myself a damn fish.

Unfortunately, I have no idea what I’m doing. This is the first time I’ve ever even swum with my weird water ambush body that I thought up for fun and then accidentally gave birth to and wow that sure is a sentence I just thought. I guess I have no choice but to just figure it out.

My eyes are open underwater, which isn’t a problem at all thanks to the whip eel’s visual structure I modded over my own. I also don’t feel any desire to breathe yet, so that’s working. The water is cold, but kind of relaxing. I guess I’ll just… hang out down here until a fish comes by.

I catch some more bugs with ETB in the meantime. This is actually pretty fun. Really fun, even. It’s like, my favorite activity as a human combined with my favorite part of being a scary alien monster. We’re talking chocolate fondue and raspberry cheesecake fun. Day at the beach plus day at the theme park fun! I get to fly, catch bugs, and eat them so I don’t starve! I do have to be careful of robber flies, however. They’re as big as I am, being a tiny fairy and all, and ETB is pretty much a substantially less effective (if much cuter) copy of them. They would probably beat the crap out of me if I tried to catch one with this body, but thankfully they don’t seem interested in hunting me. They prefer smaller prey.

I don’t have anything to do with EP, but that’s fine. My original body still has a horrifyingly fucked-up shattered ankle, so it’s not super fun putting much mental effort into paying attention to that aspect of myself. Though on the subject of paying attention, I suppose one of my bodies should actually be doing that, keeping an eye out for dangers and the like. Today will hopefully be a relaxing day by the river, far away from any scary dinosaurs or whatever the hell traps scary dinosaurs, and certainly far away from any exoskeletal space weasels. The whip eel scared the crap out of me the first time around, but with EE underwater I shouldn’t have the slightest bit of trouble spotting one nearby. That is what makes humans winners, after all: learning from our mistakes. Damn, though, it really is a nice day today. I hope it wi—FISH!

Without even thinking about it, I shoot my arms outward to make a grab at a fish as it passes over me. My claws scratch at its scales, but it gets away. Damn. It looked pretty tasty. Kinda weird, too, but everything here looks weird. And no matter how odd it was, just a quick look at it was enough to get me salivating underwater. How best to catch one… I suppose I should actually use the tentacles I installed for this purpose, for starters. I sort of forgot about them again.

I surface, sucking in a new breath of air and reaching up to collect some bugs that I’m handing off to myself. I tried to fish with a stick before, which didn’t work because I didn’t have a hook. Now, I am the hook. I sink back down to the riverbed and turn around, feet facing upstream. It’s much easier to look down than it is to crane my head back, and the last fish came from up the river. My plan is pretty simple: use a bug to get the fish close, and then grab them. My tentacles are wiggly and brown enough to maybe just seem like a soggy piece of wood, and by holding a bug in one I bet I can make a pretty enticing trap. With my buggy bounty between my fingers, I wait.

It’s pretty boring, and my tentacle quickly gets tired, but the simple joy of simultaneously being a bug-catching fairy is enough to pass the time. Mr. Mooshi is more than content to chew on riverside plants, and every once in a while another Mooshian trundles by to give me a sniff before returning to their business. I pet them whenever they get close enough, and none of them seem to mind. It’s wonderful.

Eventually, a fish wanders by. A weird alien fish. It’s very… cylindrical. A normal fish has a small face, a fat belly, in detail that tapers thinner and thinner at the end, right? Well, this thing has the face, but after that it just stays fat, like a big chubby barrel with no tail. How does it move without a tail? I legitimately can’t tell how it swims, but I suppose that’s a question that’s better answered once it’s inside my mouth.

It sees the bait. It wanders close, carefully. Nibble. Nibble…

In a flash, I reach out for it, but it’s just as fast. I barely miss, and it scurries off downriver. It would seem that fishing is something of a patient sport. Two more fish escape my clutches, but on the fifth attempt my tendrils wrap around my target and my claws sink into its flesh. The fat, tubular animal thrashes like crazy but I get both of my hands sunk into it and hold fast until its struggles cease.

I exit the water and prepare to dig into this brand-new species, doing my absolute best to not think about how desperately I’m looking forward to it.

I bite down, and my other bodies look away.

13 Plans to Focus

I don’t know what I was expecting this fish to be, but it definitely wasn’t a jet engine. Not that I’m complaining; whatever it was I had in mind, this is definitely way cooler.

Rather than acquiring propulsion through lateral water displacement, this aquatic alien—which I’m going to call the piston fish—possesses a series of hollow body cavities running down its full length. Opening the siphons from the front, it can suck water in by expanding the cavity, then close the forward opening and push the water out the back. By alternating all four of these siphons, the fish can maintain constant thrust as it sucks water in through the front with one siphon as it shoots water out behind with the other. The structure reminds me of what little I know of the human heart, although somewhat less complicated and with the pumps facing the same direction. The end result is a swimming system ideal for thin rivers, possessing excellent forwards and backwards acceleration at the cost of subpar turning speed.

Unlike my last aquatic meal, the piston fish also has gills… or at least an equivalent. I don’t really know a whole lot about how gills work on Earth so I can’t compare them to this independently evolved underwater breathing system, but it extracts oxygen from water as the water passes through. The gill organs are in fact within the pistons, allowing constant rapid water influx so the fish never suffocates as long as it is moving.

It should probably go without saying at this point, but that was delicious. I’m fairly certain this is also the same sort of creature that jumped out of the water and nabbed my bait when I tried to fish with a stick. I guess it can get pretty impressive bursts of speed!

Heartened by my fish-catching success, I have EE return to the water to collect more. I spend a few more hours lounging by the river, catching food and nursing my wounds. Out of the several dozen fish that pass by me, I manage to catch ten and eat them whole. I spread them between EE and EP, since ETB has more than enough food from bug collection. Now, with my immediate needs taken care of, I can start to plan.

I am, of course, extremely bad at plans. Long-term thinking has never been my forte, what with the ADHD and anxiety and just sort of not needing the skill. I go to school, I go to class, I do the homework, and I think about everything else later when I’m done playing video games or reading a book or wandering around the forest kidnapping crickets. But the way I figure it, as long as I keep my goals short-term enough, I shouldn’t get too overwhelmed.

All three of my bodies simultaneously start to laugh at that. ‘I shouldn’t get too overwhelmed.’ Oh man, I can really be a hoot sometimes.

“Please try to focus,” Mr. Mooshi insists.

Oh, yeah, he’s right. Where was I? Ah, I remember: short-term goals. First, the space weasels. Apparently, those things are pack hunters that attack animals on the surface. They seem a bit poorly-equipped for that, but perhaps they are just in an evolutionary stage where they are being forced to adapt to a new environment. A reduction of food in the underground ecosystem for some reason, maybe? I can’t really argue with the results, either. I definitely could have died there. Now that I think about it, Mr. Mooshi has no defense against getting slowly whittled away by acid sprays from underneath; maybe the weasels prey on Mooshians. Dang it, all the more reason to hate them!

They have turned my home into a minefield. This is a problem, because I don’t have any idea where else I could find an even slightly safe place to sleep, nor do I have any good landmarks. I want my cave back. I guess I don’t really need it. It might be wise to try and set up some kind of camp by the river instead so I don’t have to make constant trips, but I don’t actually have any idea how to make a shelter, and I am more than a little terrified of getting attacked by eels while I sleep. I have to deal with the weasels.

My second goal is exploring that light. I need to find people. I need to. I’m absolutely going nuts having only Mr. Mooshi to talk to. Who knows how long I’ll have to survive here. A year? I don’t even know how long a year on this planet is! There’s light at night, and I refuse to think about the very real possibility that it is something other than a big colony of sapients.

…Okay, well now I’m thinking about it, actually. Stupid brain. Let’s say it’s not people. What does that mean? What else could it be? An enormous forest fire? Some kind of colony of glowing creatures? Maybe it’s where all of the fireflies I ate come from. Damn, that would be awesome actually. I want to go even more now. I suppose that settles it; even if it’s one of the many things other than people, it’s probably a good idea to explore this planet, despite the danger.

Which means, practically, both of my short-term objectives have the same first step: I need the ability to defend myself. I need to chase off the creatures around my home and be able to maintain defenses against them, and I need to be able to travel without fearing the many dangers of the forest.

I made Evelyn Experimental on accident. I made Evelyn Tinkerbell for fun. It’s time that I expand myself for a more specific purpose. I need to make a body with a job, something that can solve my current problems and overcome anticipated ones.

I continue catching bugs and fish as I think. Am I really up for this? In some abstract way, it feels as though the more me I make, the less me I will become. But if I turn that question around, I’m forced to ask: can I afford to not do this? I need more than simply the capacity to survive day by day by catching every meal as it comes. I need to be proactive, I need to build up stocks of food and be able to protect them, or else I will never progress past the bare basics of survival. I am an omnivore, but meat is both more effective and more appealing. Which means I need to make a body designed to kill.

Even thinking that makes my stomach roil, but it’s hard to argue that train of logic. It’s not ever okay to kill a person. I firmly believe this. Animal cruelty is absolutely a problem at home as well, particularly in regards to the mass breeding and slaughtering of farm animals, and that’s something I have much more complicated feelings on. I think… this is not that. I am stuck alone in the wilderness; it is okay to hunt animals to survive. That’s what all these other animals in the wilderness are doing anyway! It’s fair game, and even if it wasn’t I’m not sure I’d have a choice.

So. A hunter. Immediately, I recognize an obvious flaw in my current body designs in terms of killing other animals. All of my current signs are humanoid, and while humanoids have obviously dominated Earth, they did so by using tools. And sweat I guess, but… that’s off topic. The point is, I am a complete dunce and I can’t figure out how to start a fucking fire, let alone make a weapon more complicated than a stick. I am quite attached to having arms, walking on two legs and using my head rather than my strength to solve problems, but that just isn’t cutting it here.

It’s time to get feral.

“Okay Mr. Mooshi, so I’m going to go full Zergling and discard the pathetic weaknesses of my humanoid form and cool stuff like that. But now what?”

“Narrow it down, of course,” Mr. Mooshi answers impatiently. “Is this going to be a land hunter or a water hunter? Some combination of both?”

“A water hunter would be really cool. I just ate this awesome fish, and I really want to—”

“Don’t forget your goals for making this, Evelyn,” Mr. Mooshi chides.

Oh, right.

“It’s gotta be a land hunter, because my fight against the weasels will be on land and the glowy stuff is probably on land,” I realize.

“Exactly,” Mr. Mooshi agrees.

Well, that’s a good start. Unfortunately, I haven’t actually eaten any land predators. I don’t know if I have a good idea on how to make one. Well, no, I suppose that’s not true. I don’t have the biological basis for one already pre-built in my head, but do I really need that? I know a crap ton about biology and I should have all the individual parts I need to make something functional. So… what should I base it on?

The first thing that comes to mind is a cat. Not a housecat, one of the big cats that are very commonly apex predators of their respective environments. But considering the circumstances…

“I think this is more of a dog situation,” I mutter out loud.

“Because you intend to make multiple and use pack hunting tactics?” Mr. Mooshi asks.

“No, because I really need the positive attitude and energy of a dog friend more than the adorable tsundere softness of a cat friend,” I tell him.

There’s a pause.

“Evelyn, the new body is just going to be you again,” Mr. Mooshi says slowly. “You know that, right?”

“Yeah, yeah of course,” I say, waving him off. “Just like how I’m speaking both sides of this conversation.”

I look down at him for confirmation, but he doesn’t respond. Oh, I mean, of course he doesn’t respond. That’s what I was expecting.

…Will having four bodies make me go crazy four times as fast?

“I don’t think it works like that,” Mr. Mooshi assures me.

Oh, thank goodness. Anyway, dog body. Maybe with some cat-like independence. Evelyn Experimental tosses another dead fish out of the water while I think, and I catch it for munchies. EP gets all food from here on out, since laying an egg is hungry work. I’m not actually sure if my other bodies could do the deed, but Evelyn Tinkerbell is super tiny and Evelyn Experimental is sort of still a kid? At least in terms of physical development. I’m curious to see how quickly that part of me grows now that I am getting some good protein in me rather than just munching sticks.

“Stay on target,” I squeak at myself, flicking EP’s nose with ETB.

Right, right, right. Dog body. I could make it fuzzy, but the only hair I have is my presumably human hair and that just seems weird. Besides, a chitinous body is pretty darn superior given all the body types I have access to. It’s not difficult to take my humanoid skeleton and reshape it into a canine form. The skeletons have the same basic structure, the skeletons of nonhuman mammals mostly just have different bone lengths, shapes, counts, and configurations. I don’t know if my end result is anything like how a dog skeleton actually looks, but it doesn’t really need to be. It’s similar enough and my mental simulations declare it functional.

Now for the extra bits. Firstly, I want this creature to hunt those fucking weasels. Which means it needs to be able to attack them while they are inside tunnels. As far as I’m concerned, this is the easy part. Whip eel tendrils are fast and thin enough to shoot down a tunnel and snatch something before it can scurry away, and I can use the triloweasel’s very own advanced whisker structures to be able to aim and attack with such a tendril without being able to see down the tunnel. There’s no good reason to not make this tendril the tongue, since I want it to pull my target into my mouth anyway. Like a cat or dog, biting things is going to be my main way of killing them, so that’s just efficient.

Last and not least, for a bit of ironic justice, I can make the teeth of my dog body out of a similar substance to triloweasel claws and give them the ability to produce acid. From my first contact on this stupid planet, I have decided that I really hate acid. With my luck, most creatures here have evolved it somehow, which would just be a pain in the ass. But while I have the ability to produce it, I may as well use it. No doubt acid is useful for a lot of things if so many creatures opted to evolve it.

Okay… I think that’s a design set. Now I just need to figure out the best place to lay the egg before I—oh, oh no, I feel it growing oh shit why didn’t I think of this!?

I buzz over and jump out of the water, helping myself off of Mr. Mooshi and quickly towards the best sight-lined part of the riverbank I can find. I didn’t think this through at all! If I don’t have my cave, then where am I going to safely lay an egg? The riverbank is doubtlessly going to have all sorts of creatures stopping by for a drink, and some of them are absolutely going to want to eat delicious juicy eggs!

Mr. Mooshi wiggles his feeding tendrils in distress, smelling concerned for me. Oh yeah! The Mooshians might not be able to get me any food, but they are fantastic friends and ideal defenders. Setting myself down and mentally preparing to unhinge and drop an egg once more (which mostly just amounts to doing absolutely everything in my power to not think about it), I focus on expelling a complicated array of scents that will draw the Mooshians to my aid. Sure enough, three more of them slowly waddle over to form an impregnable wall of Moosh so that I can hopefully spook off any predators that decide to get too close.

Eventually, the deed is done. Exhausted and hungry again (at least in one of my bodies, which is kind of an odd feeling), I go back to fishing and spend the entire rest of the day gathering enough meat to make yet another me if necessary, as well as feed my new body when it hatches. It’s boring work, but I know it’s necessary. With little to do but wait by the river, I watch the hours pass as many creatures I’ve never seen before wander by for a sippy. A small, six-legged fuzzy creature, the same red color as the grass, scurries up to the water with undulating movements, its long ears flat against the back of its body all the way until it starts to drink, at which point they shoot upwards to detect any incoming motion. The dome-headed bat-eagle I saw a while ago returns as well, dropping from the sky to steal a fish swimming too close to the surface. Speaking of fish, I acquire many more kinds, although very few of them have interesting attributes the piston fish did not. The most notable was a fish that swam in much the same style as I’m used to on Earth rather than the frankly much more interesting siphon jet. A few of the fish had toxins in their skin, but none of them seemed to have any detrimental effect on me and I have no real way of knowing how dangerous they would be to any other predator if ingested. I might be able to run a few simulations in my head to figure it out, but frankly I feel like designing a body that produces deadly poison is just sort of asking fate to get that body eaten. Not that I believe in fate, but… you know, dress for success. Build the body that survives how I want to survive, not the body that dies how I fear to die.

Before long night starts to fall, and I prepare myself to sleep within fort Mooshi. My relatively lifeless cave is a stark contrast to the teeming activity of the riverbank. I’ll just have to trust that no predator is going to want to mess with four Mooshians plus whatever the hell I am. Safety in numbers, and all that. With the exception of that creature I found trapped in wires, Mooshians are the largest land animal I’ve encountered here. Even that big thing isn’t going to want to mess with a group of them.

That thought, no matter how logical, is little comfort. Huddled around my own unborn self under the open stars, the terror of the night keeps me brutally awake. EE and ETB are exhausted from working all day, but EP, despite the incredible effort of making another one of myself, has done little else but sit around waiting for a broken ankle to heal. It’s just not enough exhaustion to fight against the buildup of anxiety that has been growing since the day I first found myself here. Alone at night, trying to sleep, the worst kind of panic attack finally hits me.

There’s no immediate threat. Nothing is attacking me other than my own mind, but attack me it does. What if I don’t make it out? What if I never see my family again? What if I die here? What if I live here but never escape? What if there is nothing here, no other people and no possible salvation? What if I’m trapped forever and I go insane, turning myself into something so far from human that nothing of what I am now remains when some spacefaring race finds me raving and indomitable thousands of years from now?

Nothing but spirals of fear on fear are left in my head, trapped in a triple nightmare of my own devising. Any logical resolution is met with an instant counter, never sounding reassuring to my maddened mind. My heart rate is far too fast for sleep, my bodies each on the verge of tears. In a horrible sort of way, I’m lucky this hasn’t happened sooner. Not even medication ever totally stopped these moments from consuming my nights, and now I’m not only missing drugs but I have far fewer safety nets in general. I have no one, nothing. Not a stuffed animal to hold, not a mother to dial and call… in fact, remembering those things only adds to the panic that consumes me, hours and hours into the night, plagued by the ever-present temptation to just dig metaphorical fingers into my brain and shut it all off.

I don’t know when I finally become too incoherent to remain awake, but I know I’m not likely to be rested tomorrow.

14 Speak

Waking up is a procedure of increasing confusion, wherein I slowly begin to acknowledge the uncomfortable position of my body parts, certain that each one could not possibly be more absurd than the next, and repeatedly being proven wrong.

I am woken first by a mild pain in my shoulder, which is rightfully protesting having to support the weight of my entire body. I try to adjust slightly and flop face-first into the pool of drool I’ve apparently been cultivating overnight. I attempt to disengage from the disgusting puddle, but my legs are too tangled up with the arm I’m sleeping on to reposition easily. Ugh. Screw it, I’m too tired for this. Maybe I can just shuffle downward under the covers? Hmm. There don’t seem to be any covers. I am on the floor. My other, less-trapped arm is sprawled in the opposite direction of my legs, stretched away from my body as if attached to a torture rack. I suppose it’s not the weirdest position I’ve passed out on the floor in, but it’s up there. I remember one time I was up so late wiki walking I ended up having to buy a new keyboard after my face crushed it and dumped saliva into the circuit board.

I should probably get up and figure out what I broke this time.

Opening my eyes I start to yawn and stretch, but as I move my free arm something yelps in surprise and pinches my finger.

“Ow,” I say, without much feeling.

This isn’t a particularly surprising occurrence thanks to my roommate, Mr. Bubbles. Craning my neck to check on her, I glance instead at a bright blue beetle-like creature grasping my finger in its forelimb and using it to poke at a cell phone.

Ah, right. There’s an alien in my house.

“Hey Blubie, can I have my finger back?” I mumble, blinking exhaustion from my eyes.

Obediently, the creature drops my hand and scuttles backward to face me as I extract myself from the mess of my dorm room floor, yawning mightily.

“Sorry, Blubie. I guess I fell asleep. I hope you, um, looked up nice things on my phone?”

I retrieve the device, which I apparently had the sense to plug-in before passing out. Hopefully the thing hasn’t already stumbled on a Wikipedia page about nuclear weapons or the Holocaust and decided that my whole species has to die.

After stretching, I sit down next to Blubie, carefully making sure to place the phone where they can see it, and scan through the history. I could do it privately, but that seems… stupid. It’s an untested hypothesis that Blubie is an alien, sure, but it’s* something *super smart. The last thing I want is to keep secrets from it. That never goes well in the books.

I sigh with relief as my browser history reveals no forays into the darkest mistakes of human existence. Judging by the number of open apps, Blubie poked through more or less my entire phone before beating my high score in Flappy Bird and opening five tabs of Google Earth. Nothing evil about that, thank goodness. My Flappy Bird high score was garbage and Google Earth is cool as fuck. One of the tabs is showing the street view of the very dorm building we’re both currently inside, which is about as good of a confirmation of intelligence as I can think of.

“I had initially feared there was a constant, real-time surveillance system,” says a female voice I’ve never heard before, “but it’s just pictures, isn’t it? Taken manually, by a ground team that traveled the world. The dedication is laudable.”

I slowly turn my head to give Blubie an incredulous, open-mouthed stare.

“Hello,” she(?) says, and waves a claw.

“You, um…” I stutter, the words catching in my throat. I have to swallow a few times before they feel safe enough to come out. “You picked up English fast.”

“Yes,” she agrees, “not being able to communicate was a hassle and this body was poorly optimized for pronunciation. So, I acquired more detailed linguistic knowledge and restructured my vocal cords overnight.”

“Oh, uh,” I stammer, a thousand million thoughts ricocheting around the inside of my skull. So many questions, so many fears, so many horrifyingly important things which, if ignored, might just screw over everyone forever if I fail to ask in just the right way. Yet the one thing that ends up blurting itself out of my stupid mouth is:

“Would you like to be my alien bug friend?”

A moment of terrifying silence passes. If Blubie could blink, I suspect she’d do it very slowly right about now.

“Uh, um, I mean, if you don’t want to that’s okay…” I continue to fall over my words like a hopeless idiot I am. Stupid, stupid, stupid!

“You have been kind, helpful, and insightful in our interactions so far, Evelyn,” she says. “I would love to be your friend. Although, I do wish to point out that my name is not ‘Blubie.’ It is Tleshkinat Tarakanora Se Ktahn-Hashlenesa.”

Completely overwhelmed, I have absolutely no idea what to say to that… so the stupidest possible option succumbs to gravity and falls out of my mouth.

“That is very long,” I point out.

The hyper-intelligent super-bug starts to make a horrible, trilled screeching noise and for a few moments I am certain my life is about to end before I realize she’s actually laughing.

“I suppose it must seem that way,” the alien admits. “Your culture seems to prefer much shorter ones, although if I’m correct that seems to result in a lot of people with precisely the same designation. That seems rather more confusing to me, but since we are friends I would be honored to let you call me Tara.”

“U-um, okay!” I manage to blurt out, ears still ringing. “You can call me Eve if you want to! I promise I’ll memorize your name as soon as I can!”

Tara laughs again, a startling and screechy sound that is still unmistakably joy.

“Tleshkinat Tarakanora Se Ktahn-Hashlenesa. I will say it as many times as you wish.”

I’m not sure that will help.

“Can you, uh, spell it?”

“In your language?” She taps a leg in thought. “…Maybe?”

This is so surreal. It’s difficult to believe I’m not dreaming, with something so impossible sitting in front of me. Talking to me. I don’t understand how any of this could have happened, I have so many questions it’s paralyzing. And yet this talking bug just agreed to be my friend.

It’s just begun, but this is absolutely, without question, the best day of my entire life.

…

I wake up, and immediately bonk my nose on the inside of an eggshell. All my bodies spasm simultaneously, waking the Mooshians surrounding me up with a jolt. Holy shit, okay, I have a fourth brain now. I figured this would get a little easier after the third, but it’s still weird as fuck. Thankfully, the disorientation quickly passes as all of my heads help each other get a handle on things. Evelyn Experimental helps smash the egg of my new body, and I emerge fully formed, though admittedly covered in gross fluid. Blinking with my new set of eyes, I pad around a bit on all fours, extending my ridiculously long tongue to slurp up the egg juice still clinging to me before devouring the rest of my egg.

I regard my form carefully as I stretch and move, pacing once my meal is done so I can get a handle on myself. Honestly, it feels kind of awesome. I love how it moves, how it feels… seeing this creature, built from no base other than my own ingenuity, fills me with the kind of pride I’ve never experienced before. I’m a bit worried that pride stems from new and foreign instincts, but after the shit sleep I got I feel like today I’m going to need every victory that I can get.

I am a hairless, armored beast, lean like a jackal and quick like a panther. Although it’s a bit strange to see completely humanoid eyes wedged in the middle of an insectoid, vaguely canine-shaped body that I forgot to add a tail to. Honestly, to someone that’s not a bug lover, the body might be kind of horrifying and disgusting?

Nah, it’s cute.

“You are officially named Evelyn Bork!” I decree to myself. “Roll over!”

I roll over.

“Okay me, now shake!”

I hold out a clawed bug foot and shake it in my clawed bug hand.

“Good job, me! Heel!”

I run around in a circle and keep pace with myself, careful to not stray too close to the river.

“Perfect! Now speak!”

“Woof,” I say using completely unchanged human vocal chords.

“Great! Now never speak again! That was really disturbing!”

“Yeah, this is kind of getting super weird,” I agree, in direct violation of my own command.

“Bad Evelyn Bork! No biscuit!”

I bear my teeth at myself and growl, then all my bodies burst out in laughter with each other. Being silly to make myself feel better is a tried-and-true tactic! Now that I’m not on the verge of crying anymore, I should probably do some of the actually important things I know I need to be doing. First things first: hunting with my new body.

The weasels must go. Before I fight something like that though, there’s something else I thought up as the perfect test run of the mighty Evelyn Bork. The whole time I’ve been here, since just after the very first moments of hatching, the forest has filled me with fear. And all of it, even more than the threat of big scary space dinosaurs, is that one little stealthy son of a bitch that nearly killed me with drool.

Acid sloths are nasty. I hate them. With their insane armor-melting acid, tricky camouflage, and no apparent mobility, they seem specialized in burning through heavily armored, slow-moving targets with bad perceptive abilities. You know, like the greatest creatures of all time, the perfect and wonderful Mooshians! This makes acid sloths my ultimate archnemesis, striking fear from above into my tattered, trembling heart. But now, the tables have turned.

Excellent perception? Check. Their camouflage is worthless against me. Climbing claws? Check. I should be able to run up a tree like a cat, so hiding up there won’t save them. Deadly, neck snapping bite? Check and triple check.

The time for revenge is now. I snap EB a quick salute.

“Go, my child. Destroy them with the wrath of your cute doggo revenge.”

And then I sprint into the forest. It’s not at all difficult to find an acid sloth. The damn things are everywhere, somehow, even though I’ve never actually seen them catch anything. Slowly and carefully, I approach the tree of my target. It doesn’t seem to have noticed me, although it’s a bit difficult to tell considering that the freaky thing has no face. It’s like half sloth, half tardigrade, no head other than a horrible, acid-dripping circular maw.

I start to climb up, and as soon as I touch the tree it reacts, turning to face me. I freeze. How did it… ah, right, it doesn’t have any eyes. It probably senses prey through vibrations, possibly resonating through the tree.

I slink around to the opposite side of the trunk and resume my climb. This won’t stop it from ‘seeing’ me if my hunch is correct, but it will certainly stop it from spitting acid at me without burning through the whole trunk that supports its home. I doubt something as lazy as this creature is fast enough to reposition before I can do the same, so I should have a solid shield on my ascent. Slowly, I crawl up. When I reach its height, I decide to play it safe. I have time, and I don’t want to risk getting any acid on my shiny new body if I don’t have to.

So, I wait.

…And wait. EE manages to catch a fish, and that’s about the only excitement that happens during this dull stare down between me and a creature with no eyes. I bet there’s probably hundreds of animals just in this forest alone that I haven’t seen yet, but one thing of particular note I haven’t seen is a non-flying, non-sloth arboreal predator. The large eagle-bat I saw probably hunts these sloth things, assuming it manages to spot one, but something that climbs up from below and hangs out in the branches? Nothing. I suppose if such a thing were around and inclined to eat sloths, there certainly wouldn’t be this many sloths in the forest. In other words, if I’m correct, this thing has absolutely no idea what I am.

So eventually, as I’d hoped, it decides I must not be a threat and turns it’s mouth back towards the ground.

That’s the worst and last decision it ever makes.

Flicking my tongue out at it, I grab on faster than a blink and whip it backwards into my waiting jaws. Chomp! This thing doesn’t really seem to have a neck, so I take my best guess as to what a good weak point is and just bite as hard as I can. Unfortunately I seem to have guessed wrong, because the sloth screeches in pain and starts to flail inside my mouth instead of dying.

Oh well.

It tries to twist around and spit at me, but I shake it hard enough to give the damn thing a concussion, smash it into the trunk of the tree, then give it the tiniest toss upward so I can reorient my fangs and chomp again in a new spot. This little sloth is less than a quarter of my size; as soon as I had my mouth around it, it never stood a chance. Almost immediately after the second bite, it stops struggling.

Its blood is sour, and tastes wonderful.

I sprint back to Fort Mooshi, although the formation has mostly dissolved as the Mooshians slowly plodded off to munch on grass. During the day with my bodies awake it’s still probably a safe place to chow down. I don’t want to risk scavengers coming by while I tear into my winnings alone. Once there, I dig in. If it’s any more difficult to pick through the pieces of this fresh corpse with paws instead of fingers, I don’t seem to notice.

As I’d hoped, the experience is heavenly. I am overjoyed to realize that the sloth has particularly acid-resistant tissue lining a significant amount of its body. It’s not perfect, not by a longshot, but I can implement it into nearly any organ design… including skin and chitin.

Less exciting, but definitely noteworthy, is the structure and method of creation governing the acid sloth’s incredibly potent chemical weapon. Even with its own resistance, the substance is so dangerous the sloth is unable to store the pure form inside its body. Instead, the creature’s throat sprays a multitude of chemicals into its mouth, which are mixed together in a chemical reaction that forms the acid the sloth ultimately spits. Every time it does this, the creature suffers a severe acid burn inside its own gullet, tolerated only by the efficiency through which the sloth can heal and the rarity by which it needs to eat. Still, I’ve seen the effectiveness of this acid firsthand, and I doubt I would need more than a few good sprays to kill just about anything.

The last interesting aspect of this hateful creature’s biology is its incredibly low metabolism. Hoping something walks underneath it isn’t a particularly effective hunting strategy, but because it never moves it hardly ever needs to eat anyway. The redundancies and incredible minute optimizations of how it uses and stores food are in many ways applicable to any body I make, which should make all food more efficient, even if only by a little bit. I could also just directly use every part of this metabolic system to make a body that just kind of never moves but doesn’t have to eat more than once a month. Like a plant that I give meat to, or something.

Ah, so useful, so delicious. Vengeance is sweet. Well, okay, technically in this case it’s sour, but still. My bug-dog body is awesome, even if it barks like a total weirdo. High off my victory, I briefly consider completely genociding in the entire acid sloth population in a one-mile radius, and decide that while that is a very great idea in almost every way, genocide is actually bad. I should probably figure out what’s in a one-mile radius though, since that’s at least partially what I made this dog-me for.

One mystery that has been pricking at the back of my brains for a while is “what the heck caught that giant spooky dinosaur?” I never ended up seeing where the sharp threads holding it were coming from. It’s possible that it could be a trap laid by a sapient species, or maybe it’s a giant murder spider. …Shoot, I don’t actually know which one of those things I would want to see more. It’s not too far away from the river, so I figure I should go check it out. I send EB and EE, in case I need hands.

Genocide aside, I still kill a sloth or two along the way because fuck those things. Now that I’m paying attention to it, EE looks substantially taller than she did yesterday, probably thanks to feasting on so many space trout. Which is good! It looks like as long as I have enough food, I can grow about as crazy fast as I heal. Although EE isn’t quite how she’s supposed to be, still lacking chitin, I definitely feel a lot stronger. Hopefully I won’t need that advantage, but I’m sure I will be happy I have it when I inevitably do.

…Yeah, yeah. I’m eating crow on the superstrength thing. Sue me. Oh wait, I am immune to all legal action due to being in motherfucking outer space. Take that, government! You can’t arrest me if I’m on another planet!

Anyway, I still make it to the clearing, only stopping a few times to enact delicious justice on Mooshian-murdering menaces along the way. The clearing looks more or less how I found it the first time, shattered branches scattered in a circle around where the extraterrestrial dinosaur used to be. It’s a mostly circular area, at least twenty feet wide. There is no longer a big scary dinosaur, and with its absence I immediately notice that there aren’t any other plants growing in the clearing, not even grass. Ominous!

Right, well, first things first, I look up. Unfortunately, I don’t see an enormous adorable spider, only the remains of the tree branches that haven’t yet been shattered. No hints there. Carefully heading over to the outermost part of the clearing, I feel around at the shattered branches, trying to find some of that thread. It was super strong, so I bet I could make a kick ass fishing line or something like that with it… except I can’t find any. Where did it all go?

It’s gonna be a person! Why else would someone collect all this thread after using it? I can’t see the trap, but maybe I can activate it? Grabbing a stick and waving it around, I managed to find a few threads attached to the trees around me, slack rather than taut. They are crazy difficult to see, but they’re definitely still here, set up once again.

I grab a small rock and chuck it. When that does nothing, I find myself a really big rock. With a legendary yeet, I hurl that stone right smack dab into the middle of the clearing, where it hits with a mighty thud. At the very instant of impact, the threads all pull tight, actually lifting the stone slightly off the ground. With less giant thrashing monster in the way, it’s clear that the threads form an upside down pyramid shape, with the bottom of the pyramid being where the threads attach to the surrounding canopy of trees, and the top being the point just below the ground where they all seem to converge. What pushes up the rock is how close together all of the threads are at that tip.

I wait. Just to be certain, I spend a couple minutes of intense silence waiting for someone to come and check the trap. But just as I start to think I’ll have to stay here all day to catch them, two enormous lips suddenly consume the entire ground from below, swallowing the stone whole. I don’t see the full size of the creature, but judging by how it’s mouth alone encompasses the entire clearing, I’m not sure I want to.

Hmm.

I see.

Welp, fuck this!

I turn around and skedaddle. Maybe if I shove bucketfuls of acid down its throat I could… haha holy shit no, I would need so much acid. I resolve to avoid all clearings like that in the future, and place this titanic terror in a firm but low, low, low spot on my to-eat list.

Honestly, acid might be a really shitty idea anyway. Not because it won’t kill—enough acid will probably kill anything—but it would do so via the complete cellular destruction of a significant percentage of the target’s body. My mouth can extrapolate pretty well if something is smashed, stabbed, or cut in half. Total organ decomposition, however… that might be a little bit harder.

Meh, problems for later. I sure have more than enough problems for now. The important thing is that the creation of my awesome anti-sloth doggo body is a great success so far! Now I just need to figure out if it’s anti-weasel, too. Sloths don’t seem to be fast enough breeders to count as a sustainable food source, but for the immediate future they are numerous and likely a very solid food source. A big load off my shoulders to be sure; not only am I going to have plenty to eat between fish and sloths and whatever else I can hunt with EB, but I don’t have to worry about acidic drop bears anymore!

…Oh my god, am I in space Australia? Holy shit, I’m in space Australia. Damn it!

Well, that settles it. I need more offensive power and I need better scouting capabilities. I have a combat body and scout body ready and designed. I think it might just be time to take off the kid gloves. I am… frightened of what I am about to do. For many reasons, some better than others. Perhaps I only have the courage to do this because my failure to sleep more than a few hours last night has left me with zero fucks to give. But ding dang darn it, I have goals and the capacity to achieve them. Let’s do it. I am going to find other people.

A couple of feasts later, I am the proud owner of a new Evelyn Bork egg… and the eggs of ten new Evelyn Tinkerbells.

15 Defiance

Okay. Okay! Things are progressing nicely! Evelyn Bork has managed to catch a decent amount of food with which to get her impending sister, Evelyn Bork 2, quickly up to speed. Then, I’ll see how the pair of them do against the weasels plaguing my home. Evelyn Experimental continues to get me a steady supply of fish and Evelyn Tinkerbell is just really fun to be. I’m not totally sure how having ten more of that body is going to feel, but I guess I’ll just—

AaaAaAaAAAAAaaaaaaGaGaaaagh!

Everything suddenly goes dizzy, all of my selves falling to the ground as ten more brains simultaneously enter my collective consciousness, nearly quadrupling my prior number. The original Evelyn Tinkerbell falls out of the sky and lands in the river. I barely manage to fight through the disorientation and save myself with EE as my mind sputters like an old car trying to re-fire the ignition. Yet second by second, my mind starts to take stock. One, two, three, four… all accounted for.

And just like that, things start running smoothly again.

My mind, in essence, is now something like a fourteen-core parallel processor. Not all of those cores are the same size or strength, but they are nonetheless legion. Despite breaking out of ten different eggs in ten different ways mere seconds after expanding my consciousness to absurd levels, things just feel natural. No strain, no distraction, just a whole lot of me. If anything, my thoughts seem clearer, easier to call on.

After a lifetime of struggling with serious mental issues, simply thinking that and being able to believe it almost makes me cry.

All ten of my new ETBs step out of my eggshells and look at each other. They’re all completely identical, which is kind of weird, but they’re also all me so I guess it makes sense. It’s not like I’m going to confuse who is who. All of my selves blow raspberries at each other, thumbs to their temples and fingers wiggling. My larger selves all giggle. I may be a terrifying monster, but at least I’m a fun monster! As soon as I’ve eaten enough food and baked in the sun long enough to dry off, it’s time to take my squad to the air.

“All wings!” I announce to the sky, “Report in!”

“Evelyn Ten, standing by!”

“Evelyn Seven, standing by!”

“Evelyn Three, standing by!”

“Evelyn Six, standing by!”

“Evelyn Nine, standing by!”

“Evelyn Two, standing by!”

“Evelyn Eleven, standing by!”

“Evelyn Five, standing by!”

“Lock S-Foils in attack position! Reewwwww!”

Flying is awesome. When I first started flying I was afraid I’d eventually tire of it, but it turns out that eleven of me flying at once, in formation, is just eleven times as awesome. It’s the kind of thing that has so much subtlety and nuance to how I do it that I doubt I’ll ever truly master the experience, even with a thousand bodies. Each wing beat is a hundred micro-decisions on breadth, angle, force… and I’m flapping almost two thousand times a minute! The wind is at my back as the fearsome and courageous Squad Evelyn sally forth, cackling wildly while I do flips and barrel rolls and loop-de-loops.

At some point I decide I should probably do something productive and fly up as high as I can go, really get a bird’s eye view of the place, so to speak. I would have done so earlier, but I was afraid of screwing something up and falling to my death. With this many of me, however, I could now probably catch myself. Not that I expect I’ll screw up the flight.

I shoot Evelyn Five upwards (it has to be number five, she’s the main character) and it starts getting very cold, very fast. Thanks to my incredibly detailed control over my own internal systems, I have an innate ability to regulate body temperature… but a tiny insect body simply can’t generate heat faster than I start to lose it. Still, I can get a pretty good gander of the local geography at a comfortable altitude.

The mountains to the north are breathtaking. They’re a pale white where vegetation doesn’t cover them, even below the snow-capped tips. Dark sections of various sizes dot the cliffs—holes, I realize. Massive chasms and chambers snaking through the interior of the mountains. Great natural bridges span between some of the lower peaks, hanging stalactites in the open air. Even back when I was looking at them through the trees of the forest, they struck me as frighteningly similar to a massive skeleton. The resemblance is even more uncanny now that I see them in full, which quickly starts a mild panic attack. There’s no way. Right? A megafauna of that size would be very, very impossible. As I continue to stare, I slowly start to calm down to reassure myself no, this isn’t actually a skeleton the size of a mountain. There’s no discernible anatomy from peak to peak, just a series of huge white chunks of rock, some of which are incidentally hollowed out like skulls or rib cages which cross through the island.

Incidentally, I do indeed seem to be on an island. Either that or a peninsula; I cannot see past the mountain range, but to the east, west, and south I see a body of water which must be the ocean. At least… I sure hope it’s water. Maybe it’s just the distance, but from up here the liquid seems kind of… purply.

To the west, the trees seem to get darker, thicker, and much, much taller. A far greater variety of plant life is obvious even at a distance. They’re so far away, yet I can still clearly see how much taller they get than the trees nearby. They must be truly massive. The sense of distance and scale is awe-inspiring.

There isn’t much of interest to the south. The forest seems to get thicker, but none of the giant super-trees seem to grow in that direction. To the east, though, to the place the glow of the night comes from, I see color. Color and clouds. A light fog rolls upwards from the ground, a translucent barrier which looks like a waterfall in reverse. Beyond it, vibrant purples, yellows, blues, and greens cover the sparse patches of ground I glimpse between twisting, net-like branches and vines, like a dark web cast over the ground. Within the heart of the web, barely visible in the daylight, something glows. Something… alien.

I drift downward to rejoin my other selves, and pain explodes through my senses. I feel my body snap, a jolt of impossibly fast movement crashing into me. Out of the corner of many of my eyes I watch a streak of movement crash to the ground, and the next thing I know I am pinned on my back. The pain in my injured body’s legs suddenly goes numb.

Looking up from and down at the scene of the impact, I see myself at the mercy of one of the dome-headed fuzzy flying creatures I saw by the river. Covered in poofy fur, its bat-like wings are stretched outward for balance, its full wingspan longer than EP is tall. Meanwhile my pinned body is barely the size of EP’s thumb, completely trapped underneath its talons. On either side of the dark, hairless dome it has in place of a neck or head, pointy, fuzzy ears adorn its shoulders, sticking upwards. The monster’s mouth is on its chest, and I watch in a split second of painless horror as it pulls my tiny leg off with its free foot before dropping it down its gullet.

My leg is gone. It ate my leg.

Panic overwhelms me instantly, all of my selves frozen for a fraction of a second that stretches to forever. Then, I start to scream, and the bird immediately responds by kicking me in the face. I feel it, instant by instant. The chitin cracking, smashing into tiny shards. The force carries through, vibrating my brain in disorienting eternity before my exoskeletal faux skull bursts like a raspberry and I die.

I fucking die.

Contact with the body is lost. My legs had been paralyzed but my head was not so lucky. It hurt unlike anything I had experienced, an immortal memory of agony to haunt me, soon joined by the sight of the bird peeling apart my shattered face to crunch down bits and pieces at a time.

It’s quite easy to recognize the organs it pulls out. After all, I designed them. Yet as I take in the macabre show, terror and shock flowing through me like blood, a little prickle in the back of my mind finds a voice, one of my flying selves speaking up.

“…Am I just going to let it mutilate me until there’s nothing left for a funeral?”

Many sets of eyes narrow at that. Adrenaline is already pumping through me, and I encourage it. Shape it. Start to think. No. No, I don’t think I will let it do anything of the sort. I am not planning to let this planet keep kicking my shit around forever. May as well take that first step today.

As EB, I burst into action, dashing my deadly dog-body towards the scene as fast as I’m able. I’d been out hunting and my new EB hasn’t quite hatched yet, taking much more time to form than I don’t want to just sit and wait for myself to catch up, however. Even with all ten of my Tinkerbell bodies combined, it far outclasses me by weight. But if I can just gang up on and injure a single wing, the fight is over. I’m mad all of a sudden, a rare emotion for me. I want to recover that body! I am not for eating!

“I am the one that eats!” I squeak-roar, blitzing the murderer from all sides as adrenaline flows through me.

Then pain smashes into me again, almost immediately. A second dome-headed bat crashes into another one of my bodies, killing one of me instantly by smashing it against the trunk of the tree, flattened organs popping out the sides of my tiny torso like a blood-filled piñata. Two more bodies are blown off course by the wind of the creature’s passing alone, my original target taking flight and focusing on the swarm of mes, air pumping from its wings too powerful for me to safely strike through.

Then it falls with predatory purpose, catching me despite my attempts to scatter. Yet another one of me is pinned underneath it.

This was a mistake. I want to kill them! It hurts, holy shit it hurts so much. But it hurt me. Which means it is strong. It will be delicious! My mind races. How do I fight it? Head, not vulnerable. Legs, dangerous. Assumption: bones are hollow and weak like Earth birds. Irrelevant; ETB bodies lack the force necessary to deal blunt trauma to bones. Wings. Frail bits of skin, stretched between stronger structures. Bite the wings, tear holes in the wings. Win condition. How to approach?

Target is superior in the air, impossible to catch during flight. Air displacement causes more force than ETB bodies are capable of outputting safely. Remove assumption: safe output. Air displacement still too great. No leverage. Pinned body, mostly undamaged. Leverage possible. Insufficient. Attack when distracted. Flank. Wait for…

Heuristic calculations fly behind the eyes of my many bodies, though none of them distract from the stark reality in front of me. If anything, they make my situation feel even more helpless. There is almost nothing I can see happening that delays my third death— all within thirty seconds— long enough to avert it. EB can beat these birds but that part of me isn’t here. Death stares down at me, all mouth and no eyes. There’s no beak on this space bird, just a gaping, toothy maw dripping saliva down to splatter on my tiny face. At least the spit isn’t acidic. I got cocky, didn’t I? What was I even thinking?

The terror creeps back in, chasing away the foreign fury and confidence of before. I’m not some kind of super-powerful god monster, I’m just Evelyn. A stupid girl crying alone on an alien planet with unknown deaths around every corner. And so, for my hubris, I will die.

Again.

Really, now that I think about it, should I truly be this afraid? I just died twice and I’m still… well, alive. Yet nonetheless terror fills me. How stupid. I could just shut off my sense of pain, close my eyes, and pretend it’s not even happening. I could deactivate my body in advance, poison my own brain and be dead before it can stab me. And I will live on. EB is approaching as fast as I can. EP is still resting on top of Mr. Mooshi. EE is fishing. And my other Tinkerbells are watching, calculating the ever-dropping odds of victory, one slapdash mental simulation at a time.

Yet it is still scary, because it should be scary. I will not wipe this fear away. Death matters. It’s significant. And I do not want to die.

So fuck dying.

My Tinkerbells are the only body that use pneumatic musculature, due to their exceptionally small size. It lacks a lot of the advantages of traditional musculature, and of course it requires a certain amount of accessible fluid to function, which my body can only hold so much of. Furthermore, if my ‘muscles’ are punctured, they will fail to work entirely as they leak that fluid. With all my tiny bug strength, I try to push this massive bird foot off of me, all of that fluid compressing and straining inside me. Yet it’s just not enough. I can’t generate enough pressure, not without cracking.

So I crack on purpose.

I shut off my ability to feel pain, but not because I intend to accept my fate. The internal musculature of my left arm shatters, pumping leaked fluid into the rest of my body as I contract and squeeze the surviving organs. A series of impromptu vascular networks fly together by my will, comprised of swollen and fusing tissue, orders to heal myself being corrupted to change my body from within. I pump the extra fluid from one end of my body to the other, overfilling my muscles to dangerous degrees.

Hold together. I begin systematically hardening the cells of my other muscles with plant-like walls.

Hold together. I pump an excessive amount of oxygen into each one of those cells, disrupting delicate internal balances that I have to compensate for on the fly. Even then, they won’t survive long.

Hold together! Chemicals fill the empty spaces, reacting with each other and forming an epoxy-like molecular glue. If not of oxidation, then my muscular walls will surely die of suffocation in less than a minute.

But by then I’d be digested, so there’s no relative loss. I know exactly where my EB self is and how fast I am running. The math is intuitive. The results are clear. It is right to fear death, but fearing pain, fearing consequences, is foolish. They are already known, and I have already chosen. That is all there is. Act, or die.

And fuck dying!

Straining my tiny limbs, I shift the foot of a predator over forty times my weight. It squawks in indignant surprise, pressing harder to try and pin me once more. A Herculean feat of strength. I will not die here, not again. I refuse, with all my might and all my being.

But not everything in the world revolves around my meager will.

Seconds pass. My cells burst, individually at first, but then in the dozens, hundreds, the thousands, the millions. By any measure, I have accomplished the impossible for something of my size. I wonder how many kilopascals I’m holding right now. A hundred? A thousand? A hundred thousand? And I’m accomplishing this with… with a bug! With the body of a tiny dragonfly! This is my power!

Quickly it becomes clear, though, that it’s not enough. As I start to tear EB’s muscles in an effort to get here as soon as possible, the bird presses down with its foot even harder. My cells break. My muscles fail. Relieved at the end to the brief surprise, the bird lifts its other foot and squashes me. Like a bug. A third body’s senses vanish from my awareness like a blown-out birthday candle.

My other bug bodies vibrate with barely-contained frustration. That was genius. That was the best I had! I did an impromptu modification on the internal structure of my own organ systems in a matter of seconds while under deathly duress, implementing drastic (if temporary) improvements to my original design! And it still wasn’t enough!

“A bit arrogant to be disappointed that you can’t punch forty times your weight class, isn’t it?” Mr. Mooshi grumbles.

“I’m just stressed from dying,” I defend. “Okay? I just… I just fucking died!”

Although did I really? Honestly, I lost the equivalent of a few fucking fingers. Regrowable fingers! Entire bodies that looked like me, had faces, had silly Mickey Mouse voices, spent hours playing in the sky and hunting bugs… fingers. That’s it. A hand at most. I can replace and double their number in an afternoon, so why should I care?

“What the fuck am I, Mr. Mooshi?” I hiss.

“You’re Evelyn, last time I checked,” he answers.

Which means what, exactly? I’m not even surprised by this. It almost feels like some part of me, some little bit in the back of my brain knew I wouldn’t die all along, and had never been afraid of from the start. Of course I can try again and again, fail as much as I want, and eventually come out on top. That’s only natural. I get extra lives. It’s like a game. So whatever put me here… they must expect me to win.

That, more than even the deaths, frightens me to the core.

When Evelyn Bork finally arrives on scene, stalking close to the murderous avians and whipping out my tongue is enough to catch the first and end its life in my jaws. The second is much trickier, flying off at its first opportunity, but I follow easily enough, catching and killing it as well after it lands an hour later. That is what humans do to animals that eat us, after all.

I get some very nice adaptations out of it, I have to admit. Keratin-based external growths optimized in shape and thickness for heat insulation, also known as fur. Very fuzzy. A working bat wing structure, which will probably be invaluable. The black dome that it had in place of the head is actually a giant eye optimized for detecting light differences and movement, though its depth perception is so bad the creature also evolved sonic detection systems. It is, all in all, an incredible find.

The ecstasy of eating them was somewhat dampened, however, by having many of my own corpses litter the dinner table. It is only well after it’s too late that I realize one of them was on my metaphorical plate.

I’ve already eaten myself before I realize what I’m doing. I can’t even pretend it’s an accident, the brutally methodical method of devouring my prey dissected the stomach in pieces, pulling out my broken corpse and deliberately dropping it down my throat. My own flesh. My own body. I try to retch, but no vomit comes. My stomach is too efficient.

Immediately afterwards, I start feeling the temptation to eat the rest. I need to get rid of the bodies. I have to. I can’t leave them. Eating them would be the easiest way, practical and efficient. Instead of doing that, I grab what’s left of my corpses and flee from the scene in disgust.

It’s not the only thing I do, though. That would be a waste of time. Two of my ETBs continue onward, because the whole point coming out this way is to investigate that light and I will be damned before I’m going to just give up on that. My two Tinkerbells ride together on Evelyn Bork, not risking another aerial assault. It’s almost dark by the time I reach the rising fog cloud that obscures what appears to be marshlands beyond. The trees of the forest start to become sparse and soon and entirely as the ground gets wetter, squishier, and stinkier. The air smells like farts.

It’s not enough to dull the beauty of the rising cloud that acts almost like an artificial barrier between the two zones. Honestly, I hope in my heart of hearts that it is artificial, that it is the product of some advanced species. But even on close investigation, I see no clear sign of technology or intent. It is beautiful enough to be art, but it is a natural sort of beauty. A happy coincidence of conflicting air patterns, likely caused by convection currents in the atmosphere that for whatever reason are consistent enough in this area to form clouds on the ground and pull them into the sky. It is nothing like anything I have seen on Earth, but there is no reason it has to be artificial or magical. Just more dead, thoughtless nature.

Hesitantly, I fly through the cloud and die for a fourth time.

Not because of any air currents, not because of any predator, but because I simply take a breath. The cloud is poison, a wretched stench of rotten eggs that fills what passes for a bloodstream in my insectoid body with something I simply cannot metabolize fast enough to purge. I can recognize the chemical, though not identify it. It’s very often inside my body. But instantly, I can feel it is far too much. I shoot backwards into fresher air, catch myself with my second ETB, but it is already too late. Today I have died for the first and fourth time, and I have officially had enough.

Returning to the river in defeat, furious and numb, I form Fort Mooshi once again and collapse into sleep.

16 Council of Evelyn

A beautiful blue alien is sitting in my room.

“I have so many questions,” I tell her.

“Probably almost as many as I do,” Tara responds, “but ask away.”

I’m sitting cross legged on the floor, with Tara nestling her little beetle body in my bedspread. She seems to like it.

“Oh! Oh!” I declare excitedly. “We can take turns! I’ll ask one, then you can ask one!”

Her horrible screech-laugh sounds through the room again, equal parts terrifying and wondrous.

“That works for me,” she agrees. “Would you like to go first?”

“Yes!” I say immediately, though I’m still scrambling to decide what to ask first. “Um! So! Why did you come to Earth?”

“I have absolutely no idea.”

I blink in surprise.

“What? How do you not know?”

“My turn,” she chides. “Why did you pick me up in the forest and start feeding me?”

“Um…”

The real reason is just that I thought she was cute. Which I mean in the same way I mean that Mr. Bubbles is cute or a kitten is kinda cute, but now that I know she’s a person I can’t describe her as cute out loud or else I will have a stroke.

“Well, I’ve been in the forest a lot,” I answer slowly. “And I had never seen anything like you before. So, I just thought that was super neat and it made me very excited! I guess I fed you because I wanted you to be happy and fed? Wait, you used an ‘and’ so that’s two questions!”

She responds with a hissy chuckle.

“I see. I suppose you’re right. Your turn to take two, then.”

I nod rapidly, trying to calm my fiercely beating heart as I let more questions flow out of my mouth.

“Okay, um… how did you get to Earth? And are there any other of your people here?”

“I don’t know, and I don’t know.”

I narrow my eyebrows, starting to get concerned.

“How can you not know?” I ask. “Are you hurt?”

“That’s two more questions,” Tara points out. “You’re bad at this. It’s my turn. Why did you ask to be my friend?”

“Um.”

Because I think being friends with an alien is the coolest possible thing in the universe.

“Because it’s always better to be friends rather than not friends?” I hedge.

“Is it?” she asks immediately.

“Huh?” I blink.

“You can count that as another question. Is it always better to be friends than not friends?”

I open my mouth to say “yes,” but manage to shut my dumb trap at the last moment to not let any sound out. My alien bug friend just asked me a question about friendship. I should probably consider it more seriously. And off the top of my head… yeah, there are a lot of situations where I wouldn’t and shouldn’t be friends with someone.

“Well, not really,” I admit. “I just meant that I think the whole world is better off when you treat everyone in… you know, a friendly way?”

I wince as soon as that comes out of my mouth, regretting that phrasing. The alien may very well not know what I mean, so I press on for clarification’s sake.

“I think everyone should be nice to each other, is what I should say. Yet at the same time I guess, at least in my culture, there’s more to being friends with someone than just being nice to them. You have to invest time and attention and care into learning about and being with that person, and generally do that you have to like them a lot. And… and I guess that’s not the sort of relationship I can have with everybody, since I just wouldn’t have enough time? But, I would like to do that with you! Um, if you want.”

The little alien beetle sits in silence.

“Um, is it my turn to ask?” I prod after a minute.

“Ah. Yes, I think it is.”

“What do you know?” I ask. “About getting here. And, um, please tell me your best speculations if you don’t know anything!”

The bug continues to be quiet, long enough for the hint of panic to start mounting inside me, fearing I’ve done something terribly wrong. But eventually, she speaks.

“I do not remember much of anything,” Tara admits softly. “At least not in regards to how I got here. I was… I was living my life normally, in my home, and then I was here. I was panicked and confused and vulnerable. I had to eat raw animals to survive. I initially suspected your species was at fault, but you seem to be as genuinely confused as I. So I have no speculations. Not even any hints. I truly have no idea what happened to me, Evelyn. I am frightened.”

Oh my god. What can I say to that? Poor Tara.

“…As far as I know,” I hesitantly respond, “my species hasn’t even discovered another planet with life on it, let alone yours. Even if we did know where it was, we’d have no way to reach it. We haven’t sent a human to any celestial body farther away than our own moon. Outside our solar system is way beyond anything we can do. So I’m really sorry, but I have no idea what happened to you either.”

“I see,” Tara says. “I believe you.”

“If you want, I can probably introduce you to some super-smart people who know more than I do about this stuff. I bet if I rolled up to someone who works at NASA and you started talking to them they would be overjoyed to help you out as much as they can. They’re probably all huge dorks like me.”

“But you don’t think they could get me home,” she says.

I don’t want to tell her no, but you should never lie to a friend.

“Unless you know how interstellar travel works and can teach them, there is basically no chance,” I admit. “I’m sorry. But if you do know anything, or even just a hint, I promise they’re all really smart, so—”

“No,” Tara says quietly, cutting me off. “My species knows about how outer space works and we have theories on how it all came to be, but we have not even traveled to our own moon yet. It was not deemed an acceptable use of resources.”

“Oh. Yeah, that makes sense,” I nod. “Humans only went to the moon because we were mad at other humans that wanted to do it first.”

She makes a startled, amused noise.

“That’s why you went? Really?”

“Really,” I confirm. “Our government was mad at another huge country’s government, so they funded the race. It turns out there isn’t much of interest up there anyway. Your moon might be cooler, though. There are some pretty neat moons.”

“That sounds absurd. Why didn’t their superiors step in?”

I hum to myself, leaning against the side of the bed so I can rest my head next to Tara’s little body.

“…So, the government of the country on Earth is about as high as it goes,” I explain. “Except arguably the United Nations, kind of. But not really. And we have hundreds of countries! Are your people unified under a single government?”

“Yes,” she answers simply. “About eighty-seven of my peoples’ years ago… well, I suppose maybe not from now, but that long from when my memories of home end, the nation of Haslken-Rkto successfully united the world in a war that spanned every nation on the planet. I hear it was quite brutal at the time, but we have not had open warfare since then.”

“Huh,” I eloquently comment. “In our first world war, most of the countries stayed the same afterwards, I think? Also in the second, maybe, but don’t quote me on that. The countries that wanted to rule everything just sort of didn’t win? Then nuclear weapons became a thing, and everyone has been too afraid of a third war that big to try it. We’ve still had a ton of smaller wars, though.”

“Nuclear weapons?”

“Really, really big bombs. They can kill everyone in a whole city, and then the whole area is poisoned afterwards from radiation. They’re horrible.”

“They sound horrible,” Tara agrees.

“Yeah. They are. Your planet sounds nice. War sucks.”

“I can only imagine. Of course, my people are far from perfect. We are safe and cared for, but our government is very… what’s the word? Rigid? Industrialist? They make and make and make, we work long and hard for them. Your planet seems very relaxing by comparison, at least in the moments where I am not terrified for my life.”

“Ah, I can see that, yeah,” I say. “A lot of us work really hard too, but in a rich country like this one a lot of people don’t.”

Both of us sit in silence once again. Tara seems very content to leave the quiet unfilled, and I am more than introverted enough to understand. I watched the light in my room reflect off her brilliant blue carapace for a while, until I realize I’ve been staring at her for a solid five minutes. I quickly look away.

“Um… if you’re still… I mean, I don’t want you to have to fear for your life here,” I stammer. “This is my planet! I mean, it’s not mine as in I own it, but… um, I mean, I’ll keep you safe. We’re friends, so you can count on me, okay? You can ask me anything you want, and I’ll help you as best I can. I promise!”

Tara shifts her weight a little on my bed, staring back at me.

“You are a strange and funny alien,” she responds. “I get the feeling that I am very lucky to have met you.”

I’m unable to suppress a grin at that, far too happy to be embarrassed. I stand up, suddenly full of energy.

“Want me to cook us some food?” I ask.

“Oh, yes please,” Tara says. “These days, I feel like I am constantly hungry.”

…

“And so,” I say gravely, “I call to order the first Council of Evelyn!”

My bodies are arranged in a rough circle, branching off of where Mooshi happens to be grazing by the river so that he appears to be seated around my invisible table. All of my me is gathered into a single place, where I can begin this debate with myself. The Council is ready.

Evelyn Experimental, almost to her full nine-foot height, is a foolish endeavor made by accident and lack of foresight. My first extra self, my initial doubling, is the representation of everything I fear and the voice of my restraint.

Evelyn Tinkerbell the First, trapped in a world of giants where even bugs hold threat and birds are lethal creatures of nightmare. Created to be an expression of joy, a personification of everything I love, she now represents the consequences of optimism and hubris, the voice of my cynicism.

Evelyn Bork, the powerful and lithe devourer of sloths and keeper of the forest’s safety. Key to both my livelihood and my protection, she is both my most inhuman form and also by far my most effective. Eternally hunting and eternally hungry, she is the voice of my desires.

The clones, including my freshly-hatched Evelyn Bork 2 and the rest of the Squad Evelyn, sit together to show the clear evidence of my capacity for exponential growth. They know that each individual part of me is temporary and meaningless compared to the whole. They were built to expand, to consume, to protect, and to conquer. They are the voice of my alien instinct, something I cannot deny is present and influencing me in ways that are often difficult to detect.

Mr. Mooshi, my eternal rock, the singular friend I can hold in my darkest hours, my hooverer of grass, maintains his ever-watchful gaze on the status of my sanity and morality. He is the voice of my wisdom.

Finally there is Evelyn Prime, the first among equals, the original and still the best. …Unless you measure via any practicality-based method. Hatching here on that first terrible day is a memory I will never, can never forget. Perhaps her death will be the end of all of me. Perhaps she is just another cog in the machine that has become my ever-expanding body. Whatever the truth, she represents the voice of my reason and master of the Council.

“Here here!” comes the resounding answer from all of my other bodies.

“Our first order of business today,” I have EP say, “will be discussing the reclamation of our hill and home.”

“It’s not worth it,” EE grunts. “Why do we even care? We can just stay by the river.”

“If we can’t handle a bunch of tiny bug-weasels, we will never be able to survive on this planet,” my newborn dog body grumbles. “The hill might not matter that much, but being able to take it does.”

“If we lose?” my Tinkerbell body counters. “The weasels clearly hunt in packs, they’ve demonstrated the ability to hurt even our larger bodies, and we have no idea how many there are.”

“They probably hunt Mooshians, though,” EB growls. “Think about it. They dig holes to get our feet stuck in the ground, and then they start burning away at it with acid. There’s no way instincts like that wouldn’t be used to take on Mooshians, they would be the ideal target for a strategy like that. If Mr. Mooshi gets hurt because we don’t know how to handle pack hunters…”

“Evelyn Experimental is strong enough to lift me now,” Mr. Mooshi intones. “You won’t let me come to harm. I believe in you.”

“And we won’t let that belief be misplaced,” I promise him. “I mean, I won’t. But it’s we in the context of this bit we’re doing.”

“Don’t break kayfabe!” Evelyn Bork chides.

“I think there might actually be a legitimate risk we could fragment our personality, so maybe we shouldn’t actually be doing this,” Evelyn Experimental points out.

“Okay, can we just focus please?” I snap with Evelyn Prime. “Are we retaking the cave or aren’t we?”

Most of myself turns to look at the two Bork bodies I now have. They were in part designed to capture and kill the stupid weasel creatures, and doing so is both important for my safety and for my ability to control territory.

“Hold on, we want to control territory?” some members of Squad Evelyn realize, scowling.

“You do,” Mr. Mooshi confirms. “That’s certainly not something you would care about as a human, but is it an unreasonable urge in this situation? If you control territory, you possess a degree of safety that you otherwise wouldn’t.”

“It’s not unreasonable,” EB agrees. “I was made to do this. Let’s do it already. If we want to make somewhere safe, we want to control the cave so that we have a central fallback point, and we want to control part of the river so we don’t die of dehydration. From here to there is our control zone.”

“I agree,” Evelyn Experimental nods. “Going all the way to that swamp place with just a few bug bodies was not a well thought out plan. We knew there were birds. We knew there was a risk. We knew we were expanding well into unknown territory. Going that far was a stupid idea, no matter how lonely we are. We need to understand everything we can and then start expanding.”

“Yeah, I’m tired of dying,” ETB grumbles.

“All right,” Evelyn Prime confirms. “So first, we are taking back the cave. Then we are going to focus on making the cave safe, or as safe as possible. I’ve thought about it a bunch, and I have some good ideas for ways to make that work without totally messing with our head. What if the bodies we create don’t have to be intelligent or otherwise part of the hive mind? We can just make shit, right? Is there any reason we can’t? Plants are ideal for that. We need to start branching into creating them. The trees and stuff around here are edible, but the nutrition we get from them is terrible. We need nuts or fruits or things like that. So I say we replace the nearby flora with stuff that we can farm better.”

“Wouldn’t that be environmentally disastrous?” Mr. Mooshi asks.

“Only if we make our new plants capable of breeding on their own, which we don’t have to do. We aren’t introducing an invasive species, we’re just building a farm, and maybe a city out of stuff that happens to be alive. We can manually plant everything we need ourselves. It’s not like we’re going to be low on womanpower.”

Most of my selves nod along to that, at least until ETB makes a squeaky throat-clearing noise and chimes in.

“So if we’re going to produce seeds, plant them, and then eat the stuff that those plants make, isn’t that objectively cannibalism, even if the plants we’re making aren’t conscious? They’ll have come out of our… you know.”

I wince.

“Motion to just not think about that?”

“Sustained.”

“Sustained.”

“Sustained.”

“Sustained.”

“Rejected,” EB2 says, drawing many glares. “What? We know we’re going to.”

“So,” Mr. Mooshi says, “you are going to take the cave back and establish a bit of a more stable base before returning to our search for other sapients species. What’s the time limit on this?”

“Time limit?” I ask, glancing his way. “Oh. Yeah, I guess we should set one. We still do need to find people. We can’t lose hope for that, and we can’t let ourselves get so distracted by expanding and defending that we forget it.”

Mr. Mooshi does not nod, but I imagine if he could he would.

“Two weeks then,” I say. “We have the exponential chutzpah to make that work, right? And then we’ll find ourselves some sapients.”

“Agreed!” all my bodies cheer.

Together as one, we move for war. Well, not war-war. Unless you count the Great Emu War, I guess. A real war is between people, a clash of ideologies solved only through death, and I believe it is unambiguously evil. I will not wage war. Pest control, however, is acceptable. Animals are not people. They are not sapient. They are sentient, certainly. They feel and they think and they experience the world, and it is therefore pointless cruelty to harm them more than necessary. But sapience, the capacity to reason, is something animals do not have, and that sets them apart from personhood. So this is not war.

If things go to plan, it will be a slaughter.

17 War is Hell

My hill looks exactly the same as when I left it, which I suppose is only to be expected when all of my enemies live underground. Now, however, I have new ways of seeing.

It doesn’t take long to find a hole, and I saunter up to it as Evelyn Bork and stick my tongue down inside. Yes, extending my prehensile tongue down a dirt tunnel doesn’t sound very tasty, but I’ve placed the same whisker structure that the triloweasels use to navigate their underground homes onto the tongue of the Borks. I let out a quick click of noise, and soon my brain is overwhelmed by a host of new and incomprehensible information.

Fortunately, I have many brains. My entire self is here, waiting at the edge of the clearing. I start to identify and decode the sensations of echolocation. Some part of me instinctively references my knowledge of the weasel brain itself, and the moment I begin focusing on that I start to see the tunnel as these creatures do. A huge segment of interconnected passageways fills my mind, and a few clicks later I have not only identified most of the traps around my hill, but I have identified the trappers.

A huge collection of these creatures remain under my home, as if making some new colony. They hear the very sound I use to locate them, locating me in turn, and immediately a contingent dispatches to identify and deal with this new threat. I listen carefully, retracting my tongue just enough to be able to spur it outwards at a moment’s notice and grab my prey. My second Bork body is ready and waiting, able to snap into action whenever I need to. It is time.

As soon as the closest weasel gets in range, I strike. My tongue lashes out, grabs a target, and whips back into my mouth, letting me bite down on delicious segmented chitin. Then all hell breaks loose.

I rush the giant EE into position as well. She doesn’t have the ability to see within the tunnels, but she does have the ability to grab things with tentacles… and can functionally see into tunnels anyway since I can see them with my Borks. Coordinating between my different bodies is startlingly natural, and when my stomping feet send the rest of the weasel swarm into a tizzy, it’s not long before I catch one with that body as well.

My catches shriek and hiss at me, twisting to claw at me, to spray acid at me, to do everything they can to make me hurt before I turn them into Evelyn chow. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to eat them. With my Bork I bite down, piercing through exoskeleton and letting acid from my teeth—the very acid these things have been trying to kill me with—sink into the creature’s flesh before tossing it behind me, back to my other bodies. A crushing fist to the brain of Evelyn Experimental’s catch likewise kills it instantly, and I continue my work.

The weasels scream at me, like a war cry, and I feel an inexplicable indignance as if I’ve just been insulted. I scream back, letting all my pent-up fury over the past few days be heard in a raging, every-bodied shriek. The sheer volume of my response is enough to send a quake through the ranks of the weasels, but a few more hisses from their side and courage is restored. I feel a twinge of worry at that, but I have no time to investigate it as the battle starts in earnest.

These damn weasels are smart. Rather than charging blindly through the tunnels I’m camping, they start digging new ones, flanking in and around the areas I control. A few scout groups prod at my range, attaching to each other in interlocking lines like a bridge of soldier ants, preventing me from yanking them away. Damnit, there must be some sort of creature that already tries to hunt the weasels by snaking tendrils down their tunnels. They’ve previously evolved countermeasures to the strategy I made up, or maybe they are just smart enough to figure something like this out. Still, I bet I can adapt faster than they can. That’s pretty much my whole thing.

I can extend my EB tongues a solid eight feet, hiding the majority of them inside a nice little cavity within my body designed for the purpose. This gives me quite a bit of leeway in terms of attacking within tunnels. I understand what these stupid animals want to do to me, and I take advantage of it. I shoot off my tongue and try to grab one of the scout groups anyway, pretending not to notice the tunnelers making new routes with which to flank and attack my prehensile limb. I can hear them just fine thanks to repositioning EB2’s tongue close enough to a nearby tunnel. An instant before their flankers surround me in an attempt to grab and attack the middle of EB’s anti-weasel weapon, I disengage from my tug-of-war with the scouts, pull my tongue back, and fire it off again right when the flankers emerge. I catch one by surprise, pulling it out as well and adding it to my food pile with an acidic crunch.

Honestly, I should have designed more bodies before heading into this fight. Something that could simply walk into the tunnel and start wrecking shit would allow me to penetrate a lot deeper. I can hear the main weasel colony, and it is well outside the reach of my questing tentacles. So in the interest of a more complete conquest, I start letting EP think about that. I haven’t confirmed it in practice, but I am almost entirely certain that any and all of my bodies are capable of the same reproductive feats as Evelyn Prime. Still, with Evelyn Prime’s leg out of commission, I don’t have much to do with that failure of a body other than breed.

Wait. No, that’s not a failure body, I didn’t even design that one! Also, more importantly, it’s me! I disengage from the fight, partly to give myself a bit of a breather and mostly to tease through that fucking mess of a thought process I just had. I don’t need complete conquest, I just want to get these things far enough away from my home that I can feel safe. Thinking about new bodies doesn’t help me right now, not unless I intend to disengage for the better part of a day in order to design, create, and hatch them. And Evelyn Prime is me! That aspect of myself is no more a failure than any other part of me, and while that might not be a very impressive qualifier it is one that I am sticking to, dammit. Fuck off, alien instinct! Fuck off, attention deficit disorder! EP’s brain is going to focus on decoding the triloweasel brain I ate.

I can simulate how entire bodies will function in reality within my own mind. That’s pretty crazy, right? My brain can somehow contain all of the physics necessary to run a tiny, extremely limited universe. There are probably a lot of heuristics going into such a simulation, shortcuts and inaccuracies, little imperfections that make such a ridiculous feat possible. But I know for a fact that I can still do it. What if I take that simulation further? What if I simulate a brain… inside my brain?

I should have the raw hardware to pull it off. I am, of course, many brains, and many of those brains are significantly more advanced than the one I devoured from within my first weasel victim. So let’s say that, hypothetically, I simulate this weasel brain. I simulate this brain’s body. And I simulate putting this brain’s body, with the brain inside, into a situation analogous to my enemy’s current situation. Can I not judge how such a brain chooses to react, and then anticipate the movement of my enemy under the assumption that it will act similarly? It sounds absolutely fucking crazy, but isn’t everything I am crazy?

I let EP’s body go limp on Mr. Mooshi’s back, putting every bit of that body’s processing power into the task. And then—

I wake up, the last thing I remember being a rock falling to crush my body. Serves me right for being curious, I suppose. Where am—I am currently fighting a creature of unknown origin, a prehensile predator questing into my territory. My colony family clan surrounds me, I am in a scout group frontline warrior band. Our flanking maneuver has failed, as if anticipated.

It’s working! It’s actually working! I send EE and both Borks back into the breach, taking the chances I get to snag other weasels and crush them. I’m going to have so much fucking food!

I don’t have authority to I’m not a I don’t understand what I call my band to retreat.

As my simulation predicts, the weasels quickly start to retreat. I whoop in victory, sending my Borks up the hill to ensure the way is clear before scooping EP up in my big, strong EE hands and carrying myself towards the cave. They’re scared! Perfect! All I really want is for them to leave me alone; I have plenty of food from fish and sloths, both of which are much less intelligent creatures. I’d rather eat dumber animals than something like a monkey or a dolphin.

I don’t know what that was. Where were we fighting. Where am I. What happe—

How likely is it that you will return?

I’m still retreating. It’s important that I think about how likely it is that we’ll return here. I hope we don’t. I expect we don’t. I do not make that decision, however.

Nice! Okay, so I should be home free. I lay EP down in the cave, sending my other bodies to start filling in the many potholes around my hill so that grass can regrow and I don’t break another fucking ankle. I suppose I could just halt the mental simulation now, but it’s interesting and I don’t have anything else to do with that brain anyway. Plus, something is just feeling very off right now. I almost feel like I am the mind that I’m simulating, bestowing on it some measure of personification.

The War Leader will decide where we go from here—

See, like that. I keep thinking of specific aspects of this weird weasel colony as like, a tribe or something.

—as will my mother, the chieftain.

…Yeah. Like, um, like that, too. But there’s no way these things are actually sapient, right?

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck! No, no way. These weasels are not people, they don’t have a culture. They don’t wear clothes, they don’t use tools, they don’t even have a language, they just hiss and screech. Like animals.

I will have to speak with her. I seem to be in a walking dream. Maybe I’ve been cursed?

No. No, no, no. This is just me going crazy again, right? I stick my tongue back down the tunnel, trying to listen for hisses and identify the sounds. They’re not talking. They can’t be talking.

I’m not even a warrior. Mother is trying to shape me into the next chieftain, but I lacked both the skill and the desire to speak for a god.

Oh shit oh shit oh shit! Hisses ring through the tunnels, glimpses of sound carrying glimpses of meaning. I feed the noises into the simulated mind, converting them through it—through her—into meaning. I start to hear words where there was once only animalistic gibberish. Her species does not have lips, and they have very limited control of their tongues, but they compensate for this in a language that takes relative pitch and duration into account as much as diction. I didn’t notice. I didn’t think about it!

She will scold me when I get home. I can already imagine what she will say.

No please. I didn’t know. Please don’t have a name!

“Hsthressis!” She’ll snap, knowing full well I hate to be called that. “Were you foraging for roots again? You know that if you spend too much time by the surface—”

I start to hyperventilate, most of my body’s sinking to their knees as the tears start. I had one rule. One objective! One thing I assured myself I would never do, and one thing I wanted to find more than anything. My values and my goals were perfectly dovetailed, and I fucked it all up immediately.

“—you’ll be killed by a demon.”

I wail in despair, feeling the tipping point where my higher functions all collapse into agonizing, paralyzing guilt. I let it happen, I lean into it even, because I deserve it more than anything. Idiot. Bigot. Murderer. The worst case scenario has been under my nose the entire time, and I never had the mind to notice it. I saw some creature acting like a subterranean bug and assumed it was as simple as one. Do I really think that clothes make someone civilized? I’m not even wearing any! Tools? I’m not fucking using any!

I wonder what my mom would even do if I died out here. Maybe nothing. Maybe she’d nab War Leader Talrissark and start a crusade to avenge my death. He’d love that, honestly. I feel bad for any demon that goes up against Talrissark the Purger.

I want to stop, to halt the simulation. I don’t want to hear this anymore, I don’t want to invade the thoughts of a dead girl, I don’t want to know that I murdered someone named Hsthressis and three other people just today. People! I killed people! What kind of fucking pacifist am I? I can’t—I can’t eat them. I have to bury them. What are their names?

Three bodies flash through my senses, warriors of my clan mangled and broken on the ground. Dead. What are their names? I have to know, I have to remember the answer, but I only know one of them. Kisklichna. He’s dead? No, no no. This has to be a dream.

No, no no. This has to be a dream. How could I do this? How could I have let myself do this!? I know I’m a wretched failure, but to let my failures extend this far, I—

I hear a crack and a clatter, like falling stone. A vibration runs below me, and the simulation ends the instant my body detects danger. An overwhelming surge of despair drowns out the adrenaline, however, and I’m slow to act. The cracking gets louder until finally the stone floor under Evelyn Prime shatters, and I fall.

It reminds me a lot of Evelyn Tinkerbell falling down the pit trap. Yet I am no longer the size of a fairy, and gravity is a harsh mistress to the massive. I land on my back with a sickening crunch, chitin shattering and gravel raining down over my body. I slowly opened my eyes and see the walls of a pit nearly twenty feet deep, the dim light above coming from the mouth of the cave that I, in my arrogance, thought these creatures could never breach. I thought they were too simple. I thought they would not, could not hurt me here. These weasels—no, the Sthrenslians, the name they call themselves, in their language, which is something I now know because I violated the dead brain of a living, thinking person—they are very capable of hurting me. And they will, because they are also capable of love, and I hurt them first.

The walls of the pit are lined with tunnels, and peeking out of each one is a furious, tiny person. The Sthrenslians watch from all directions, cheering and jeering and screaming for justice. My mind starts to compensate automatically, absorbing information and translating their words, their furious cries, their curses and their wails.

“The demon has fallen,” the loudest voice of them all intones, though not a single one of the words sound anything like what I would have identified as language a mere five minutes ago. “Now is the time to wet our claws in Sss’s glory!”

With a triumphant roar of agreement, they pour from the tunnels, descending on me. I don’t move, though I’m not sure I could even if I tried. My ankle is still far from healed and now my spine is damaged. My remaining bodies rush to the lip of the pit, but it is too deep. I can’t reach a tentacle down and grab myself, I can’t leap down without risking injury, and I can’t fly down and expect to be able to accomplish anything with Evelyn Tinkerbells.

Not that it matters. I don’t want to move or save myself or do anything at all. I watch the host of furious people, rightfully furious people, swarm over my body. I don’t turn off my pain as tendrils yank at my hair, acid burns into my armor, and claws rip into my skin. I deserve this.

I wish I could say the agony brought some relief, like the overwhelming torture releasing some sort of cathartic feeling of having paid my dues, but the pain is neither overwhelming nor satisfying. It just is. My first body is torn to shreds before my eyes, and Evelyn Prime dies.

But as I feared, I do not.

18 The Right Thing

The sight of my body being ripped apart in front of me is different when it’s not a simple bug. I designed Evelyn Tinkerbell, after all. Those deaths and the resulting macabre horror show I witnessed as they got disemboweled was terrifying, and are certainly memories I will always dread, but it is so similar to watching an insect back home get picked apart. It is the kind of thing I have done before on purpose, and I knew what to expect from the sight. It feels very different to watching the incredibly human and incredibly me Evelyn Prime suffer a similar fate. My mind rumbles with frustration, parts of me pushing to destroy each and every person that took a bite of my flesh, but I refuse it. To hurt another Sthrenslian now is more unthinkable than death.

But I know that if I will not stop this horror show, I must at least watch to see that my body is properly disposed of. I can’t leave it lying around. I’d wanted to give my fallen Tinkerbell bodies a proper funeral, but I couldn’t do it. I doused the corpses in acid, only feeling better once they were finally all gone. Whatever I am now, it refuses to leave parts of me behind.

A loud click sounds in my direction, and I look down at the little weasel-like person who made it. He or she has no eyes with which to glare at me, but they still face me as they speak, directing their voice up to where I stare down from the lip of the pit.

“You see, demons?” they hiss. He hisses? “We will not cower. The warmth of Sss protects and guides us.”

I swallow, knowing the words, knowing what I have to say. But they’ve never come from my throat before.

“Wet stone,” I hiss, then swear in English. That wasn’t right. “Closing gap. Hsssrsssriksss.”

I swear again, take a deep breath, and go slowly to make sure I get it right.

“I’m… sorry,” I say to them.

Although many of the Sthrenslians continue to tear at my corpse, many of them turn to me as I speak, in confusion or horror or fury. A flurry of responses follow.

“A speaking demon.”

“What does this mean?”

“We should be fighting to reclaim the dead.”

“Don’t listen! It will tempt you!”

The words they’re using of course aren’t exactly the same English words I think of, with different meanings and connotations. Most notably, the word “demon.” It’s specifically a monster from the surface, but there is a significant religious connotation to it, hence my translation choice. Whatever they think I am, it has to do with whatever they believe about the world. I’m picking up that their god is named “Sss,” which is just about the simplest sound you can make in their language. Perhaps that’s symbolic.

“I’m not a demon,” I say simply, speaking with EE so my voice is loud enough to cut through all of theirs.

Perhaps I’m a monster, but I’m not a demon. Not unless this planet is often visited by alien hive minds, anyway, and that’s not the impression I get from the word. One of them said something about reclaiming the dead, though. I run down the hill with EB2, collecting the corpses of fucking people that I just murdered in cold blood. Not even self-defense! I escaped, I was safe, and I returned here with the intent to kill them. I didn’t know they were people. I didn’t know, but… did I really check? When I first saw that… when I first saw Hsthressis, I just assumed she was a meal! I killed her before I even had the chance to investigate!

Shuddering from the cold grip of regret, I wrap the dead bodies in my tongue, trying not to be hyper-aware of each acid-burned puncture wound that marks the evidence of my horrific acts. I can’t believe this. I can’t believe I let myself do this.

“I’m sorry,” I say again, barely avoiding screwing up the words as I almost choke. “I didn’t know you were—”

My head short-circuits trying to find the right word. I want to say “people” but there’s no direct translation, no singular concept that means exactly what I wanted to mean, only a bundle of culturally dipped terms that aren’t exactly what I mean. When I say “person” what I mean is a sapient individual, a mind capable of reason and empathy and communication. But the Sthrenslian language contains no precise analog to that philosophical ideal, its equivalent words seeped in other connotations. One such word is just “Sthrenslian.” They are the only people they know, and so the name of their species identifies the only concept of a sapient creature outside of legends and gods— devils, angels, that sort of thing. Of course my analogues to Christian theology feel hollow and incorrectly appropriated in ways that I can’t really understand without diving deep into the stolen brain within my own, but on the subject they have a religious word that denotes someone to be capable of receiving salvation from their god, having a soul, and so forth. They also have a word for indicating that someone has, through their actions, become a non-person, and a word which indicates the opposite of this state. It basically means “one who is not a heinous criminal,” so of course that one doesn’t apply to me. Still, I need to say something.

“I thought you were food,” I continue honestly. “I was wrong. I am sorry.”

Perhaps a more competent person at social interaction could have predicted that wouldn’t go over well, but it turns out I’m surprised when calling a bunch of people food results in less than appreciative reactions. I just silently lower the three corpses into the pit, dangling them by my tongue.

“You… wanted your dead, right?” I ask, letting EB and my Tinkerbells take the brunt of the sobbing while I try to keep EE as mentally stable as possible. “I’m sorry. You can have them back.”

Another Sthrenslian speaks as I lower the three, and with a shutter I recognize the voice as the one my mental simulation used for her mother. She says precisely the words I fear to hear.

“Where is Hsthressis?” she asks.

I am certainly no expert of Sthrenslian vocal cadence, although I probably could be if I tore the information from the ghost of a dead girl. Still, the pinpricks of knowledge I do possess recognize the equivalent of a quiver in her voice, someone on the verge of erupting into anger or sadness, and unsure which path to take. This woman, this mother, she believes she knows the answer. And I can believe that she knows; Sthrenslians have excellent senses of smell. Any one of them who knew Hsthressis could probably identify where she’d been, and how much blood she’d shed.

“I—” I open my mouth to tell her, to tell the woman I ate her fucking daughter, and that I am sorry but I deserve no forgiveness, I was ignorant but that earns me no mercy, because now she is dead, dead forever… but the words fail to come out. Some terrifying fraction of my mind first asks a question: is she actually?

I have a copy of her mind, created because I ingested her fresh, almost entirely undamaged brain. Her body, including that brain, have been utterly annihilated by whatever alien processes occur inside my belly, but before that ending of everything she is I made a copy in the form of memory, like an image file from a disk. She has no body, no bones, no brain, but in my brain I can create the conditions necessary for her to exist anyway, as pure information.

I pirated an entire person like a goddamn videogame, and I am the emulator that can run her.

Even more than that, I can install her into other hardware. I could just allow Hsthressis the ability to see through my bodies, I could let her talk to her mother right now. At least, I think so, and only in the sense that a memory replica of a person is the same person, which is… a very large can of worms that I absolutely don’t have the philosophy degree to tackle! But still, I could let her talk to her mom right now. Not that her mom would believe it if I just gave Hsthressis control of one of my Evelyn Tinkerbells, and Hsthressis wouldn’t be able to understand the body anyway, since it would contain senses completely alien to her and lacks the ones she has known her entire life, not to mention being a completely different shape, and probably tons of other problems I haven’t even thought of.

Yet can’t I fix that too? I’m already simulating her brain. Can’t I just remake her whole body?

“Where is she?” the mother hisses again, louder.

“I… she’s hurt!” I blurt.

Oh shit, am I going to lie to her? Is this a lie? I don’t actually know if I can fix this, I’m just assuming but… it makes sense, right? I should be able to do this? And if I can do this, I’m kind of morally required to, right? Oh, shit, the other bodies! Can I revive them if I eat the other bodies!?

The numb horror of the situation gives way to panic once again as I reel the corpses I’ve been offering back up. None of the Sthrenslians had made any move to grab them from me, but almost all of them protest as I reel them in. All of this outrage is for naught, unfortunately, as I see one corpse with an utterly smashed skull and the other two with acid burns far too deep in the brain for me to have any hope of returning them as they were.

“Sorry!” I yelp at the protesting aliens. “Sorry, I just needed to check I thought maybe they weren’t dead but…”

But they are very dead. And I killed them. I killed the other one too, but I’m too weak to admit it. Just gotta fix it. Fix fix fix.

“How hurt?” The mother demands. “Bring her to me.”

“I…I can’t yet, she’s…I can’t let her see you. Maybe—”

They don’t have a word for tomorrow? Oh shit, they live underground, they don’t have a word for tomorrow.

“Maybe after a rest I can bring her here?” I try.

“Chieftain, demon is clearly lying,” one of the Sthrenslians insists. It’s a voice I feel like I recognize, but all of the Sthrenslians pretty much look the same to me.

…Oh shit, I’m space racist! No, this is normal, right? It’s like how humans can’t tell monkeys apart. No! Bad brain! These are not monkeys, these are people!

“We will not fall for your tricks, demon,” the mother says. “We will see you slain, and lies will not stay our hand.”

I look over the near-hundred people arrayed against me, equipped with acid, claws, and a perfectly justified reason to hate. These creatures, capable of planning coordinated attacks and digging the massive pits with which to kill me using nothing but gravity, who greatly outnumber me and no doubt possess countless tricks to fight against anything I have to fight. People that by all rights I should submit myself to, for I have committed an unforgivable crime.

“I’m not going to let you do that,” I tell them, my voice shaking. “I-I’ll be back later. I’m leaving, you can’t stop me.”

Tears dripping into the pit, I lower the corpses of the three warriors back down again, and when once more no one moves to take them I place them into a tunnel along the pit wall, not resisting when my tongue is clawed and spit on. Fighting them is wrong. Letting myself be killed by them would be wrong too. My mistakes have to be fixed.

“I will be back with Hsthressis as soon as I can heal her,” I choke out. “Or as soon as I know that I can’t.”

Then I walk away, retreating from threats and jeers given by invaders in my own home. Though I suppose on a broader level, I am the invader. I am the outsider from another world, and there is nowhere on this planet that I can truly call home. Acid licks my feet as I leave, attacks of opportunity occurring wherever possible, and I make no retaliation or haste to avoid them.

Mr. Mooshi, the friend I don’t deserve, waits safely for me at the bottom of the hill, outside the range of the tunnels. I encourage him to follow me to the river, but he stays still. Watching the top of the hill and waiting for his first and favorite Evelyn to return, his strange deformed daughter. She’s not coming, though. That part of me is dead, and the degree to which I barely notice that fact is the most prominent loss I feel on the matter. Mr. Mooshi doesn’t know any of that, though. We were each unique to him, not a singularity but a family.

Mooshians are almost always silent, but as I lift him and carry him away to the river, he lets out a low and mournful wail of protest, struggling the entire way to escape my arms and return to the Evelyn he lost.

I don’t look back, though. I’m too busy looking inward.

Hello? A part of me thinks. Hello, is anyone here? Where am I?

“Hello, Hsthressis,” I cause her to believe she hears. “My name is Evelyn. I want to see if I can help you.”

19 Soul of Theseus

I don’t understand, I think to myself.

No. No, that’s what Hsthressis thinks to me. At me? At herself. She’s just thinking, and I know what she’s thinking. It’s not really at me at all. It’s not really not me either.

I can’t feel anything. I can’t hear anything. Was there a voice? I want to answer it, but I can’t talk.

“I can hear you,” I say, and the very act of it freaks me out. It’s not telepathy so much as mind control. I am simply causing her mind to believe I’m saying something, inserting it directly within the false reality I maintain in my imagination which allows her to exist. It’s messed up, it’s wrong, it terrifies me on an existential level, and it is the only option I really have.

Sss? I… I mean, Hsthressis asks. I remember. There was that stone, and then… are you Him?

Sss is the name of their deity. Not a name I’m in any hurry to claim as my own.

“No,” I say firmly. “I’m not a god.”

Firmly ignoring, of course, the fact that the simulated universe of my mind is entirely under my control, and for all intents and purposes I have nigh omnipotence over Hsthressis’s current existence. Up to the amount of things I can simulate with my brainpower, anyway. She won’t be staying this way. I will figure something else out.

Oh. So you’re Khlasinas, then. I guess that makes sense. Mother warned me about being an unfaithful daughter.

“I don’t know who that is, so I’m not them either.”

Except I do kind of know who they are, since the mere act of wondering about it extracts the information from Hsthressis’s memory as if it was my own. Khlasinas is their religion’s devil figure, basically. Although the parallel isn’t exact; Khlasinas is an evil being of equal power to Sss, the other half of a duotheistic religion rather than an explicit inferior in the way that the devil is in Christian theology. But, again, I don’t really know much of anything about any other religions so those are the sorts of parallels I draw. After deciding I didn’t believe in the things my mother believes in, I didn’t really explore religion much further.

Well then who are you, mysterious voice? Why can’t I move? Why can’t I feel anything?

“Because I killed you,” I explain. “I’m sorry.”

If I’m dead, how are we talking?

“I am going to find a way to bring you back,” I tell her. “It should be possible to revive you, if you want to be alive again.”

The disembodied mind tries to laugh.

Are you sure you’re not a god?

“I’m sure I don’t want to be.”

A moment of emotional turmoil follows that, and I try to do my best to not spy on the inner machinations of Hsthressis’s thought process before I feel she’s ready to communicate on purpose.

If I choose to stay dead, she asks, which afterlife do I get?

That’s not really the best question to ask an atheist.

“I don’t know for sure,” I say honestly, “but I am confident that you would go nowhere at all. You would simply cease to exist.”

Oh. Well, better than the bad one I guess.

I swallow, panic starting to spike again. What if she says she wants to stay dead? What do I do then? Do I just stop simulating her and never do it again? She’s already dead, so doing nothing makes sense, but whether I simulate her or not she’s still in my head. She wouldn’t be dead so much as sleeping. In a coma, maybe.

“Y-you’re not considering staying dead, are you?” I stutter. Fuck, even in my own mindscape I stutter.

Can you tell me what happened after I died? Hsthressis asks, instead of answering. A twinge of temptation to make her answer pushes through my head for a second, but I crush it.

“The short answer is that your mom declared war on me,” I say. “And I lost… an important part of me. One that I can never really get back. But the damage I inflicted was worse. I made a big mistake, and I’m trying to do what I can to fix it.”

And you’re trying to fix it by reviving the dead. Which makes you… what? Some kind of greater demon trying to trick me? An angel giving me a second chance?

“Neither. I’m just Evelyn.”

And what is an Evelyn, exactly?

I almost laugh, but it doesn’t feel very funny.

“Asking the big questions, huh?” I say dryly. “I don’t really have the slightest idea anymore, Hsthressis. I’ve never brought anyone back to life before. I would’ve thought the idea was ridiculous just a little while ago. I think I can do it. It feels like I can do it. But I will have to figure out how, and you will have to take a risk for me. I don’t want you to stay dead, but if you don’t trust me, I will accept your decision. Just tell me so I can start designing your body if we’re bringing you back.”

Wait, wait. You can design my body? As in, change it?

“I guess so? I didn’t really think about changing it. It would be simple enough to just give you the same body again, but if you want me to change it I can.”

…Really? Well, what sorts of things can you do to it?

“Anything you want, I guess. It’s the least I can do for murdering you.”

An emotional cacophony tries to leak into me, but I do my best to actively ignore the thoughts that aren’t meant for me. Still, I pick up apprehension, embarrassment, fear, discomfort, excitement. A bit of a complicated question is about to be asked of me, I suppose.

Can you… make my claws bigger? Hsthressis asks.

Or not, I guess?

“Easily, yes,” I confirm. “Anything else?”

Maybe… a thinner tail?

I send her a mental impression of what her body with the suggested modifications would look like to her echolocation.

“Go ahead and think about any changes you want,” I say.

She starts doing just that, and I modify the body accordingly. She’s getting increasingly excited about this opportunity, but then I realize I forgot to ask an important question.

“How old are you, Hsthressis?”

What? Um, fourteen molts I guess.

“I don’t really know what that means. Are you an adult?”

I’m just a really slow molter! she protests, which I interpret as ‘no.’ Maybe I shouldn’t be letting a child have unrestricted access to the design of her own body, but… it’s something I’ll just have to live with I guess. Well, something she’ll have to live with.

“Make sure to pick carefully,” I warn her. “I’m not exactly planning on killing you again, so you’ll be stuck with whatever body you choose here.”

I want to be stronger! she insists, perhaps not taking my advice as seriously as I’d like. Can you do that?

“Sure,” I say. “But the stronger I make you, the more you will need to eat every day.”

Ah, don’t worry about it. I am the chieftain’s daughter, they’ll figure out how to feed me as much as I want.

“If you told me that a couple days ago I would’ve been quite jealous. Just don’t hurt anyone, okay?”

This coming from the person that killed me?

“…I know it’s hypocritical. I just don’t want you to make the same mistake. Please? If I bring you back and you turn out to be a bad person I…”

I don’t know what I would do. Nothing, maybe? Not because it’s not my responsibility but because I probably wouldn’t even want to live anymore.

Hey. Hey, I was kidding. Um, it’s okay to hunt for food, right? I just wanted to be strong so I could help my clan and stuff.

“Yeah, that’s fine. As long as you’re not hurting anything else intelligent. Um… You don’t know of any other creatures that are sapient, do you? Like something that is smart enough to talk, even if it doesn’t speak the same language you do?”

I don’t know what sapient means but there’s nothing else smart, no. Just Sthrenslians.

“Okay. Okay, that’s fine. I hope… I hope I didn’t screw everything up with them forever.”

Oh. Well… you said my mom declared war on you because I died, right?

“Because I killed you, yes.”

Sure, sure. But I mean… I bet she’ll call the war off if I’m not dead. So don’t worry about it, I guess?

“I murdered you and you just want me to not worry about it. You really don’t care?”

I don’t know. It barely feels real to me. But you seem sad, so I just wanted to reassure you I guess? I don’t know what you are, really, but if you’re actually going to bring me back to life… I don’t know. You’re weird. You have to be some kind of angel or demon, but you don’t act like how either of them act in the stories.

“Well I live on the surface, so apparently that makes me some kind of demon, right?”

Oh, fuck. I mean… yeah? But at least you seem like a nice demon?

I sigh. I don’t know why, but for some reason that makes me feel a lot better.

“Thanks, Hsthressis. Are you finished with your body design?”

I guess so, yeah. I… do you think it looks nice? Looks good? Like, I don’t know. Handsome?

“Hsthressis, you and I don’t even have the same number of limbs, no matter how you count them. I’m really not the person to ask, but I’m sure it looks lovely.”

Right. Right, yeah. Well I guess I’m done then. How do we do this?

“Well… I think you don’t do anything. As in I think you literally stop doing anything at all. At least for a bit. I don’t think I have the cognitive ability to simulate you and your body design at the same time.”

Uh, what does that mean?

“It means I’m going to have to put you back to sleep while I make your body. And then I’ll need to figure out how to put you in it, I guess.”

Oh. Well, okay then? What is that going to feel like?

“Putting you in your body or putting you to sleep? Because the former will hopefully just feel like being you. The latter won’t feel like anything at all. Goodbye for now, Hsthressis.”

Goodbye, I guess.

I cease maintaining the focus necessary for Hsthressis to exist. She pauses, becoming nothing but an updated memory waiting to be accessed. I shudder as more of myself is brought back into awareness. I have cradled the crying Mr. Mooshi all the way back to the river, where he and I are now sitting among a gaggle of his kin, many of them nuzzling him in sympathy. I take a few deep breaths with all my lungs simultaneously, then return to focus.

The task of making the body properly is not a difficult one. I’ve eaten a Sthrenslian before, and I know how they work. Hsthressis’s design alterations are easy to apply and they take minimal thought. Now I just need to add antennae—I will disguise them as an extra set of whiskers, because why not—and then I just replace her reproductive system with my own and bam. Body done.

…Wait.

Why did I add antennae and change the reproductive system? No, no that’s wrong. And the digestive system is wrong! No, I just want a normal body! Remove that shit! It’s just her. It won’t be a part of me. Now I just have to put a perfect copy of her brain back inside, and… no, wait. The simulation fails when I do that. The brain… no. No, I want it to… why isn’t this working? Over and over, I try to imagine the creation of a physical brain that matches the pure memory of a brain inside my head, and I fail. Over and over again, I make the effort, but over and over again I find myself with frustratingly imperfect results.

The body, and therefore the brain, are not created fully formed. I have to create the parts once they are imagined, and then they form within the egg before and for a significant time after I lay it. Brains aren’t designed to grow into specific configurations; they do not develop with memories preinstalled. That’s what I’m trying to make them do, but it’s not something I know how to do. The brain of this body will start as an infant’s brain, grow rapidly to adulthood, but still be a conscious brain long before that point. My brains do not need to go through a learning process because they are linked to my hive mind. My brains can download all of my memories from my other brains, and function more or less independently from that point. But I can’t upload Hsthressis’s memories into a body unless I give her antennae and make her part of my hive mind.

This is a problem. If it was the only problem, however, then I could probably just do exactly that and then have the antenna dissolve themselves, so that I upload Hsthressis and then separate her from my being. I almost do so before I realize that wouldn’t put Hsthressis back in her body at all.

It would put a copy of Hsthressis into her body.

I mean, the current Hsthressis is arguably a copy. But at least she’s the only Hsthressis! It’s one thing to replace every plank of wood in the ship of Theseus, it’s a totally different thing to do that, then build a second identical ship and then tout that as the one and only true ship of Theseus. If I upload Hsthressis into a body, then separate that body from my hive mind, it does not delete my memory of Hsthressis’s mind. I then run into a situation where I have two Hsthressis: one inside a body, and the other still inside of me. I can simply not simulate that Hsthressis, but that’s basically just putting her in a coma. It doesn’t make her less real!

So do I upload Hsthressis into a body, separate her from my hive mind, and then delete my own memories of her mind? That’s something I can do, sure. But firstly, that’s fucking terrifying, and secondly, that’s just taking the Hsthressis that would have been in a coma and murdering her a second time instead! God dammit!

I can return her to life. I truly am that powerful. But in exchange, she has to stay a part of me. One way or another.

Instead of finalizing the body, I start up Hsthressis’s simulation again.

“Hey. So. I’m back.”

Back? You never left.

“Oh, right. Sorry, I just kind of forgot to simulate the passage of time for you. But I guess if I did that you would just have been alone in a void for a while, so that probably wouldn’t have been pleasant. It’s actually been… I don’t know, probably like half an hour since we last talked?”

What’s an hour?

“Nevermind. Look, I’m running into some problems with the whole ‘reviving you’ thing. So, the reason I can talk to you is… well, okay maybe I should start from the beginning. So after I ate you—”

Wait, you what!? Hold on, hold on. You ate me?

“I know! I know, I’m sorry, okay? I thought you were food. I fucked up.”

You thought I was food!?

Oh no. I forgot she didn’t know. I can’t have her freak out like this, I’m barely holding myself together as is!

“Look, that’s not important right now—”

Oh, that’s not important right now? Holy shit I thought you dropped the rock on accident or something. You ate me. You actually ate me! Holy shit!

I start shaking. I’m so stupid. I shouldn’t have said anything, she’s freaking out and now I’m freaking out I’m going to have an anxiety attack. I want to slam my head into a tree, I want to scream, I want to cry and beg for forgiveness, I want to jump into the river and suck down water and hope my death is quick.

“C-calm down, please!” I beg her. “I’m sorry. You’re right, I’m a monster, and I’m sorry, but please stop yelling at me. Please.”

That’s why you have to make me a body. Because I’m in your fucking stomach! I’m not injured, I’m not trapped in a corpse or anything, I’m you!? In your body? That’s why I can’t see, why I can’t feel? Oh Sss. Oh fuck. I—

“Calm down,” I repeat, as firmly as I’m physically able.

I’ll calm down when I fucking—

I cut the simulation.

My rapid breathing slows into shaky gasps. I didn’t kill her again. She’s just on pause. Just taking some time to calm down. Right. That’s fine. Really, this is the power I should’ve asked for. The ability to pause conversations whenever I need to. It would be nice to be able to do that without killing my conversation partner first.

“I’m in over my head, Mr. Mooshi,” I whisper.

“You don’t say,” he grunts.

“I’m sorry about Evelyn Prime. I couldn’t have saved her without hurting them.”

“You were saying about being in over your head?” he deflects.

“Right. Yeah. I messed up. I don’t know what to do. How do I console someone over the fact that I peeled them apart and dissolved them into nothing?”

“Well, you don’t phrase it like that, that’s for sure.”

I swallow.

“Mr. Mooshi, are you mad at me?” I ask.

“I don’t need to be. You’re plenty mad at yourself. As you should be, but you need to get yourself together and decide on a course of action.”

Of course he’s right. I take another deep breath and simulate.

—Get vomited back up so I can claw your chitinous cloaca back to—

“Stop.”

She stops, no longer possessing any other choice. I shudder. That wasn’t exactly what I meant to do, but I add it to my pile of regrets and push forward.

“Okay. We need to decide what we’re doing with you if we want to get this done before nightfall.”

What’s nightf—

“It doesn’t matter. I just need your input on a philosophical decision. Your body is gone, but I have your mind. Unfortunately, simply sticking your mind into a new body isn’t quite so simple. We have a bunch of options, and I don’t like any of them, but ultimately it should be your choice.”

Okay. Well, you’re the one holding my soul, so it’s not like I’m not going to listen to you.

I note that in the Sthrenslian language, ‘mind’ and ‘soul’ are basically the same word, just with slightly different connotations. They are often used interchangeably, which I suppose speaks to their beliefs on how the universe works.

“Right. So, after I… did what I did, your soul kind of became part of me.”

You ate my soul.

I wince, but send an affirmation.

“For the purposes of your understanding, basically yes. Now the problem is that I can’t move your soul out of me into the new body. I can either link the new body to mine, so that your soul pilots it as its own but you remain in many ways part of me. I… honestly don’t know what all the consequences of that will be. I don’t know how well it will work and I don’t know how much we’ll… I don’t know. Interfere with each other?”

Yeah, that sounds pretty awful. No offense. What are the other options?

“Well, that’s the thing. The other two options involve making a copy of your soul and putting that in the body instead.”

Um. Pardon?

“Yeah, it’s as weird as it sounds. Basically, you will, in every way that you can possibly understand, be reborn in that new body. But a second you will also still be inside me, still bodiless. I can pause this second Hsthressis so that she perceives nothing. I can also destroy the second Hsthressis, and kill her again. But… I don’t want to do that.”

I don’t understand. Two Hsthressis? You can’t just clone a soul.

“It’s not really a soul,” I say. “If you have a soul at all, I don’t know what happens to it no matter what we do, and I don’t know where it is now. What I have is a copy of your brain.”

I don’t know what that is.

“It’s the organ in your body that does all the thinking for you. It’s a physical representation of your mind. But… I can’t explain how it all works to you, we don’t have the time and you don’t have the educational background. Tell me your thoughts on these options.”

Okay, sorry.

And so Hsthressis makes the decision that will define her for the rest of her life.

That is, if such a phrase even applies to her, anymore.

20 Cultural Exchange

“Wait, wait, wait, wait. Are you saying that you don’t have any fiction? At all?”

I’m doing the dishes after feeding Tara. Again. She really eats like crazy! After I fried her some crickets she asked if I had any more crickets, and if she could have them raw. I don’t have any more, but I will be sure to catch extra later for her. If my alien friend is interested in eating raw bugs, who am I to tell her she should have PB&J instead? Any excuse to hunt more bugs is welcome anyway.

But then she goes and says something super-duper crazy! After asking why I wasn’t more frightened or surprised about hearing that she was from another world I started recounting some of my favorite sci-fi stories and she suddenly got really confused. We asked each other a few more questions and it turns out her home world is way bleaker than I ever thought.

“Fiction? That’s your word for stories about things that aren’t real, yes? It’s not like I’m not familiar with the concept, I just find it… somewhat morally indefensible? Why would you create such an elaborate lie?”

“Oh my gosh, Tara, I’m sorry but you’re just in a dystopian space future and you don’t even know it!” I lament, pacing around the room. “I don’t know, maybe your species is really different but to me this sounds super bad! Like this is some Fahrenheit 451 bullshit! You don’t burn books where you live, do you? I mean, I guess the warning signs were there from some of the other things you talked about. You had some 1984 vibes, but—”

“Evelyn! Slow down, I have no idea what you’re talking about! Why are you the one worked up about this? You’re saying these stories are lies, of course I wouldn’t want to hear them!”

“No! They’re not lies, Tara,” I insist.

“But you explicitly said they aren’t real.”

“It’s different!” I say firmly. “Lies are things that you tell with the intent to deceive. With fiction, everyone knows the story is not real. You are never at any point attempting to give the impression that it actually happened.”

“People could still be confused,” Tara argues. “Sharing untruths is a serious problem, Evelyn. If people go around believing things that aren’t true and thinking that’s okay, you get all sorts of problems! Weren’t you complaining earlier about societal issues you face because of people who don’t believe in medicine?”

I’m about to respond immediately, but firm lessons from my father managed to make me stop and consider that instead. She’s not wrong. A lot of people say and do terrible things because they believe something stupid. Or… misguided, at least. And other people exploit those who are willing to believe in those particular kinds of nonsense, which is arguably even worse. But still…

“So, for starters, you are absolutely right that the truth is very important. If you think the world works a certain way, but it doesn’t actually work that way, you can end up doing super terrible things while thinking that they are good.”

Tara relaxes a bit, muscles untensing.

“Exactly, yes,” she says.

“But… that’s not all there is to it,” I continue carefully. “Firstly, I should establish some important cultural background here. On Earth, fiction is well-established, well-respected, and distinctly quarantined from real things. Almost all of the places where you can get fiction, it’s clearly marked as fiction, and if you can find both in the same place then the non-fiction is marked too. This isn’t always the case, but we are all just so used to it that even the places which don’t mark the difference still have a distinction between the two that is inherently obvious to us.”

“You say that, but we still have countless examples in your history where atrocities are committed due to lies regarding some group of people or another. What about your ‘Holocaust?’”

“Godwin’s Law!” I declare, shooting finger guns at her.

Silence stretches between us for a moment.

“What?” Tara asks.

“Nevermind, I’ll tell you about it later. Anyway, that example is totally different. The people who did those bad things either thought those lies were true or they were too scared of the ones that did to say otherwise. But nobody thinks that fictional stories are true, unless they are already crazy or the writer goes out of their way to try and deceive people, which is definitely lying and still considered wrong.”

“I understand what you’re saying,” Tara answers hesitantly, “but it just seems like such a hard-to-define distinction, which bothers me. It’s a very blurry line, and I don’t know why anyone would go to all the trouble to draw it just to create a culturally acceptable form of lying.”

“It’s not—” I begin, but cut myself off again. I can’t allow myself to just give knee-jerk responses. I have to think about it from her perspective. Talking with aliens is stressful!

“Sorry, can I take some time to figure out how to explain this?” I ask.

“Please do,” Tara answers amicably, crawling into and starting to nibble on more of my pantry. Geez, she’s got to have eaten like three times her weight by now.

“There are two main reasons I think we go to all the trouble of making the distinction,” I answer eventually. “The first and more basic reason is that humans just find stories enjoyable. If I’m being honest, this is the biggest reason and because of it hardly anyone ever really questions this. Fiction is fun, and nearly everyone likes it, because I guess over time people that enjoyed paying attention to information about other people got to have more sex or something. I don’t know, I’m not really an evolutionary biologist. Culture may have evolved beyond that a lot, but it’s part of who we are as people. We need entertainment to alleviate stress, and nearly all of us find fiction entertaining.”

“Okay…” Tara murmurs thoughtfully. “It’s not as though my people don’t have any fun, though. Surely you all have things you find entertaining other than… fiction.”

“Of course we do, yeah,” I agree. “But that brings us to reason two! This is one that people don’t really think about, but in my opinion everyone should. Stories are an incredible tool to teach with and learn from. They can give you outlooks on life you couldn’t otherwise come across, and they can deliver those outlooks in a more nuanced and effective way than just flatly telling someone about it. You can teach someone about, say, the moral framework of utilitarianism, but it’s going to be bland and boring and miss a lot of nuance that could be better conveyed by immersing someone in a story about someone who believes in utilitarianism. You could show how that affects the way they interact with the world and the consequences in their life that result from that belief. You could even have the story be about the character initially not understanding the framework and learning about it slowly over time and growing as a person as the ideas they encounter change their thinking. The people reading or watching that story will see the process on a more intimate level and understand it more completely.”

“Why not just do the same thing with the true story?” Tara asks. “People who have had those experiences could simply write autobiographies.”

I shrug.

“Well, firstly, I find autobiographies super boring, and while that sounds like a silly complaint it actually matters a lot. The type of person who goes out and looks for nonfiction about moral philosophy or whatever probably isn’t the type of person that needs to know more about moral philosophy. Right? They’re going to learn about it anyway, but it’s good to also have a way to reach the people who weren’t originally thinking about it. The way you do that is to make it fun!”

“And secondly?”

I grin.

“Well, secondly, you can’t write an autobiography about the best ways to talk to aliens if no one has talked to an alien before. I have read all sorts of stories in which first contact with someone from another world goes horribly because people just don’t think about all the problems that could occur and their carelessness, ignorance, or selfishness causes a lot of pain. None of those people are real, but I can still know about and try to avoid their mistakes.”

She’s quiet for a while after that, occasionally shifting her many legs as she munches away at more food.

“By that same method,” she responds eventually, “could you not influence people with false lessons, negative outlooks that seem good, and portraying cruelty as heroism?”

“Yeah, of course you can. You can also get stories with no real thought or message behind them beyond entertainment, as well. But can’t you do the same with stories of things that actually happened?”

She rapidly taps one leg like a woodpecker, in what I think might be an irritated gesture.

“I… yes, I suppose you could. But do you really think this story strategy is working? Your planet still has no end of problems.”

I tilt my head to the side.

“Well, yeah. Doesn’t yours?”

She stops eating, turning to face me.

“I suppose it does,” she admits. “We have many. No wars, which I think is a rather big deal, but we still have terrorists. Murderers that attack Haslken-Rkito administrators in broad daylight. It’s rather terrifying.”

There is something I immediately want to ask about that, but it might be risky and dangerously personal. It might disgust her. I’ve seen stories go both ways. But I have to trust her friendship, or what’s even the point?

“Are they in the right?”

“What?” she asks, startled.

“The terrorists. Are they doing the right thing when they fight hazel-ken ricky-toe?”

“Wh—no, they’re not in the right!” Tara snaps. “They’re murderers, Evelyn! They kill people!”

“So do governments, a lot of the time,” I say. “And a terrorist group certainly risks being killed themselves if they fight your government. So why do they do that?”

“How should I know? They’re insane. Self-defense is one thing, but aggressive, targeted murder is… it’s inexcusable! Indefensibly evil!”

I smile, setting the last dish on the drying rack and pulling a chair up next to the counter so I can sit next to my friend. I offer her more crackers. She takes them, grumbling quietly in what I assume is her native language so I don’t catch a word. It’s so cool that I can do this. Yeah, I’m a little worried about things going wrong. There are all sorts of thought experiments I’ve read about arguing morality with alien, generally as a representation of something totally inhuman in personality and perspective. But Tara isn’t like that, not really. She’s just a friend with a few different opinions. Not to mention she’s also an actual fucking alien, which continues to be the most incredibly amazing thing I could ever imagine.

“I don’t know these people, or really anything about them,” I tell her soothingly. “I’m absolutely not saying whether they are or aren’t in the right. There are some horrible, awful terrorists on my planet that attack people for crazy reasons, and I certainly don’t think anybody should be murdering anybody else. But I can think of a dozen situations in which someone might try to fight the government anyway, and a lot of them are pretty good reasons. They come from both real life and fiction. These people from your home might very well be evil, but like my dad always used to say…”

I clear my throat so I can do a proper impression of my goofy old man.

“It’s not enough to think you know something, Glowbug! You have to know why you think you know it, because until you get into the habit of asking that you’ll find you don’t have a good answer more often than you’d like to admit!”

Tara chuckles.

“He seems like quite the interesting man, which I suppose is to be expected for the father of such an interesting woman.” I turn away as I feel my face going red, but thankfully Tara continues speaking so I don’t have to. “Still, while I agree with the advice in general, it’s not as though I can walk up to the terrorists and ask them why they do what they do. My whole family could go to jail if it looks like I’m sympathizing with terrorists.”

“Wait, so you can be punished for things that you had nothing to do with as long as your family did them?”

She shifts her weight nervously.

“Well, it’s not as though anyone in my family would do something like that, but hypothetically yes.”

Yep, that’s a solid point in favor of a dystopian government if I’ve ever heard one.

“I have some stories that I think you would find really, really interesting,” I tell her. “Think of it like a cultural exchange! To help you get acclimated to life on Earth, for however long you’re staying here.”

She lets out a hissy sigh.

“I suppose I will consider it,” she relents. “But I—”

Her words are interrupted by a sudden knock on the door.

“Yo, dork!” Samantha calls from the other side. “I got the rest of your notes!”

I jumped to my feet, grin on my face.

“Oh, that’s Sam!” I tell Tara. “She’s super nice, you’ll like her!”

I jump up to get the door.

“Wait!” Tara yelps. “Wait, I…”

I stop, looking back at her. She’s… shaking.

“Do you not want to meet Sam?” I ask. “We can pretend that you’re still Blubie if you want.”

She doesn’t respond, and Sam knocks again so I go and answer the door. I retrieve her diligently-copied notes, chatting with her in the doorway for a little bit before politely excusing myself and returning inside. I don’t invite Samantha to come in. Walking back into my room, I find Tara in exactly the same place, so I sit down next to her again.

“I apologize for my rudeness,” she says quietly.

“Hey, it’s fine,” I assure her, holding out my hands. After a brief hesitation she crawls on and I move her to my lap. “Trust me, I know social anxiety when I see it. If you want to talk about it, I’m happy to listen. If not, that’s okay too.”

She doesn’t respond at first, opening and closing her armor and mouth a few times without letting out any words.

“I don’t know if I would call it social anxiety, per se,” she says eventually.

“Oh yeah?” I ask, encouraging more elaboration.

Again, she’s quiet for a while.

“It is nothing of real importance,” she eventually mutters, with a quiet fear tinging her voice. It’s as if she’s afraid the words themselves might rear up and attack her.

Her species really must value the truth a lot, since she’s even worse at lying than I am. But I won’t press until she’s ready to talk about it.

I may not have many, but I know that’s not what friends do.

21 Powerlessly Humane

I want to be the one and only me, Hsthressis concludes. If that means you keeping my soul, at least in part, so be it. You don’t seem all that bad.

I figured that might be the case, but for some reason I dreaded that answer. Perhaps that isn’t fair. I dread every one of the options before me. There is no good way to make up for a murder, even if I can partially undo it.

“Okay,” I tell her. “Then things might get a little weird.”

Weirder than the timeless void I’m floating in after death, Miss definitely-not-a-god?

I sigh, both internally and externally.

“Honestly? Maybe, yeah. Bye for now, Hsthressis. See you when you hatch.”

See me when I what now?

I pause her existence, changing my focus to visualizing and completing her body design. I suppose I will have Evelyn Experimental lay this one, mostly because that body is largest. It should be easier that way.

I move one of my Evelyn Bork bodies to get food, starting a hunt as my other Bork lays down near the rest of myself to defend in case of attack. It’s not long before EE starts to swell and I have Hsthressis’s egg soon after. Now, I suppose I just need to occupy time until it hatches.

Sustainability. Food. I need to be able to eat if I want to be able to make more bodies. I need more bodies if I want to be able to protect myself. I need to be able to protect myself if I want to explore the world and eventually figure out how to go home.

So. Sustainable food sources means either domesticating and ranching animals or farming plants. The latter is a better choice. Not because I particularly like eating plants, but because I can make my own. I gain nothing from growing and eating animal bodies, but plants, being autotrophic, can continually make more and more food. The main problem with that? Plants tend to do so slowly.

I start thinking about ways to get energy more efficiently. The most obvious problem is probably the fact that there are a massive amount of trees here, and I can eat trees, but I can’t do it well. They are too big for me to take out of the ground, so I’m stuck snapping off and munching branches which is frankly not nutritious in the slightest. I need sap, the actual energy stores inside the trunks. I don’t know a good way to get it normally, but…

The tiny, heroic Squad Evelyn buzzes around the trees by the river, sampling as many small plants as I can get. I use the brain in Evelyn Experimental to start analyzing it all, rapidly expanding the possibilities available to me. Some of what I thought were plants are in fact fungi, although they seem mostly indistinguishable from the fungi I know of at home. The similarity is just due to the fact that they are decomposers, not autotrophs, and while I’m not sure I can efficiently encroach on their turf, the mycelium structure they possess gives me an idea.

Who says I have to cut down a tree or dig up its roots in order to eat it?

I can create a parasite. I know that sounds bad, but when you think about it it’s not like slowly sucking a tree dry is any worse than killing it and then eating it whole all at once. And I know that for real because I ate some of these trees before and they definitely don’t have feelings. I double and triple checked and also asked them. I wouldn’t do this to an animal, because that would be cruel. Animals have feelings, but trees don’t so I can make them as sick as I need to and they won’t be hurt in any way that matters. As long as I carefully control the amount of parasitism I’m doing, it shouldn’t be an issue… and I can pretty damn carefully control anything that’s part of me.

So, I start designing. The structure is pretty simple. I will create a vine that grows up the trunk of the tree and extends filaments into the bark, tapping into their inner resources and slurping them down. Using that pilfered energy, the vines will make nuts… but they will be neutered nuts, not actually capable of growing another vine. They will exclusively be energy sources, which I will probably need to harvest and protect fairly regularly or expect them to get pilfered by other animals.

Of course, that could arguably be another upside. I have pheromones, right? I have been underutilizing them. Why go through all the work of hunting down random critters when I could draw them to me with enticing scents? Of course, I will need to be significantly more comfortable with my capacity to defend myself before sending out an all-call to the forest. There are quite a few things I need to do to improve on that. But first, I finalize and quickly create a dozen seeds for my new parasitic plant prototype, which I will name “Ivylyn.”

“Get it, Mr. Mooshi?” I say, giggling to myself. “Ivylyn!”

“Your wit is truly unparalleled when it comes to jokes that only you will enjoy,” Mr. Mooshi deadpans.

“Thank you, I think!”

So. Safety. The first thing that comes to mind is how pathetic Squad Evelyn is. What’s the point of having a flying squadron if they get ripped apart by birds? I think I need a larger flying body to provide overwatch and protection. Something offensive enough to actually make a difference.

My first priority needs to be ensuring that anything I come across isn’t a person. After that, I need to make sure it doesn’t hurt me… and if it’s not a person, I don’t care how I accomplish that. Well, I suppose that’s not entirely true, but I have officially reached a point where being afraid of causing environmental damage has dropped well below being afraid of dying. I can do a proper ecological survey when I’m not in mortal peril. So if Acidsucks wants to throw down, I’ll throw down Acidsucks style.

The piston fish can suck fluids into an organ in order to expel them at a high velocity. The acid sloths can develop and release a devastating superacid inside their bodies. It doesn’t take a genius to make the obvious combination.

I’m going to develop hydraulic acid cannons.

“So much for pacifism,” Mr. Mooshi mutters. “That’s kind of a big jump, don’t you think?”

“It’s only for self-defense,” I insist. “I can’t even use it for hunting, because the acid would ruin the body.”

“Not quite what I mean,” Mr. Mooshi clarifies. “Weren’t you worried about losing your humanity, like… yesterday? Now you want to make a flying defense drone body?”

“Keeping my humanity was kind of a joke from the start, wasn’t it? I can’t even pretend to be the original Evelyn anymore. I could be a clone, a simulation, a reincarnation, a copy, but I can’t actually be… the person I think is me. Right? I’m not stupid. There is no more Evelyn Prime.”

“And why does that matter to you? You are always the person you think you are. What you believe yourself to be is part of your reality.”

“My reality? There’s either reality or there’s fantasy. Whatever I believe may affect me, but the real world couldn’t care less.”

There’s a pause as I whip a Bork tongue out to grab a small rodent-like creature and crunch down on it. It tastes all right, although I’m not particularly interested in any of its adaptations.

“Is Hsthressis the original?” Mr. Mooshi asks.

“No,” I grunt. “Of course not.”

“But you still believe you owe her for the crime you committed, because she is a continuation of Hsthressis’s consciousness. That’s a contradiction, isn’t it? You still believe Hsthressis matters. You still believe she is the same Hsthressis, even if she’s not the ‘original.’ So why do you not allow yourself the same concessions? Besides, you could also be wrong. You should never discount that possibility.”

I glower down at him. Stupid smart friend, being all insightful and shit.

“Are you saying I shouldn’t make acid cannons?” I ask.

“No, I’m saying that you shouldn’t despair. You are still you. Choose whether you make acid cannons or not in that light. What does Evelyn think about acid cannons?”

“Evelyn thinks… a lot of things,” I murmur.

The back of my head is always wondering what sort of body could I evolve to just absolutely crush all of my problems. I have a new design for the Evelyn Tinkerbells that should make them drastically more powerful. I figured out how to make acid cannons ages ago. And when I knew that all those weasels wanted to kill me the first thing that came to mind was how easy it would be to slaughter them if I actually put my back into it. But… I’m just really not cut out for this. I don’t fit as this sort of creature. I can’t be me and still be the zergling horde. But I still feel myself slipping, and… I’m just not scared of this world anymore. I can be frustrated by it. Annoyed. Certainly very anxious. But looking back at the closest brush to death I’ve ever had, I can’t reasonably believe that I’ll die here anymore. Now I’m just scared this place will push me hard enough to make me push back.

“I’m scared that the accidents I made today will turn into the kind of thing I do on purpose.”

“It’s much easier for a powerless human with no responsibilities to not do any evil, isn’t it?” Mr. Mooshi asks, and for a moment I almost feel like I’m talking to a memory.

One of my tongues lashes out, snags one of those terrible bird creatures, and pulls it into my mouth so I can crush its bones. With a satisfying snap, its life ends, and blood starts to run down my chin and throat.

“I didn’t mind being a powerless human,” I tell him. “But just because I’m not one anymore doesn’t mean I’m going to fly off the handle and start being evil. That’s not how it works. So… yes. Let’s make acid canons. And let’s use them for good. I’m not going to be something that people fear. But… I’m not going to be defenseless either.”

I let out a huff, sounding much more confident than I feel.

“Being a human is lame anyway. Right, Mr. Mooshi? We are way better off being cool bugs!”

“And plants. And dogs. And whatever EE is.”

“Hey, don’t make fun of Evelyn Experimental, Mr. Mooshi. I like having a weird, imperfect body, even if I sometimes get urges to eat her and start again.”

I pause for a moment, and let my gaze move over to Hsthressis’s egg. Her whole existence feels like a waste to that part of me. Thinking about it, isn’t it kind of odd that I have such obviously alien urges? If I’m the same sort of thing as Hsthressis is now, why would whatever made me this way have given me these desires? And if these are clearly alien, would it be bad to root around in my own head and turn them off?

Maybe now is not the best time to think about that. Fucking around inside my own brain is to be reserved for moments of emotional stability and executed only after multiple days of deliberation. That seems like the only reasonable way to not go crazy trying.

“I’m not sure if you should be putting a whole lot of hope in not going crazy,” Mr. Mooshi comments. “So, what sort of terrible creature are you going to give acid cannons to?”

“Not just a creature,” I tell him. “A fortress.”

I have been very worried about having safe places to sleep, and that worry has only been compounded by my utter lack of ability to craft myself a shelter. But I don’t need to craft anything. I can just grow it!

“It’s going to be a giant wooden sphere, basically,” I explain to Mr. Mooshi. “We are talking really fucking big. I’ll plant it next to the river here, and it should cover from the riverbank all the way over here to the tree line. What would you say that is, like twenty feet? That’s enough to be a college dorm room.”

“And how exactly are you going to get it to actually grow? You realize that these trees take many many years to get as big as they are, and you want something even bigger.”

“Well, obviously I’m going to cheat a bit. My tree is going to have a stomach.”

There’s no way I can get enough energy stored in the seed or from photosynthesis to have this thing up and ready in any reasonable amount of time. But I think if I mix plant and animal attributes, I can make something impressive. In fact, I could give this big sphere body a sensorium, a brain, and limited musculature to aim and fire the acid canons. Basically, I’m making myself a point defense system that I can live inside.

It’s odd making a completely stationary body. A couple days ago I might have worried about getting bored, but nowadays I spend almost all my time with at least one body not moving at all, using the brainpower for something else instead. I may as well formalize it. I can create versions of myself that are perfectly specialized, and I know how powerful that is.

I make the seed. It’s drastically larger than the Ivylyn seeds, big enough to be an egg all on its own, but I want this thing to grow fast so I need to give it a lot of initial power. I dig the hole, drop it in, and set up Fort Mooshi around it.

The sun is setting, and tomorrow I will finish bringing a person back to life. Isn’t that something? Really, I don’t know how to feel about that. It feels like it should be more. Death is such a big deal to humans, but since I’ve gotten here I’ve died four times already, killed four people, and started one resurrection. No one Evelyn should have all that power.

But no matter how big I grow, I’ve decided to believe for now that I am the one and only Evelyn. I have no evidence to support this, no reason to consider it fact. On the contrary, all the evidence, while circumstantial, seems to indicate the opposite. Are my dreams of home memories? Or are they updates? I can’t answer these questions, and at the end of the day it’s just more practical to believe in the world that leaves me with the most hope.

The sun sets, but once again my mind decides to wander instead of sleep. Anxieties crawl up the inside of my skulls, wondering and fearing and refusing to go away.

I forcibly shut them off, produce sleeping chemicals in my brains, and pass into rest.

22 Demon Mom

Wrapping up my wet hair, I speed around the room, trying to scrounge up some clean clothing. I’ve spent the last few days chatting with Tara, showing her some more of my favorite stories, answering questions, getting bugs, chatting some more, and just kind of hanging out. It has been incredibly, impossibly cool, but…

“I’m really sorry, Tara, but I can’t miss another day of classes. I mean, I could, but if you’re trying to keep on the down-low and not become a public figure I probably need to keep up appearances too or people will start looking for me. Although, again, I personally think that there are going to be a lot of people who would just be super excited to help you.”

“No, Evelyn. I just don’t think I’m ready for that. There is a lot I have to do and figure out before I will be comfortable. Thank you, though. Your ‘college’ sounds like a very good use of time. You don’t need to be with me, ah, twenty-four seven, I think is the term?”

“Alright. It’s totally your decision. If you want to be my secret alien bug friend, that’s pretty awesome too. Ah, here it is!”

Wrapped in a towel, tearing through piles of discarded outfits, I manage to find the one bra I’m confident I haven’t worn since last time I did laundry. Mostly because it kind of digs in a little. Like, not that much, so I never threw it out, but I still really hate it? Still, by floor bra standards, it is the cleanest, so that’s what matters.

…I should probably do laundry today.

“Can I turn around now?” Tara grumbles.

“No!” I insist. “I still have to put it on!”

“I do not understand why this is such a big deal.”

“It’s a cultural thing, okay? It doesn’t really make sense but I can’t just decide to stop being anxious about it!”

Tara drums her legs on my desk, where she is currently perched facing the wall.

“Fair enough, I suppose. I am experiencing a similar irritation. Your stories are quite interesting, now that I am reading them, but I cannot shake the constant feeling that there is something horribly wrong with doing so. It makes them very frustrating to try and enjoy.”

“Yeah! It’s kind of like that.”

I toss on a fresh shirt and… meh, I guess it’s okay if the pants are old. I do a quick check for stains, spotting a little mud on the ankles, but whatever. I throw those on too.

“Okay, you can turn around now,” I tell her.

She scuttles in a circle to face me, quirking her antennae in irritation.

“Honestly,” Tara grumbles, “it’s not as if no one knows what you’re hiding under there. Aren’t there only two kinds of human? If I’ve figured it out, surely you’re all in on it by now.”

I grimace a bit.

“I mean, you could maybe argue that there are two basic kinds but… no, there are a lot of exceptions to that. Like intersex people and, um… oh! I know it’s technically educational, but please don’t look up naked people while I’m gone. It’s school wi-fi, so they track stuff like that.”

“Ah, I see. So I should look up naked people while you’re here, then?”

“No!”

She chortles, and I return my towel to the bathroom with a huff. For the past few days I’ve tried to be very careful and not assume anything Tara says is a joke, because that’s like alien communication 101. Don’t ignore the culture gap! Unfortunately, Tara quickly figured this policy out and has been using it to make fun of me ever since, the little troll.

It’s actually pretty weird how much of a culture gap the two of us don’t have, communist Space China notwithstanding. She picks up on idioms and vocal quirks surprisingly fast. It’s a bit startling sometimes, especially when I accidentally say something really obscure and figurative, but it’s nice that I don’t have to explain everything constantly.

“Of all the cool alien bug friends in the universe, why did I get the one who makes fun of me?” I grumble, trying not to blush from all the naked person talk. I am way too awkward for this.

“Oh!” Tara exclaims immediately. “I’m sorry, should I stop? It’s not bothering you too much, is it? I just noticed the characters you like in your stories attempts to make each other mildly uncomfortable on purpose and that seems to work as some sort of camaraderie-building exercise, so—”

“It’s fine, it’s fine!” I insist, offering my hand to climb on. She obliges, and I carry her over to the bed so I can shovel the contents of my desk into my backpack.

“It’s honestly pretty funny,” I continue. “The clothing thing is just a super weird one for me, specifically? I wish I could be more open about it but I’m really, really not. It gives me the heebie-jeebies to even think about! When I used to go swimming I would wear my suit to the pool and wear it all the way home even though I was soaking wet, no change of clothes, because I didn’t want to do anything like that in a public locker room. I guess a lot of people do that, but I don’t know. It’s the example that comes to mind. Swimming would have been a lot more comfortable, especially after the fact, if I could just do what I would always see so many other people doing and change clothes in relative public.”

“I think I understand,” Tara murmurs. “I certainly get your general point, at least. Would you like me to wear clothing?”

I give my big beetle buddy a considering glance, raising an eyebrow. It is a good point. Is it weird? She is a person and stuff.

“Nah,” I eventually decide. “Not unless you want to. You look like a bug, and bugs are adorable and wonderful and always clothesless and that doesn’t really bother me. The weirdness is explicitly about humans or particularly humanoid things, so you don’t really bother me.”

Tara nods, mostly by bobbing her entire body up and down.

“That makes sense. But you’ve mentioned this is both inherently cultural and something that doesn’t afflict everyone. I’m a bit confused by that.”

“Oh, well, humans have a lot of cultures. And in some places, America being a significant one, lots of extremely different cultures live right next to each other and bump elbows a lot. Er, that means that we get packed together into a small space. Anyway, there are some people that don’t care in the slightest about nudity, but I’m definitely not one of them. It’s just how I was raised, I guess. Modesty got really ingrained in my brain.”

“Like truthfulness in mine,” Tara mutters.

“Like truthfulness!” I agree. “Modesty and truthfulness are both virtues, but maybe ones we were brought up to take way too far.”

“And now the instincts are inescapable,” Tara finishes. “Yes, I think I understand completely. It is frustrating. I wish I could enjoy these stories like you do.”

“Maybe someday,” I reassure her. “But for now, I really gotta go to class. You have enough food, right? I noticed you really like the grasshoppers and butterflies, I can try to find more of those if you want. After class, I mean. Oh, right, books are on the bed, fiction pile by the pillow and nonfiction on the other end. Um, feel free to use the laptop if you want? I take paper notes. I saw you log in a few times so I assume you know the password already?”

“Yes. P-h-i-d-i-p-p-u-s-A-u-d-a-x, correct? With the first P and first A capitalized.”

“Um. Yeah. Wow. Didn’t you only watch me type that once?”

“It seemed pertinent,” she answers simply.

“Still, wow. Good memory. No way I could do that in one go.”

My friend bobs her body in another imitation nod.

“I doubt I could have either, up until recently. But I am trying to develop as many skills as I can.”

“Yeah, understandable,” I sympathize. “Hey, don’t worry too much, okay? Something brought you here. If it’s possible to send you all this way, it’s definitely possible to take you home.”

“Yes,” Tara agrees, “and I will find it. Thank you, Evelyn. I will see you when you are done with your ‘college’ today.”

“For sure!” I answer with a grin. “I really do gotta go now, though. Class started five minutes ago.”

Hsthressis isn’t ready to hatch when I wake up, which mostly surprises me because her egg is so small. Sthrenslians are only slightly larger than my hand, after all, and my smaller eggs tend to develop to maturity faster. To that end, I’ve been spending the morning thinking about tiny bodies, specifically the Evelyn Tinkerbells.

They’re a flawed design in many ways, especially for the purpose that I’m certain is about to become very important: entering Sthrenslian tunnels. I want to be in contact with the Sthrenslians, partially to not go crazy and partially to see if I can somehow make an effort to be forgiven for my crimes. I know I don’t deserve to be forgiven, but I’m legitimately scared of what isolation would do to my mind, and since I don’t intend to commit suicide my mental health is arguably important for the physical health of… well, the whole planet.

I hate thinking like that. I hate the arrogance of it. ‘Arrogant’ is one of those words that I would hear thrown about by my mother whenever she was angry at my dad. I don’t want to give the impression that the two of them fought a lot; my home life was pretty darn good by most standards, but fights inevitably happened from time to time. It’s a bad word, a naughty word and a cruel insult. I’m a humble person by nature, generally not thinking much of my importance in the world and being okay with that. Like, back on Earth, there are problems everywhere. Disease, starvation, systemic abuse, hatred, violence… I feel like any reasonable person should want to solve those problems, even devote their life to solving those problems. But I’m just some girl who likes bugs, and I planned to get a job looking at bugs. Not because I don’t care about those issues, not because I don’t think it would be better for me to try and help with those issues, but because I really genuinely don’t believe I have any shot at fixing them, even if I worked myself to the bone. I think I’m not a good enough person for that, that I would be miserable to even attempt to tackle any of it instead of devoting myself to the obsession with my object of interest. To assume that I could be more than that would just be… well, arrogant.

How much of that is hypocritical justification for me to just ignore the problems of the world and do something that I love? I don’t know. Probably most of it. A good person would grind herself raw, heedless of the suffering she caused herself as long as it brought joy to others. But that model of a good person isn’t realistic. I don’t think I could actually be that person, I don’t think most people could be that person and I don’t expect them to. But despite that impossibility, it’s still the model of goodness that makes the most sense to me.

I’m getting distracted again. The Evelyn Tinkerbells should be upgraded and enhanced for subterranean travel. That means tunnel whiskers, that means bioluminescence, that means ditching photosynthesis. While I can make changes to the pre-existing bodies, it would be faster and more efficient to just redesign and lay new ones. I can leave the current squad Evelyn aboveground, to tend to the Ivylyns. Laying a new set from scratch also allows me to implement general enhancements, like moving from a pneumatic to a hydraulic muscle system, creating sacks to store excess fluid, placing the wings lower on the body so that they’re closer to the center of mass (but not directly on top of it, so I still naturally orient myself feet-down) and so on. The new versions should be about eight times stronger than the original Evelyn Tinkerbells, which sounds really impressive until you remember that they are the size of my pinky. At that scale, multiplicative improvements are relatively par for the course.

I plop out the eggs and sigh, a bit annoyed that all my cool ideas take so long to finish growing. I should probably start to stockpile food that I can feed to my fortress body when that part of me finishes forming a stomach, but actually storing a bunch of food without the fortress to hide it in seems like a risky idea. Still, I don’t have anything better to do with my time, so I do it anyway. Fish, sloths, and those damn birds. They die and get added to the slowly-growing pile. Then, finally, I feel the Hsthressis body wake up.

Immediately, I halt all conscious and unconscious thought in its mind, functionally placing it in a coma. I have to make sure the transition is as seamless and uncorrupted as possible, and I already know the brain isn’t a perfect match for Hsthressis’. It should, however—keyword ‘should,’ because I have never done anything like this before—it should be able to change and adapt to her thought processes if she’s the only one doing any thinking with the body.

That, of course, will be the difficult part of the trick. What Hsthressis asked me to do still keeps her as part of my hive mind. Which means, technically, I will always have perfect and unrestricted access to every part of her mind. I have to just… not use any of that access, ever, because that would be a horrifying violation of personal privacy and bodily agency. Basically, I’m terrified, but I feel like I’m obligated to follow through with her decision instead of one that I might like better. Because, you know, I murdered her.

I focus on the Hsthressis simulation I’ve paused inside my head and set it to run in her new body. Immediately, I’m bombarded with her initial thoughts and feelings, but I make a focused effort to ignore them, to let them pass without acknowledgment, and my ADHD brain succeeds at that about as well as one might imagine. I feel her confusion, her panic, her realization that she can move. I feel my claws—her claws—slam against the inside of the egg shell. I’ve made a mistake, I think, but I can’t back out of it now.

The shell shatters, Hsthressis coughing out egg juice taking her first breaths in her brand-new body.

“What the hell!?” she hisses, scuttling around in confusion.

“I told you you’d be hatching,” I hiss back at her, because everything in her language is at least kind of a hiss.

“Evelyn? Is that you?”

Seeing what she sees (and then quickly trying to not do that, because again, gross violation of personal rights) I remember that Sthrenslians don’t have eyes, and their echolocation is optimized for much smaller spaces than the great outdoors. This is probably quite uncomfortable and frightening for her, the equivalent of being stuck in the dark.

“Yeah, it’s me,” I confirm. “You’re safe, don’t worry. I’ll get you back underground with your family soon. First though, you need to eat. Getting born is hungry business, in my experience.”

I offer her some meat from my pile, dropping it down next to her. I choose a fish because I suspect the difference in anatomy will make it the least likely to carry diseases to her. Although, since her body is technically one of mine, she’s probably as immune as I seem to be.

“Right,” she mutters. “Thanks, I guess. Born?”

“Yeah, I mean, I had to make your new body somehow,” I answer. “Welcome back to life, my technically-kind-of-daughter.”

“Fuck that,” Hsthressis grumbles. “The last thing I need is a second mom. Especially if one of them is a demon.”

She starts munching away at the fish, and I can tell she likes it. Well, I did it I guess. Next stop: weasel civilization. Let’s hope I didn’t fuck up my only chance for social interaction.

…Who am I kidding. If I haven’t yet, I definitely will soon.

23 Social Skills

“I hear if the teacher doesn’t show up in fifteen minutes, we can just leave,” Samantha eventually says.

I’ve been back to school for a few weeks now, having classes during the day and hanging out with Tara all evening. I hardly interact with anyone else anymore, at least outside of classes, but that’s more than okay. I was never much of a ‘hanger’ anyway. I caught up on the schoolwork I missed fairly quickly, and I do all of my new homework at home (like it says on the tin) while Tara reads. Sometimes she’ll study with me instead, she’s apparently quite fond of my textbooks. The little alien is particularly interested in history, a fantastic coincidence considering that I can’t manage to pay attention in history class for more than two minutes at a time.

So I can’t really bring myself to be too disappointed when the teacher just… isn’t around today.

“Yeah, that’s definitely a thing,” one of the other students insists. “They can’t keep us here. It’s like… the law.”

“Um, nobody’s keeping us here in the first place,” I point out. “This is a private college. We’re paying them so we can be here.”

Multiple people roll their eyes at me, so I shrink down and try to become invisible.

“I just mean the teacher can’t mark us as absent if they don’t fucking show up,” the student clarifies.

“Are you super super sure, though?” another student asks. “I can’t miss another day or I’ll fail the class.”

Internally, I balk at that. I ditch sometimes when it’s urgent, but it’s not difficult to email the professor with an ‘I’m sick’ notice and then get excused, no questions asked. Sure, it made me nearly rip my own heart out to lie to Professor Copple like that (and almost made me pull my lungs out with it when she responded with an animated get well card) but my lie was at least for the good cause of becoming friends with an alien. I wonder what kind of crazy stuff these people are doing that stop them from even sending a message? Maybe alien bug friends are less uncommon in the grand scheme of things than I realized.

…Or they’re just delinquents here on their parents’ money, but that seems ungenerous to assume.

“Nobody is going to be there to mark us absent if the professor is absent,” Samantha insists. “If fifteen minutes late is when we’re absent, it’s when she’s absent too.”

Nods go all around. Yes, that seems reasonable. And everyone certainly wants it to be true, so we all decide to believe it. A bit of doubt remains in my heart though, so fifteen minutes comes and goes. Awkwardly, I stand around outside the classroom door until only Samantha and I remain.

“So…” Samantha murmurs, “got any plans for our sudden free period? I haven’t seen much of you outside of class.”

“Oh, um, yeah,” I stutter. “Sorry. I’ve just been busy with, um. Stuff.”

“With stuff, huh? That sure explains it. Eve, I get that you’re not exactly a social butterfly, but you just kind of dropped off the face of the Earth. You been doing okay?”

“Yes?” I say, honestly surprised at the question.

“You need to get out more, girl. Hang out with friends. It’s not good for you to be cooped up alone all the time.”

While I don’t totally disagree with that, I haven’t exactly been alone. I suppose I can’t tell her that without coming off as crazy, though.

“I… guess?” I venture. “But I’m not cooped up! I go outside a lot!”

“Evelyn, I know you go outside, but you don’t go out. Come on, let’s go for an early lunch. I have some other friends who’re free right now. We can all hang out and get food off campus.”

“I don’t really have a lot of extra food money…” I hedge.

“Oh my god. Then I’ll buy you lunch, okay? Come on! I’m your friend, and I’m telling you that you need to socialize with something other than bugs.”

I grumble quietly, offended by the implication that bugs are anything less than perfect company, but I can tell a losing argument when I see it.

“Fine…”

Samantha practically drags me off campus, sometimes literally while I protest her gratuitous jaywalking. Fiendish woman, the crosswalk is right there! She’s tearing down the very fabric of society! Clearly, she is a bad influence on me, and I should leave and not go out in public at all.

An array of fast food joints has been unsurprisingly cropping up around my school, and out of all the possible choices Samantha pulls me into an Arby’s. I have to admit, that’s pretty disappointing. Couldn’t she have at least kidnapped me for a meal at Taco Bell?

Immediately, I am dragged towards a group of three other people. One is kind of a ritzy girl, wearing long fake nails and those hoop earrings that mortally terrify me with nightmares of having them caught on something. Her curly brown hair bounces with vim as she speaks enthusiastically to the other two. I’m of the opinion that she’d actually be a lot prettier if she wore less makeup and add-ons, but she probably just likes it, so who am I to judge? Her shirt is cut to barely, barely let me see a hint of her cleavage, which (unless she stuffed her bra) is significantly bigger than mine, because of course it is.

The next-most-animate conversationalist is a very androgynous person, and I’m guessing that’s the objective behind the look. Between the tight clothes that show off a wiry frame, the short-cut hair, the defined chest that could just as easily be pectoral muscles as it could be a contained pair of A-cups, I am thoroughly bamboozled. Not that I really trust my ability to pick up social cues correctly in the first place. I’m pretty sure that the polite thing to do in this situation is to just ask, which sounds like it would be an excellent solution for someone much less anxious than I am. “Hi, I’m Evelyn, I like bugs. What is your gender?” Like, yeah, that’s how it’s supposed to go I think, but I don’t know for sure and I don’t want to offend anyone and it doesn’t really matter, right, because gender isn’t important because the worth of a person lives within the personality and the nature of their mind, not the arbitrary social constructs of… aaaaaaagh! Meeting people is really hard! I’m too busy having a philosophical freak out to even listen to what she’s saying! I mean what they’re saying! Or maybe what he’s saying? Dammit I’m doing it again!

“Evelyn, this is Sasha, Alex, and Thomas,” Samantha tells me, breaking me out of my mental spiral and pointing to her three friends in order.

Oh yeah, there are three. The third apparently being that hot guy who sits in front of me in Intro to Economics that always wears form-fitting shirts and is single-handedly the only interesting thing about the class. Like seriously, who the hell puts an economics class on the required course list for biology majors? Liberal arts education su—oh god he’s holding out his hand he wants to shake my hand.

I stare at his fingers for a solid three seconds before managing to recover in time to give a Normal Person Shake without it getting excessively weird. I really hope he washes his hands. Dang, he looks a lot nicer from the front though. No! Wait! Bad brain! He is a person, not my eye candy! Boy does he wear a tight shirt though. No! Look at the face! He has short black hair and that kind of stubble that says ‘I shaved this morning, but my sexy beard is just too powerful to be quelled by mere mortal razors.’

“Hey Evelyn,” he says. “Nice to meet you.”

“I bet you have to shave a lot,” I tell him and then instantly die.

He quirks an eyebrow at me. Straight face keep a straight face do not blush just smile just smile act natural oh god I’m going to diiiie.

The girl and Alex both burst out into laughter, and Alex holds out a hand to shake as well. I activate my handshaking protocols once again, but I’m much more interested by Alex’s other hand, because it has a triforce tattoo.

“Are you left-handed?” I ask.

Now it’s Alex’s turn to quirk an eyebrow.

“Why do you ask? I’m shaking with my right.”

I blink.

“Oh, um, me too!” I realize, suddenly, that the handshake has gone on for an awkwardly long amount of time and let go. “I just mean, um, I noticed you had the tattoo on your left hand, and like Link’s tattoo is always on the left because he is left-handed, so I thought maybe it was because of that, but Ganondorf and Zelda have the triforce show up on their right hand, so I was sort of hoping… um. I mean, not that it’s bad you’re right-handed and the tattoo is… uh.”

I trail off, my own hands gesticulating at nothing in particular. Alex grins wide.

“No, you’re spot on. Hardly anyone catches that.”

“Oh,” I squeak. “Cool.”

I managed to smile back. Was that a successful social interaction!?

“Oh good, another dork,” Sasha says, although she’s smiling too. “Hey honey, it’s great to meet you.”

Did… did she just call me ‘honey?’ I feel like that’s weird, but I’m not sure why. It’s super weird, right?

“Um, hi?” I sputter.

“What, no fancy insight?” she taunts.

“Your… hair is nice?” I hedge.

She stares at me intensely for an increasingly stressful period of time, then suddenly throws her arms into the air with a huff.

“Okay, Sam, you win. I like her. Let’s get in line already.”

“Told you,” Samantha grunts. “She’s weird, but she’s cool.”

Wait, Samantha thinks I’m cool?

“Sam, you had to drag me here because if you didn’t I was going to go catch bugs alone in the forest,” I remind her.

“Yeah,” Samantha agrees. “Cool.”

“But you hate bugs!”

“Wait, back up a moment,” Sasha insists, wrinkling her nose. “You catch bugs?”

“Hey, I’m sure there are lots of good reasons to catch bugs,” Alex counters. “They’re good sources of protein! A lot of cultures eat crickets and stuff, right?”

“Yeah, just make sure you cook them first,” I warn. “You can’t get most diseases from bugs because the genetic differences are too great, but they can totally still have parasites. If you need an uncooked snack, ants are the safest. Pretty bitter, though, and not a zero percent risk.”

Everyone is staring at me now.

“U-um, I mean, I don’t normally eat bugs… I mean, I don’t eat bugs! I just, um, I collect them and, uh, I have to catch them to feed my pet tarantula! Her name is Mr. Bubbles and she’s a grammosto… I mean, a Chilean Rose Hair! I got her when I was seven and she’s the best! So anyway I catch live bugs for her but I have to take the time to gut load them to make sure they’re safe to eat and… oh, um, gut loading basically means that after I catch live food for her, I feed the food nutritious stuff so that it’s nutritious when she eats it. Like veggies and things! And, um… uh…”

And I just hyperfocused on a rant about eating insects in the middle of a restaurant! Good! I’m just doing so good at this being social thing, I’m so glad that I got pulled all the way out here! Please kill me!

Alex coughs politely to capture attention, then flashes a winning grin.

“I think I get it,” Alex says. “So basically, when Tom whines about the delicious Arby’s cuisine not having proper nutrients, he’s actually just looking out for the giant eight-legged monster that plans to devour him whole. Good on you, Tom.”

“Yeah, that must be it,” Thomas answers sarcastically. “I can’t possibly be concerned about my own health.”

“No, Alex has a point, Thomas,” Sasha insists. “I’ve never thought about nutrition that way before, but now I’m worried. When I inevitably get kidnapped and tortured for my family’s money, I can’t very well be rude to the insane cannibals they feed my dismembered parts to.”

“Wait, what?” Samantha asks. “What fantasy is this, exactly?”

“Yeah, that doesn’t make any sense, Sasha,” Alex butts in. “They can’t mail the dismembered parts to your parents if they’re being fed to cannibals. Think about the continuity here! You can be carved open to use your pretty skin as a suit, or you can be ransomed to your parents, but not both.”

“Sure I can,” Sasha argues. “Why, in this day and age it’s not like you could use the Postal Service to send someone body parts. They’d notice! It makes much more sense to hire the cannibals to bite my fingers off and just send my parents a video of it.”

“How do you hire cannibals?” Thomas wonders. “Is there a website for it? Some kind of cannibal guild? Do you think they unionize? What kinds of payment do they accept?”

“Well, I imagine they’d accept fingers.”

“Next!” The guy behind the register calls out, and the four friends take it in stride, approaching as if they hadn’t just been publicly talking about cannibalism while surrounded by people who intend to eat in the immediate future. I continue forward in awkward silence.

“Well,” Sam says grudgingly, “these are my other friends, Eve. I am sure that they just made a fantastic first impression.”

“Um… I guess I feel a lot less weird, actually,” I admit, managing a small smile.

Alex barks out a laugh, and the others smile. Before I know it, all of us are sitting down with our food, Sasha and Alex sandwiching an irritated Thomas in the booth while Samantha sits next to me. I wish I’d had the forethought of letting Samantha sit down first, but unfortunately I am now trapped in the booth and have to bother her if I want to get up and do anything, so I will just have to hope that I never have to get up ever. Dipping my chicken nuggets in ketchup, I nibble my meal slowly so as to always have an excuse not to speak. Sasha is telling some long story I got distracted from listening to halfway through, so now I don’t have any idea what she’s talking about anymore and I’m just hoping the conversation ends soon.

“So at this point I’m just thinking ‘okay, well it sounds like all these problems you’re complaining about are entirely your own fault—’”

“Oh yeah, for sure, oh my god,” Alex nods along.

“Right? But of course I can’t say that to her while she’s gushing at me and almost crying so I just smile and nod and look friendly and then out of nowhere she starts calling me her ‘best friend’ and—”

My head leans back, and I end up staring at the ceiling. Why did Sam take me out here to meet these people? I guess they’re her friends, and she’s my friend, apparently. She’s nice. She helped me out when I was missing my classes, and we always did projects together when we could. But she initiated all of that. I’ve kind of been ditching her lately to hang out with Tara. I guess she just wants to hang out with me?

But… she has all these other friends. I’ve never really done anything with Sam other than school stuff. I never hung out with her that much before, we just studied. Maybe that’s it? As far as Sam knows, I don’t have any other friends. I guess that’s really cool of her, although meeting three new people at once when I don’t know any of them and they’re already a whole group is kind of a bit much. I feel so out of place. I wonder if—ooh, what’s that?

High up on the wall above my table is what appears, at first glance, to be a small glob of dried paint, left behind by some careless interior designer. However, my experienced eye sees it for what it really is: a bug, camouflaged in much the same way monochamus notatus may disguise itself on bark. Why is it the boring light beige of an Arby’s wall, though? That’s an odd evolution. I’m gonna yoink it!

I stuff the last of my chicken nuggets into my mouth, chug what remains of my soda, and pour the ice out on that tray which always comes with dine-in fast food meals to contain it. Then, wielding my empty cup, I climb up onto the table and clap it over the cutie pie before it even knows what’s going on. Oh, shoot, I forgot a step.

“Hey Sam, could you unzip the little pouch on my backpack and grab me a note… card…”

Oh yeah.

There are other people here.

I’m standing on a table, in a public restaurant, holding a cup to the wall like a fucking maniac. It’s still dripping sugar water. The conversation Samantha’s friends were having has abruptly stopped, all faces at the table and most faces from other tables pointed at me. The staff is giving me weird looks, the manager is trying to figure out if she needs to walk over, and Samantha is—

“Here you go,” Samantha says, handing me a note card.

“Thank you,” I squeak.

I slide the note card under the cup, trapping the bug inside. Slowly, I sit down, blushing so hard I think my cheeks might bruise. Placing the cup-card combo on the table (to Sasha’s modest dismay) I root around in my backpack for my portable terrarium. Well, it’s really just kind of a clear plastic box with air holes, but that doesn’t sound as nice.

I carefully start to open the cup into the terrarium, although I doubt the bug I caught is going anywhere fast. With the residual soda inside I think I might be hard-pressed to coax it out of… huh. As soon as I give it an opening big enough, the bug walks into my box on its own, almost indignantly. I stare at it. It stops, and stares back.

The bug reminds me somewhat of a fly, but like a beetle its wings are capable of being pulled back under its carapace to better camouflage them. It’s stocky and small, barely the size of my pinky knuckle, and as I watch it the colors on its back change, dulling and becoming harder to notice against the murky walls of translucent plastic. Spider-like pedipalps twitch on its head, sharp enough to pierce skin.

This is not a bug from my world.

Carefully, I set the terrarium down, wet a napkin, and stand up to wipe away the mess I made on the wall.

“Oh yeah, let me help you with that,” Thomas says.

Sasha grunts and slaps at his thigh as he squishes her trying to stand up. Alex heads out to grab more napkins.

“So! You really do like bugs, huh?” Sasha asks, grinning fakely from behind Thomas’s leg. “Enough to just leap up and grab them! Well, that’s… good! I’m sure they don’t want them inside the restaurant!”

Oh gosh, she’s treating me like I’m a complete crazy person. Which maybe isn’t that unfair…

“Sorry,” I mumble, accepting the influx of additional cleaning supplies when Alex returns.

“No, no, really it’s fine,” Sasha continues. “You get your insect, I get soda splashed on my face, and everyone else gets this lovely display of ice on the table. Truly, it’s a win for everybody.”

“Sasha…” Samantha warns.

“I should go,” I manage to choke out, finishing with the wall and sitting back down to grab my backpack.

Thomas bonks Sasha with his thigh again on purpose and Alex leans in to give her a glare of disapproval, but at this point no amount of friendly support is going to calm me down and I know it. Sam is sitting next to me, looking my way with a concerned, apologetic face and blocking my exit from the booth. I stare back at her, pleading, not willing to let the words out of my mouth. Please, I silently beg. Get up. Get up and let me out before I start crying, before I cement my status as an insane bug girl without enough self-awareness to act normal in public or even enough self-esteem to shrug off the consequences. Please, please, please allow me to keep at least some semblance of dignity before I start bawling in a fucking Arby’s.

Sam stands up, thank goodness. My breathing already a little uneven, I gather my backpack and bug box and quickly shuffle out of the restaurant moments before the tears start to flow.

“What?” Sasha asks her friends as I leave. “Too much?”

24 Culture Barrier

“So… this is the surface, huh?” Hsthressis asks, scuttling around. “I have to admit, I imagined the home turf of the demons to be a little less… blurry.”

“Yeah, your echolocation didn’t really evolve to comprehend open-ended spaces,” I tell her. “It makes sense for your culture to demonize the area of the world in which you are extra vulnerable to attack.”

Hsthressis twists her body uncomfortably.

“…What?” she asks. “What’s ‘eeth-olthe’ mean?”

Oh, oops. I spoke that word in English because there’s no real Sthrenslian equivalent to the concept of Darwinian evolution.

“Evolve,” I correct. “Don’t worry about it, it’s probably blasphemy.”

“Well I’m like half demon now, so it’s probably just important to my heritage if I learn some blasphemy. What’s eeth-olthe?”

I raise my eyebrow at her, not that she’s likely to understand the gesture. I accidentally picked up on how genuinely interested she is in learning what, to her culture, is basically Satanism. So either there’s some significant religious rift happening in her life causing her to doubt her beliefs… or she’s a teenage edgelord. Or both, I guess. That’s hardly exclusive. I’m not going to complain if it motivates her to be interested in modern science, but I don’t know if now is the time.

“It’s pronounced… no, wait, you don’t have lips,” I realize. “You can’t even make a ‘V’ sound, can you? Well, I’d be happy to teach you about it, but that would take a while and I’d like to return you to your home.”

“Lame,” Hsthressis grumbles. “Where is home compared to here, anyway?”

“A very, very long and dangerous walk for someone of your size,” I tell her.

At that, I flinch a little as I feel my ten new Tinkerbell bodies enter into my consciousness. Well, I guess they aren’t technically Tinkerbell bodies since I’ve modified them so significantly. I guess I’ll call the design Evelyn Tinkerbell Enhanced, or ETE for short. I punch my way out of all the eggshells and start slurping down the remains, tearing into my supply of meat shortly after.

“Dangerous, huh?” Hsthressis grumbles, unsuccessfully hiding a bit of fear. “I already died once, and I’d rather not make a habit of it.”

I’ve been having this entire discussion with Hsthressis using an old Tinkerbell body, since I want her to get used to me being that general size and shape. I walk up to her with my EE body at her words, though, kneeling down so my monstrous eight-foot-tall self with a head bigger than Hsthressis’s whole body can say the next line.

“I assure you, I will make sure you stay safe,” I promise. “I’m ready to go now. Mind if I pick you up?”

“Um,” Hsthressis answers eloquently.

Well, technically, she makes a hissing noise completely different from the word ‘um,’ but translating filler words is weird. Like, they’re half onomatopoeia, half not? If I mentally transliterate the ‘klah’ noise she’s making in the same way I hear it, it doesn’t actually make any sense to me because it’s not a filler word in my language. The same goes for accents and word choice and all sorts of stuff that literal translations just don’t… translate. Oh, right, I should focus.

“Hey, I didn’t go through all the effort of reincarnating you just so I could get you hurt. Having really, really long legs is just very handy for going fast.”

Hsthressis’ whiskers twitch and her body tilts ever slightly towards my Evelyn Tinkerbell self, as if looking for assistance. Which, of course, indicates to me that she still doesn’t quite get how I function.

“We are the same person,” I have both bodies remind her in stereo.

“Gah!” Hsthressis yelps. “Right, I know, sorry! It’s just weird, okay?”

I shrink back at that, as much as I can. I didn’t mean to scare her.

“Sorry,” I say, then hold my hands out for her to climb on.

Hesitantly, she climbs into my palms. Her whole body shakes a bit as I stand up to my full height and place her up on the crown of my head, tentacles on my back stretching up to be able to hold her in place or catch her at a moments notice. When I stand up, she lets out a scream as if she’s on a roller coaster, which I guess to her tiny body I sort of am.

“Let me know if I go too fast, okay?” I tell her, then walk over to where my new bodies are drying off and pick them up as well.

They won’t be able to fly until the egg goop on their wings is cleaned off, so I’ve been busying myself with doing just that, all the newborn mes sitting in a circle and wiping off the wings of another body. In the meantime, I pick them up in Evelyn Experimental’s arms and make my way back towards the hill, where I promised Hsthressis’ mother I would meet her. The entire journey, which thankfully turns out uneventful, is punctuated by the reality that I not only am not but functionally cannot give the safety of this young girl my full attention, because simultaneously I am tending to my Ivylyns, experimenting with pheromones, cleaning my bodies, hunting sloths, and mentally designing a new, larger aerial body that combines wings and siphon pistons to create a vertical take off and landing system. I can’t decide whether or not this lack of focus is bad or inherently justified. After all, my standards must, by necessity, alter in response to my new situation. It just feels wrong to do so.

“You probably shouldn’t tell my mom that all of your yous are the same,” Hsthressis mentions shortly before we reach the hill.

“Why not?” I ask, frowning.

“Because it’s weird,” Hsthressis answers bluntly, “and you are going to need to try and be as not weird as possible if you want to convince her you’re not evil.”

“I’d like to hope that she can tell the difference between ‘weird’ and ‘evil,’” I say hesitantly.

“I mean, it’s not like she can’t, it’s more like everything she knows about you so far is evil. You killed people, right? So you’ve got kind of an uphill battle against you.”

I shudder lightly, not wanting to dislodge any of the bodies I’m carrying. …Or Hsthressis, who is her own person and not just a body.

“Yeah, I guess I did. I don’t know if I’m going to be any good at pretending to be normal, though. It’s not really part of my skill set.”

Plus I don’t really want to lie. I’ve never been very good at it.

“Well, just leave only one body with me,” Hsthressis suggests. “Mom probably hasn’t just sat around waiting for you to come back, she has stuff to do, so I figure I should at least invite you to come with me to go see her. If you don’t bring more than one of yourself, it just kind of won’t come up, right?”

“Hey, good thinking Hsthressis,” I agree. “Avoiding the conversation entirely is the best form of lying.”

Hsthressis wiggles uncomfortably.

“Okay, don’t say stuff like that either, that’s definitely demon talk.”

Ugh, it figures her culture hasn’t developed dry humor yet. …Wait, shit, that’s racist.

“Good to know,” I tell her. “I’m definitely going to need your help to not piss off your mom.”

“Okay, well, you’re screwed then, because I am the absolute worst at that.”

I snort with amusement, and then the two of us breach the clearing to my old home. The hill is just as I left it, with my cave near the top and the giant pit within it. I stop at the foot of the hill, kneeling down and removing Hsthressis from my head, back to solid earth. One of my ETE bodies flits off my shoulder and lands beside her.

“To the tunnels with us, then,” I say. “Let’s go talk to your… clan?”

“We are called the True People,” Hsthressis informs me, which… wow, that’s a self-important name if I ever heard one. A less snappy but probably more accurate translation would be ‘chosen ones uniquely capable of receiving salvation,’ which has all kinds of unfortunate implications.

“All right, let’s go talk to the True People, then,” I sigh.

We head into the tunnel, and a quick buzz from my wings is all the sound I need to get an echo-map of the winding passageways within. Most obviously, we are not alone, as a collection of about six other Sthrenslians near the pit seem to notice me the moment I notice them.

“Hey!” Hsthressis calls out. “Guess who’s alive, idiots!”

I freeze, not entirely certain how to interpret this apparent start to my negotiations.

“What the fuck?” comes the response from one of the other Sthrenslians. “Hsthressis? Is that you, you brat?”

“Who are you calling a brat, Kalak?” Hsthressis snaps back.

“That’s Warrior Kalak to you, brat!” Kalak shouts.

Hsthressis and the group of other Sthrenslians start moving quickly towards one another, so I follow. Well, it sounds like whoever was left behind here is a friend, so that’s pretty good I guess! For once I have some luck.

“So, what’s this thing you’re bringing us?” Kalak asks.

‘This thing.’ Not ‘who is that,’ because fuck me I guess, but notably also not ‘what is that thing,’ despite the fact that Kalak and Hsthressis are shouting at each other down the tunnel. We are nowhere near each other by most standards, and in fact separated by about six random twists and bends that all break line of sight. Yet still, we are within range of immediate echolocation, and so the specific word choice used to refer to me is the one that implies we are nearby.

“This is Evelyn!” Hsthressis answers. “She almost killed me, but then she fixed me and also she’s really sorry.”

“That’s true,” I confirm. “I’m really sorry.”

There’s a pregnant pause as the incoming Sthrenslians digest that explanation.

“She’s, uh, a little bit smaller than the other one, don’t you think?”

“Yeah there are a bunch of different sizes for these weird things,” Hsthressis agrees. “Don’t ask me how it works, because I have no idea.”

“…I’m not a weird thing,” I complain, knowing full well that couldn’t be more wrong.

We are finally close enough to one another that I can actually see the incoming scouts using my bioluminescence. They squirm single-file down the tunnel towards us, and sure enough they are definitely Sthrenslians. Not that such a thing was ever in question, but I’m still figuring out how the hell to tell Sthrenslians apart from each other.

“It’s absolutely weird to hear something like that talk,” Kalak grunts. “It’s part of the same group of things that killed three of our boys, right?”

I frown, since I’m not a ‘group of things’ either, but being argumentative is the worst way to apologize.

“I’m sorry,” I repeat. “I wish I could’ve saved them, or more than that I wish that I had been intelligent and observant enough to realize I was at fault before we came into conflict.”

“Yeah, sure. Well, we’ve been instructed to bring Hsthressis back, if she actually showed up, so that’s what we’re going to do. I don’t have any orders on what to do with you, though, but I have to admit your fellow demons left us quite the feast after they ran away.”

The warriors approach me, crowding the tunnel. My tiny body is barely a quarter of their size, but all I can think about is whether or not they ate the entirety of my corpse or if parts are left behind. It’s a frustrating alien instinct to not leave my own remnants, so I move another part of my body to perform some aerial reconnaissance within the cave. …Oh, I guess there’s also another problem.

“You really shouldn’t eat the bodies of creatures higher on the food chain than you, whenever you can help it,” I inform them helpfully. “You could get mercury poisoning.”

“And what the fuck does that mean?” The leading warrior hisses, reaching forward so their relatively giant claws hover dangerously around my body.

I blink.

“Oh, sorry, I guess you guys don’t have a concept for either the food chain or mercury. Basically, there’s a metallic poison that collects inside the bodies of predators, so the more meat your food eats the more poison it tends to have inside it. The poison is relatively benign so your body can mostly ignore it, but because it never goes away it will eventually reach harmful levels.”

The claws start to close around my body.

“Your fancy bullshit doesn’t make me any less inclined to kill you, demon.”

Another ETE body finally reaches the cave and hovers above the massive pit the Sthrenslians dug underneath my home while I was away. To my annoyance, I see that most of my chitin and nearly all of my bones have been left behind, which twinges in the back of my mind as a problem, like a serious bout of OCD. I will need to make a mobile acidic body sooner than expected so I can destroy all of this. I table the flying designs for now, still unhappy with them, and consider the much easier problem of a terrestrial acid-equipped digger.

I suppose I should also respond to this guy threatening to kill me, I guess.

“You cannot kill me in a way that matters,” I tell the aggressive soldier, because I’ve always sort of wanted to.

“Um, Evelyn? You’re being kind of spooky right now,” Hsthressis tells me quietly.

I blink, then step back away from the claw. Right, death is bad. No matter how apparently immortal I am, I shouldn’t treat it frivolously, especially after committing a multiple homicide.

“Sorry,” I say again. “What I mean is, I was in the wrong. As far as I’m concerned you fought me for just reasons and you won. I would like to accompany you because I would like to surrender, and give you the reparations you deserve.”

The warriors start muttering at each other. Surrender and reparations sounds like something worth taking me to the chieftain for, but because I’m a demon any surrender must obviously be a trick.

“I’m not a demon,” I tell them firmly. “I am Evelyn.”

I am, throughout this entire conversation, dimly aware that I’m not acting very much like me. I’m not panicking, I’m not babbling, I’m just… standing here, numb. Answering questions like a robot because just looking at all these Sthrenslians makes it impossible to feel anything but deep, painful regret. It’s better to feel nothing at all. I don’t mean that in the self-brain-mutilation way, at least I don’t think so, but in the coping strategy way. I feel like I’m in shock. But that’s okay. I complete my acidic digger design and lay the appropriate egg while the Sthrenslians bicker amongst themselves, eventually deciding to bring me along. The tunnels are long and the walk to wherever it is the True People call home takes several hours. I can tell through my inherent body sense that we are moving towards the mountains, and right at the foot of them does my echolocation finally pick up what can only be our destination.

The cavern is enormous, and clearly lived in. Despite the massive size, I can clearly sense all around the incredible room. Columns of stone made of ancient stalactite and stalagmite pairs form a stone web of percussion that bounces sound all throughout the room. Stairs are burned into the sides of them, sometimes inside the particularly thick ones, from which Sthrenslians could ascend to higher levels of the many-layered room, accessing tunnels and side chambers and countless other incredible locations that combine the natural beauty of cave formations with the careful design of sapient intelligence. Massive rope bridges crisscross along the cavern, linking columns and rooms. I find myself unable to count the number of Sthrenslians here. There are at least multiple hundreds, maybe thousands.

“Woah,” I whisper.

Immediately, I’m tempted to fly forward and see it all with my eyes, dancing around the inside of the massive cavern and revealing the natural beauty with my bioluminescence. Yet such a thing would not only be a faux pas but unlikely to be anywhere near as beautiful as the full majesty of what I sense with my Sthrenslian tunnel whiskers. It is, after all, a city intended to be viewed by the blind, and careful thought has been placed into both its practicality and its beauty from that standpoint.

“This is an incredible place,” I admit, breathless.

The guards ignore me, but they don’t disagree with me either. I allow them to keep leading me along, up staircases and high into the city. No doubt nearly every Sthrenslian in the massive chamber can sense me, and I can smell the fear and confusion wafting all around the room. I do my best to counter it, releasing pheromones of calm and peace, but I’m like a single flower in a meadow of stress.

As much as the main city is breathtaking, however, the chieftain’s hut that I am led to and forced to recognize due to Hsthressis’s memories is almost even more impressive. It’s the largest building in the cavern, and it’s made entirely out of the inside of a massive, multi-story geode, covered in brilliant purple gemstones that sparkle in the cool light of my bioluminescent body. Even to my colorless vibration sense they are gorgeous, brilliant structures and textures the likes of which mere stone or dirt cannot compare. Living areas and side rooms have been carefully carved from the thicker patches of gems, culminating in a brilliant reception room inside which Chlrehistra, Hsthressis’ mother and the chieftain of the True People waits for us.

I really, really hope she is not the kind of religious zealot that would turn against her own daughter.

25 Peace Talks

“Um… hey, mom,” Hsthressis mutters awkwardly, shifting her weight back and forth under the pressure of her mother’s silence.

“Hsthressis,” the chieftain intones, a complicated mix of doubt and hope dripping from the name. “Come here.”

It’s difficult to not think of the chieftain’s audience room as a throne room, despite how Sthrenslian aesthetics almost completely invert that idea. In a throne room, the king and queen sit on a big fancy chair, usually at the top of a bunch of steps, so that anyone meeting with them has to crane their neck upwards to look at them. Which is rude, of course, but kings are like that. Chlrehistra has no chair at all—as far as I know, Sthrenslians just kind of don’t have them. If they want to rest they lie on their stomach. She has also not positioned herself above us, but in fact significantly below us. She sits in the middle of a stair-carved pit, like the stage of an amphitheater with walls that match the contours of her body so that she can snugly squeeze into a patch of earth. We don’t stand on the metaphorical bleachers of this amphitheater—we aren’t in the pit at all, and in fact I don’t have line of sight to the chieftain. Line of sight in general seems to hold absolutely no value to the Sthrenslians, probably because they are, you know, blind.

Hsthressis scuttles quickly down to see her mother as her mother rises from the… I don’t know, inverse chair I guess. No, that’s dumb. She rises from her comfy hole? No, wait, that sounds dirty. From her… rock bed. No, that’s already a thing. Um… dirt cubby? Sure. She rises from her regal dirt cubby, wraps her tendrils around Hsthressis’s whiskers, and yanks on them.

Hsthressis shrieks in agony and I do my very best not to do the same as the pain quite thoroughly bleeds into my other minds. I think I manage to pass off my reaction as a sympathetic wince as Chlrehistra starts berating her daughter.

“What were you thinking!? Hsthressis I have told you a thousand times not to go anywhere near the surface!”

“I-I was looking for tubers! I was going to help—”

“Hsthressis we have plenty of mushrooms we do not need surface gatherers anymore!”

“But I hate mushrooms!”

Chlrehistra yanks the whiskers again, and I let out a small whimper with one of my surface bodies.

“You do not get to risk your life just because you hate mushrooms!” she shrieks.

“Um, excuse me, ma’am?” I interrupt, clearing my throat. “Hsthressis just recently recovered from her injuries and her whiskers are extra sensitive.”

“They really fucking are!” Hsthressis agrees, rapidly scuttling out of tendril reach.

Obviously, Hsthressis’s recent injuries aren’t why her whiskers are abnormally sensitive, her whiskers are abnormally sensitive because one pair of them is actually my antennae. Er, her antennae, I guess. I’m not sure I have a good way of explaining that, though, so I’m just going to be quietly regretful of the half-truth.

“You must be one of the demons, then,” the Chieftain glowers. “You and your kind are not welcome here.”

“I…” Well damn, I’m already off to a great start aren’t I? “I’m not a demon.”

Chlrehistra flicks a single whisker, the Sthrenslian equivalent of a raised eyebrow.

“I know I technically live on the surface,” I quickly clarify. “But that’s not where I’m from. I was stranded there. I’m not… I’m very far from home.”

“Why does my daughter look different?” she asks bluntly.

“It was part of the healing process. I had to… uh.”

A sudden spike of panic from Hsthressis cuts off my words. Okay, so maybe explaining the regeneration process is a bad idea?

“…It’s just a side effect,” I say, again cursing myself for the half-truth, but Hsthressis relaxes immediately so I suppose I didn’t say whatever she doesn’t want me to. “Apologies.”

“You have much more serious things to apologize for,” the chieftain intones. “I am gladdened that you’ve returned my daughter to me, but three of my warriors are still dead.”

“Yes,” I agree, the words stabbing me in the heart, “I’m sorry. Their bodies were too damaged and I could not save them, and I am fully aware that is my fault. I should have tried to communicate sooner, but again I… am far from home. The surface is not a kind place. I… I mean we, um, have come very close to dying many times. I was hasty and angry and I did not know who you were. I just thought the closest thing I had to a home was being invaded.”

“So now you wish for peace,” the chieftain finishes for me, sounding less than convinced.

“Yes,” I confirm. “I just… we are lonely. We made a horrible mistake. We want to make up for it. We can help you! Whatever you need, I… I know we can’t make up for murder, but…”

The chieftain taps a leg, which I intuit as my cue to shut up.

“You claim to not be a demon,” she says.

“That’s correct,” I nod.

“Yet you live on the surface.”

The surface of this planet?

“Not by choice.”

Her tendrils curl into a Sthrenslian smile.

“Is that so? I suppose you seem comfortable in our tunnels, and you apologize for actions that are not your own. We remember our enemies, and they are far too large to fit in our home. They are barred from Sss’s warm embrace, massive in size, glutted on Khlasinas’ cursed bounties. You do not seem like them.”

Shit. I guess it was pretty stupid to just hope that the multiple body thing never came up, but I can’t lie worth a damn. What am I supposed to say? Chieftain Chlrehistra seems to interpret my panicked silence as an indication for her to continue speaking, and I suppose I’m okay with that.

“I think I understand,” she says in the kind of knowing tone that indicates to me she has drawn an incredibly incorrect conclusion. “Hsthressis, is this the… creature that healed you?”

Now Hsthressis seems to pick up on something, and she quickly flicks her whiskers in an affirmative.

“Yeah, this is her! She talked to me while I was injured and she helped me walk around when I got back on my feet and she made sure I survived the trip here from the surface!”

“And yet she is trapped on the surface, ordered around by demons,” the chieftain muses.

“…Wait, I’m what?” I ask.

Holy shit shut up, Hsthressis thinks loudly, although I don’t think it’s her intention to communicate with me this way. I am just doing really, really badly at ignoring certain thoughts I have because my god of course I am what the fuck was I expecting. Either way, I pick up on the context: Hsthressis thinks she has found a good cover story, and she wants me to go along with it.

“Exactly!” Hsthressis says out loud. “She’s like… a prisoner. Way less scary than those giant demons. She’s innocent, and—”

“No,” I say firmly. “Hsthressis, I appreciate what you’re trying to do here, but lies like this don’t help. They only make things worse when people find out the truth.”

She’s not going to accept the truth. She never does, Hsthressis grumbles internally.

“And if that truth causes problems, we will deal with them,” I continue. “Chieftain, my exact situation is difficult to describe, but I ask for now that you consider me an ambassador from a clan of people—” I actually use the word ‘Sthrenslian’ here, but emphasize it in a different way that I hope culturally tracks— “that wish for positive relations with you.”

The chieftain sighs, scuttling the rest of the way out of her dirt cubby and approaching me directly. She doesn’t stop to face me or speak with me as I expect, because again such gestures are meaningless in the city of the blind. Instead she just continues on her way with a simple command.

“Walk with me.”

So I do. I catch up and walk side-by-side with her, which for whatever reason seems to palpably increase the tension in the room. Hsthressis follows us and I do everything in my power to not just steal the answer why from her head. Chlrehistra also seems mildly annoyed, but I figure at this point I just risk adding to whatever insult I just gave if I try to correct it blindly.

“Even if you are not within Khlasinas’ clutches by choice, you still live with nothing but his silent fire overhead,” she tells me. “I cannot in good conscience endanger my people by inviting you into our halls.”

I frown, struggling to dig through all that cultural commentary at once.

“Sorry, can you explain why?” I ask.

“The world above is infused with Khlasinas’ evil,” she says. “From above he sends fire to burn us, he sends water to drown us, and he sends his demons to devour us. Only the protection of Sss, god of the deep earth, the warmth without fire protects us. You live without Sss’ grace between you and the demon king, so you could be of his ilk. Knowingly or otherwise.”

Huh. So, historical religions are far from something I’m an expert with, but it’s my general understanding that they tend to arise from helpful superstitions. Like, ancient peoples had no idea that diseases are caused by microorganisms, but they might have some idea that cooking meat makes you less likely to get sick. So they might decide that cooking meat purifies it in the eyes of some higher being and then ten generations down the line animal sacrifice by pyre is a thing. Humans are crazy fucking good at seeing correlation, even if we happen to be phenomenally bad at not jumping to conclusions as a result of correlation. Sthrenslians, obviously, are not human, but there is a startling amount of similarity in the general way they seem to think. A convenient bit of convergent evolution, I guess, from all the way across the stars.

…I wonder if I’ll find a bunch of crabs here. Carcinisation is just so fucking cool.

Anyway, being on the surface tends to kill Sthrenslians, so that’s probably why Sthrenslians created an evil surface god. Still, there’s sort of a glaring problem in the accusation I’m facing here.

“…But I lived in the cave until you attacked me and forced me to leave,” I point out. “I promise, I’m doing everything I can to get a roof over my head.”

I actually ended up using the English word for ‘roof’ there, because I guess the Sthrenslian word for ‘cave ceiling’ just doesn’t have the same connotations. Oh well, she can probably figure it out through context.

“My people attacked yours because you attacked my daughter,” Chlrehistra dismisses. “But you make a valid point. When attacked you fled for a cave. Perhaps the warmth of Sss still radiates within you.”

What an arbitrary fucking way to determine whether or not I still count as a person, but you know what? I’ll take it. The chieftain heads towards a staircase carved out of a stalactite-stalagmite column. It is startlingly thin, and completely lacks guardrails, only wide enough for us to travel single file. I suppose, now that I think about it, there’s a good chance Sthrenslians would be completely unharmed by a fall from this height, so the lack of guardrails makes sense.

I step off the stairs, flick my wings, and start to fly. No need to take up space on the stairway, and if I do this I can continue walking next to the chieftain.

…And that’s when I get an overwhelming sense of ‘you’ve got to be kidding me’ from Hsthressis and I realize that I was supposed to take the hint and walk behind the chieftain rather than next to her. Whoops. Still, flying is awesome, and at this point it would be awkward to stop.

Especially with everyone’s attention so firmly centered on me.

“I… you walk on the air,” the chieftain points out, dumbfounded.

“Well it’s not really walking, but… yeah?” I confirm. “Is that a problem?”

A pregnant pause passes through the air, but I eventually get the answer I’m hoping for.

“No,” Chieftain Chlrehistra confirms. “No, I don’t think so. Shall we eat while we discuss the terms of your… surrender?”

“That would be wonderful, yeah,” I tell her. “I really just want all the fighting behind us.”

I follow the procession of Sthrenslians down the staircase, unable to shake the feeling that I’m still making some kind of massive mistake.

26 Immortal Terror

So Sthrenslians don’t have chairs, but it turns out they do have tables. Rather than being independent pieces of furniture, however, they are just kind of carved directly into the room. Sthrenslians aren’t big on interior redecorating, I guess, because all of their furniture is incredibly permanent. They don’t seem to build much when they can get away with carving it instead.

I have seen rope, I have seen baskets, I have seen satchels and I have seen sleds. I have not seen pottery, metallurgy, manufactured weapons, any form of writing, most of the simple machines, or even—and this is kind of a big deal here—fire. I am no historian, not by a longshot, so I don’t know how much of this is normal but holy shit these guys haven’t even researched the first level of the Civilization tech tree!

I sit down in one of the Sthrenslian-shaped divots in the floor (which is obviously way too big for me) as Hsthressis and her mother do the same. I can still see over the table, thankfully, because Sthrenslians are substantially wider and longer than they are tall, whereas I’m the opposite.

“So, Ambassador Evelyn,” Chieftain Chlrehistra opens with unexpected formality, “do you have any particular meal requests? I’m afraid I don’t know what a… creature of your kind eats.”

Well, at least they acknowledge that I might not eat the same things as they do, but naturally I can eat basically anything. Still, my temptation gets the better of me and I make a request before realizing how fucking stupid of an idea it is.

“Something that doesn’t grow anywhere near the surface would be an incredibly welcome change of pace,” I tell her. “Preferably whole and uncut, if you have something small enough.”

I regret it as soon as I hear it come out of my mouth; I have seen myself eat and it is not at all conducive to peace talks. Still, when the chieftain inquires about it I fail to work up the courage to backpedal.

“Whole and uncut? Does that have some significance?”

“Er, well, it’s beneficial to me personally. I can… learn more from a meal that way, I guess?”

Hsthressis, who is fully aware that I ate her that one time, carefully tries not to think about that. I can hardly blame her.

“An interesting philosophy,” the chieftain comments, rather understandably failing to recognize that I was being entirely literal. “Well, that shouldn’t be difficult to arrange.”

She flicks a tendril at some of the other Sthrenslians that followed us into the room but did not sit down, and two of them depart immediately.

“My War Leader, Talrissark, will be here shortly and at that point we can formally discuss surrender and reparations. In the meantime, I’m quite curious about you. You mentioned you are from somewhere far away. I’m curious to hear what it is like.”

Huh… how do I explain Earth to a bunch of blind bug weasels who might decide to kill me if my explanation doesn’t match up with their weird religion? How do I explain my home?

“The people of my home are large and powerful. Some of us live underground—” (mostly in their parents’ basements, but still) “—but the rest of us don’t simply exist on the surface, we… conquered it, I guess? Your people dig shelters by carving out stone from the ground. We created shelter by building upwards, by taking stone and metal and erecting it towards the sky, creating caves where there was once open space.”

“Okay, that’s fucking badass,” Hsthressis butts in.

“Hsthressis,” her mother chides.

“It is though! Rather than hide from Khlasinas they invaded his territory and brought Sss with them! ‘Fuck you, Big K, you don’t get to live here anymore.’ That’s what I call a damn crusade.”

“I guess Big K did get absorbed into Walmart, so that’s not even inaccurate,” I mutter to myself. “And Kmart is probably about to die.”

“I don’t know what half of that means but I got the part where Evelyn says I’m not wrong,” Hsthressis continues smugly.

“It’s certainly an… unconventional strategy, but you still live with a barrier between yourselves and Khlasinas?” the chieftain asks.

“Yes, our homes are completely enclosed from the outside world,” I confirm.

Of course, we go outside a lot and can literally suffer health defects if we don’t spend at least some time in the sun, but lying by omission is the name of the game today I guess.

“An interesting way to phrase that,” the chieftain muses. “‘Outside world.’ In any case, I will thank you to not give any of my people ideas on fighting the surface. I acknowledge the validity of your zeal, but it seems like quite the dangerous path.”

“My people are more uniquely suited to following that path,” I say in agreement. “Our bodies work very differently from yours, and we have ways to fight… demons… that you don’t.”

I really, really don’t like using the word ‘demon’ but if I go out of my way to avoid using it I’m worried that it will seem suspicious. It is, after all, the word they have for surface creatures. Still, wow, what an understatement. Like yeah, we have fucking eyeballs which certainly help but ancient humans can do crazy things like persistence hunting and long distance running and throwing things, and non-ancient humans can do stuff like… I don’t know, building nuclear warheads I guess. The gap between our capabilities is comically large.

“Well,” a male Sthrenslian comments as he enters the room, “that seems reasonable to me. It only makes sense that demons are skilled at fighting demons.”

I recognize the voice. It’s the same man that gave a big fancy speech after dropping Evelyn Prime into a pit and ordering all the warriors to eat me.

“You must be Talrissark the Purger,” I grumble as he scuttles into the room and sits down right next to me.

I’m terrible at telling Sthrenslians apart, but if Talrissark has one notable feature it is the fact that he’s pretty big. Makes sense that the scariest looking dude in the room is the War Leader of this caveman culture. …Ugh, no, I can’t think like that. Respect other cultures. Respect other cultures! Even if they think I’m not a person just because of where I happen to live!

…No, wait, that actually sounds like a pretty good reason not to respect a culture. Now I’m conflicted.

“I see my reputation precedes me,” he hums. “But you forgot the ‘War Leader.’”

“Hsthressis told me a bit about you,” I explain.

That statement is entirely correct, but it immediately freaks Hsthressis out because she doesn’t remember doing it; it was during that whole emulation bit before I knew she was a person, and I was sort of fucking with her head.

“Sorry, Hsthressis. You were sort of delirious at the time,” I tell her.

“…Right,” she mutters. “Um, I didn’t ask?”

I blink, not that anyone else notices.

“Y-yeah, sorry,” I tell her. “Anyway, Talrissark, I’m not a demon. I’d prefer to not spend the peace talks being insulted with the implication.”

“My name is War Leader Talrissark,” he snaps.”I’d prefer to not spend the peace talks being insulted by the omission.”

I tilt my head, considering that.

“Apologies, I meant no offense,” I answer honestly. “Of the many things Hsthressis has taught me, etiquette is not one of them. I ask that if I give offense again, that it be assumed as ignorance rather than malice. Please correct me when I falter.”

Chlrehistra’s tendrils quirk in amusement.

“It is my shame to admit I can think of no more believable excuse than the idea that my daughter has failed to instill a sense of politeness in her acquaintances,” she says, to Hsthressis’ disgruntled protests. “For future reference, our names are always to be preceded by our titles. I should be referred to as Chieftain or as Chieftain Chlrehistra, but it is not your place to refer to me as just Chlrehistra.”

“Got it. So you’re Chieftain, War Leader Talrissark is War Leader, so Hsthressis is…?”

“Hsthressis has yet to live to her twenty-fourth molt, and as such has not yet been assigned a duty to our clan,” Chieftain Chlrehistra explains. “She does not yet have a title, and you may continue referring to her as simply Hsthressis.”

“I’m going to be a warrior or else I’m going to quit,” Hsthressis grunts.

“Hsthressis, you cannot ‘quit.’”

“Watch me. Or better yet, just make me a warrior.”

“I see a near-death experience has not improved your daughter’s attitude at all,” Talrissark snidely opines. “Is it entirely appropriate to have her constantly interrupting in here?”

“She will stay,” the chieftain says firmly, “if for no other reason than to learn to be quiet.”

She lightly wraps a tendril around her daughter’s whiskers at that, causing Hsthressis to immediately freeze in terror. I can’t help but also be a bit worried about the sympathetic feedback I’ll get if she yanks them, but at the same time the sight of it is pretty funny.

“Back to the matter at hand,” War Leader Talrissark grunts, “I’m told you have wisely decided to surrender.”

Kind of an annoyingly arrogant way to phrase that, but I guess he’s not wrong.

“Any end to mutual suffering is an application of wisdom,” I manage.

“Well said,” Chieftain Chlrehistra agrees. “But there is still a matter of payment for the suffering that was already wrought.”

I frown, but nod.

“Blood was drawn on both sides,” I point out. “But I’m interested in offering whatever aid I can supply your people regardless. I’m willing to accede to any reasonable demands.”

“Magnanimous of you,” the chieftain allows.

“Cowardly is more like it,” Talrissark grunts. “The big creatures always forget the justice of the drop.”

“My people have a pretty similar saying, actually,” I point out. “‘The bigger they are, the harder they fall.’ I like it because unlike most sayings it’s actually true. Like, that’s how force works. Mass times acceleration and stuff.”

I get a few confused expressions from the others before the Chieftain just decides to ignore that.

“Traditionally, a defeated clan is either made servile to the victor, or their chieftain is executed and their people are absorbed into the winning clan,” Chlrehistra explains.

“Yeah, that’s fine,” I answer easily.

“You’re correct, it is,” Talrissark presses. “Do not think your tame giants can just laze about on the surface, nor your flitting air walkers. Your people are ours by right of conquest, and it is entirely by the mercy of our chieftain that you will be used for the good of all rather than destroyed and devoured like animals.”

I tilt my head over in War Leader Talrissark’s direction, to find him slightly out of his little sitting divot so as to better loom above me. It takes my mind a moment to register that he’s actually trying to intimidate me. It’s almost embarrassing that I didn’t pick up on that, but I guess normally if someone ever tried to intimidate me I would be left a gibbering, sobbing mess in seconds. But Talrissark… he’s a slightly oversized insectoid weasel. It’s like being intimidated by a chitinous puppy. Before I can stop myself, the mental image overwhelms me and I start to make a… somewhat undiplomatic response.

“Pff… hahaha! Aaaahahaha!”

The giddy amusement overwhelms me, erupting in a series of giggles that only multiply at the resulting confusion of everyone else in the room. It’s not funny. It shouldn’t be this funny.

“Cease convulsing,” Talrissark orders, but he’s a fucking squeaky hissy adorable trilobite man so his words have somewhat of the opposite effect. I double over.

“Haaaahahahaha!”

“…Is there something wrong with it?”

It’s not funny. Oh shit it’s not funny, what is wrong with me? Fuck, fuck, fuck. I am trying to make up for murder, why am I doing this!?

“What is she doing?” Chlrehistra asks, significantly more intimidated by my amusement than I’m likely to ever be by her War Leader.

“I… I’m not sure why,” Hsthressis answers her, “but I feel like she’s… laughing. Evelyn? Evelyn, you’re kind of being scary again.”

Scary. Ha! Scary, she says! Of course I’m being fucking scary, I’m absolutely terrified. Just not of motherfucking ‘Talrissark the Purger.’ Why would I be? How could I be?

“Sorry!” I answer her between quests for air. “Sorry, I just… aaahahaha! I just got that I’m supposed to be… cowed, or something! And it’s just… you don’t have to do any of this!”

“You will respect the Chieftain and this gathering with—” Talrissark starts, but I cut him off.

“No no, like, it’s okay!” I insist, my laughter finally dying down. “This isn’t a negotiation! No matter how badly this goes, the war is still over because I refuse to fight it. I would rather slit my own throat than hurt any of you ever again. All you need to do, all I want you to do, is to tell me anything you’d like from me, and then I will make that happen.”

Silence, other than my shaking breaths. Oh man, I’ve been doing this wrong. I’ve been doing everything wrong from the start. No more lies, no more misdirection. I can’t handle twisting the truth anymore, not to them and not within my own head. It’s too much, it’s too goddamn much but I can’t pretend anymore.

“I mean it,” I promise, my rapid gasping quickly shifting from the aftershocks of laughter to a panic-induced hyperventilation. “Name your price. I can’t make it up to you, but I’ll damn well try.”

“…Ambassador Evelyn,” the chieftain eventually answers, “surely you must understand that this is… rather sudden. Anything? You’ll just give us anything? That’s unbelievably, suspiciously generous.”

“The phrase in my culture is ‘too good to be true,’” I say. “Yeah, I get it. Nonetheless, just tell me what to do. As long as I don’t have to hurt anyone. Please.”

“And what if what we want from you is your death, demon?” Talrissark growls.

“Then snip my fucking head off,” I tell him, showing my teeth in what can’t possibly be interpreted as a friendly gesture to a Sthrenslian, “and I’ll be back tomorrow with the same offer. If you want to kill me every damn day for a year, I will help you dispose of the bodies.”

They don’t get it. They can’t get it. Ending the lives of their warriors has already killed me more than anything they could possibly accomplish.

“Uhh, Evelyn?” Hsthressis presses worryingly, but I block her thoughts from my mind and ignore her.

“What you say is not possible,” the Chieftain insists.

“If you think I can’t cheat death, then what’s your daughter doing here?” I ask.

“Uh, Evelyn!” part of me squeaks again.

“Your giant fell,” Talrissark hisses. “Your giant died. We feasted on its flesh.”

“Yeah,” I agree, hearts hammering in all of my chests. I think I’m having a panic attack, but I keep talking anyway, my words descending more and more into a cultural lexicon that the only listeners can’t possibly understand. Yet my mouth keeps babbling as realization after realization crashes into my mind. “You killed Evelyn Prime. You killed my only real loss condition, by proving I don’t have one. Now I know there’s no red flashing weak point that magically causes a cascading failure when you click on it. I’m just a fucking copy and I can control-V as often as I like. So you are going to get peace, War Leader Talrissark, because there is no conceivable way that you can fight me. Even if by some miracle I’m annihilated by a natural disaster I’ll probably just wake up in another alien’s brain, emulated like a goddamn copy of Panzer Dragoon Saga!”

I realize, belatedly, that I’m crying with every single body capable of doing so. ETEs are not among that number, but if I could break into a sob in the middle of the negotiations, I would. I feel like my sanity is dangling by a thread, and unless someone untangles it for me I’ll end up hanging everything that’s left of me.

“Chieftain Chlrehistra, please,” I beg her. “Please. Tell me how to help you before I hurt you all by accident again.”

The silence that stretches through the room is only broken by the arrival of our food. To my surprise, a completely intact specimen of cave fungi is placed in front of me, as ordered.

“Thank you,” I tell the server automatically, a welcome numbness descending on my mind slowly but surely. Here comes the emotional burnout.

“Chieftain, is it okay if I just don’t talk while I eat this?” I ask.

“…Certainly,” she answers. “I think all of us need to take some time to calm down and think over a good meal.”

“Sounds great,” I mumble, and then submit myself to the ecstasy of consumption.

27 Multitudinous

Tears start to fall from my face, splattering on the plastic box I’m clutching tightly to my chest as I flee from the Arby’s and the overwhelming embarrassment within. I try to keep the presence of mind to avoid hitting the air holes with my waterworks. This bug—or whatever it is—could somehow be important to the question of how Tara got here. It might even be another sapient alien, trapped here like she is. I can’t let some prissy jerk in a fast food joint shake me up so much that I accidentally hurt the thing, or worse.

Wiping my face to clear my vision, I bring the cage up to look at the bug again. It doesn’t seem injured, at least, nor is it pounding on the wall trying to get my attention like a sapient creature might do. It’s just… standing there.

“Hey,” I say, trying to keep my voice steady. “Um, I don’t know if you’re smart or not, and I don’t know if you understand me, but if you are, and you do, I’m sorry for putting you in a box and I’ll let you out soon, okay? I think you might be really important to my friend. And, um, in case you’re not smart I’m afraid you’ll fly off and that could be bad if you’re actually important. Sorry.”

The bug continues to stand motionlessly for a moment, as camouflaged bugs are wont to do. But then, slowly and deliberately, it nods.

Oh boy, here we go again.

“Okay, thank you. I will be really careful and let you out when I get home, okay? Or, um, I can let you out now if you really need to but I’m worried something might happen to you and I promise to keep you safe and we’ll find a way to talk to each other and stuff.”

Another nod.

I wipe away my tears again. I’ve ruined enough first impressions today.

“Really. Thank you. I think my friend might be having a similar thing happen to her. I’ll find a way to help you both, okay?”

I fumble for my keys and managed to get the door open after only dropping them once. Carefully, I locked the door behind me and call out.

“Tara? Hey, Tara! You’re not going to believe this!”

“I expect I’ll believe every word of it,” Tara retorts from my room. “You’re not in the habit of lying.”

“It’s an expression!” I counter. “Look, Tara—”

“I know.”

My little blue friend is sitting snugly on top of my bed in a makeshift nest of old blankets and open books, looking quite cozy. She’s already facing the door when I enter, her legs quivering and tapping in that pensive habit she has when she’s nervous.

“Evelyn,” Tara says, “I haven’t been totally open with you about a few important things. I’m sorry, I should have brought this up sooner.”

“What? I mean, that’s fine!” I insist. “You’re totally allowed to talk about stuff at your own pace, Tara. But look, I found this other bug that’s—”

“That’s me,” Tara tells me.

“Huh?”

“The other bug you found,” she clarifies. “That is… another one of my bodies. After arriving on your planet, I seem to, ah, occasionally produce more bodies that are all linked with my mind? Like that creature in the game you talk about, and well… yes. That’s how it is, I suppose.”

“Oh,” I say.

Oh shit, I think.

“So… how does this work, exactly?” I ask, opening up the cage and letting the… second Tara, I guess? I let the second Tara fly on out. “What exactly does it mean that you ‘occasionally produce’ them?”

“Well, er, when I lay eggs the eggs hatch into more of me, I suppose. And I can… design the bodies to my specifications?”

“So you designed this?” I ask with wonder as the tiny bug-amalgamation perches on my forefinger.

“I did,” she answers, my obvious awe seeming to calm her down. The little bug on my finger waves—no, wait, Tara waves at me. It is her, and she is it.

“This is… amazing,” I say honestly. “Were you like this before coming to Earth?”

“I was not. I had initially assumed it was something your planet had done to me, but…”

“Yeah,” I agree with her implication. “This is way, way beyond anything on Earth.”

“So I have discovered,” she confirms, tapping her legs anxiously. “But… anyway, enough about me. Let’s talk about you.”

“Me?” I ask, waving her off. “What? There’s nothing about me that could possibly be as cool as—”

“Evelyn, I’ve seen enough of your fictional dramas to know what all that water coming from your eyes meant,” Tara chides. “Are you all right?”

“…Oh, right,” I mumble, embarrassed. “You were there the whole time, huh? How long have you been watching me?”

Tara makes a clicking noise, the smaller version of her on my finger fanning her wings.

“Since the first day you left me in your room, actually,” she admits easily. “I, er, hope that doesn’t make you too uncomfortable, and I apologize if that is the case. I was terrified you were lying to me about who you were or that you intended to say something about me. Please forgive my lack of trust.”

Honestly, that hurts. I understand, but it’s not really the best thing for me to hear right after sobbing my eyes out.

“It’s fine,” I tell her, desperately trying to mean it. “You’re trapped on an alien planet, in a different body, given no knowledge or instructions… it’s not paranoia when something is clearly out to get you, right?”

Both of Tara’s bodies visibly relax. In fact, the tiny one collapses onto its belly and gives my finger a small hug, which is a memory of such unrelenting adorableness that I will smile about it all the way to my grave. I can’t help it, I let out an involuntary happy squeaking noise.

“Thank you, Evelyn,” Tara says. “You are much more than I deserve.”

I give her—the tiny her on my finger, I mean—an affectionate poke.

“I’m just kind of frustrated I didn’t spot you sooner,” I half-joke. “I’m off my game.”

“I’m startled you found me at all!” Tara protests. “Thousands of people look my way and totally ignore me every day.”

Thousands, huh? I’m not letting that slide.

“You have more of these spy bodies, don’t you?”

She lets out an embarrassed click. Hey, it’s kind of nice to put someone else on the social back foot for once. …Ugh, wait, that’s a horrible thing to think. Fuck, now I want to cry again.

“I am trying to learn more about the world at large,” Tara meekly confirms. “But I don’t wish to be discovered doing so. Hence…”

“Yeah, I get it. It makes sense. The color-changing thing you do is really impressive and cool.”

I wish I could do that. Hang out in public places without anyone ever seeing me or trying to talk to me.

“Isn’t it?” Tara preens. “That one was particularly challenging to figure out. I’m quite proud of my…”

She trails off, presumably because she’s noticed that I have started sobbing. Damnit. I can’t even keep composure in the privacy of my own home. It’s not enough that social anxiety can make me cry, I have to burst into tears from just thinking about it!

“Evelyn,” Tara says softly. “Are you all right? I’m sorry.”

“I’m fine,” I choke out. “Don’t apologize, it’s not you.”

Her smaller body flies up to my shoulder as her beetle body crawls onto my lap. She sits in silence as I slowly get my sobs back under control. Damnit, why do I have to be like this? I was having a nice conversation with my friend! This is just such a waste of everyone’s time.

“I think I may have missed some context,” Tara eventually says, once my tears die down a little. “Everything seemed fairly… normal, for humans. But those people hurt you somehow, didn’t they?”

“No,” I insist, wiping my face. “They didn’t do anything wrong. I just had a stupid anxiety attack.”

“An attack?” Tara hisses icily. “I’m going to calmly assume that this is a phrase and that that girl didn’t actually attack you. Right?”

“Um, yes, that’s right, don’t… please don’t make this the part of those stories where the well-meaning alien friend goes and nearly kills somebody over a social slight because of cultural differences, okay? Really. Honestly, I’m fine.”

“What about actually killing somebody?”

“Tara! I’m serious! If you hurt anybody I’ll cry way more about that than I have over this!”

“I’m kidding, I’m kidding!” Tara insists, waving a leg at me. “I’m just trying to lighten the mood, sorry. I’m in no hurry to be hurting anyone either, at least if I can help it. Now, tell me about this ‘anxiety attack’ of yours. Or I can look it up on the Google if you prefer.”

“‘The Google?’ Really? You did that one on purpose.”

“Guilty as charged, but let’s not be distracted,” Tara answers smugly.

I sigh. How do I describe anxiety attacks to an alien? Like, in either the metaphorical or literal sense.

“There’s not really much to say,” I half-lie, leaning back onto my bedspread. “At least not a lot I think I can explain. My brain just freaks out and reacts to stupid stuff like it’s the end of the world. I know it’s dumb but I can’t change it.”

“Hmm. I’m sensing a recurring theme with your problems, Evelyn.”

“Yeah?”

“You said this about your other anxieties as well. That you can’t change or control it, that it just happens. That you’re fully aware it is illogical.”

Oh man, here we go. This is about to be one of those conversations, isn’t it? Everyone wants to help with my anxiety when they hear about it. ‘Have you tried performing X,’ ‘have you thought about doing Y,’ ‘consider training yourself to Z every day.’ Just a deluge of thoughtless remarks as if I wasn’t aware of habit training or exposure therapy or medication or any of the other dozen things people insist would work if I just tried them. I don’t want to be rude to Tara, though, so I buckle myself up for another depressing venture.

“Yeah, that’s fairly accurate,” I concede, waiting for the well-meaning advice to drop and rip me up.

“Well, if hypothetically you could just… snap your fingers, to borrow an expression, and make those problems go away… would you?” Tara asks.

I perch myself up on my elbows, taken aback a little by the question.

“I mean, of course I would? Anxiety is the worst. But of course that’s assuming it just magically solves all the problems without side effects.”

“What if… what if you knew for certain that it would work, but you don’t know anything about the long-term side effects? Let’s say a pill, or something.”

I hesitate.

“Well, that example is tough because I’m kind of biased against medication. Er, not that there’s anything wrong with medication, because medical science is awesome and wonderful and great, I just… don’t like it. Putting stuff in my body and then having that stuff fundamentally change how I think is kind of freaky, you know? But then of course obviously anything you put in your body technically changes your internal chemistry and thereby your thought process. You are arguably no more different a person when you are on and off medication than how different a person you are when hungry or not.”

I snort, having suddenly come to an amusing conclusion.

“So, I guess in summary I would say no,” I continue, “but mostly just because the very anxieties that pill would cure prevent me from taking it.”

“Well, that’s quite a bitter irony,” Tara comments. “But if I ever find a pill like that, should I send it your way in case you change your mind?”

“Hah. Sure, yeah. Thanks.”

I lie back down again, letting time pass by in silence as I stare at the ceiling next to my friend. Maybe my best friend now, since I moved away from everyone I knew in high school. Of course, I didn’t really have that many friends in high school; I was just the ‘weird bug girl’ there. Here in the so-called adult world I am still the weird bug girl, but the main difference is that nobody really cares. Now I can just tell people that I’m shooting to be an entomologist and they just go “Oh yeah? That’s cool. I’m looking to be a pharmacist.” I have even less of an excuse to be afraid of everyone now, yet… here I am.

“You know,” Tara chirps up, “I’m reading here on the topic and it says taking a walk is an excellent way to manage anxiety—”

“Oh, here we go,” I grumble quietly.

“—and I was hoping to show you something. It’s a bit of a long walk, though. At least a few hours, even with your giant human legs.”

“Hey! My legs aren’t giant!”

“Hmm, I don’t know… where I’m sitting I only seem to come up to your ankles. Frankly, you have bigger fingers than I do legs.”

“I don’t see your point,” I protest. “But yeah, that sounds… cool. I don’t think I’m up for my last class today anyway.”

I pull my laptop out of Tara’s claws (where she was indeed, as it turns out, researching social anxiety) and fire off a sick notice to my last professor for the day. Somehow I suspect a lot of people from my canceled period will be calling in ‘sick’ today, but even if the professors notice I doubt they’ll call me out on it. Of course, that confidence does absolutely nothing to stop me from being freaked out, but I manage to do it anyway so that counts as a win.

“So where are we going?” I ask Tara playfully, forcibly shoving those thoughts aside. “Are you taking me to your secret underground lair wherein I’ll meet your alien hive queen and learn the forbidden secrets of an ancient and ultra-powerful race from the stars?”

“Yes, actually,” Tara confirms.

I blink.

“Oh, uh. Neat. You mind hanging out in my backpack? I can’t think of a better place to hide you on the way out.”

“That’s fine. Just be sure to pack plenty of snacks. Or… hmm. Meals, actually. And a change of clothes.”

“A change of—hold on, how far away is this, again?”

Tara scuttles into my backpack instead of answering me, the incorrigible runt. I do as she says anyway and grab a full change of clothes, wrapping the underwear up in the extra shirt and making sure to put it in a different pouch from Tara. Because, you know, who wants to ride along with my underwear? After tossing a few snacks in (along with a few light meals, just in case) I pick up the backpack and nearly break my spine.

“Holy shit Tara you’re heavier than my textbooks!” I groan. “Ow, what the heck! You never weighed this much before!”

“You’ve been feeding me well,” she responds. “I appreciate it.”

“Yeah, but this is excessive, don’t you think? Agh, I didn’t know I was making you this fat!”

“It’s hyper-dense fat, mind you. I could probably weigh twice as much before I start straining the limits of my exoskeleton. Besides, it has no impact on my circulation or any of the other problems your kind experiences with obesity.”

“Yeah, except for the back problems I’ll get trying to carry you!” I complain, hiking up the straps and setting out anyway.

Tara leads me into the forest, through the forest, out the other side of the forest and back into civilization (wherein I immediately complain that we could have just taken the bus) and once again into another patch of wilderness on the other side, squirreled away between bits of civilization. It’s a particularly large coniferous forest, untamed and unclaimed… or more accurately unsold by whoever owns it to any companies trying to buy the land. I walk for hours, the dense plant matter constantly hampering my ability to move forward, and I almost insist on turning back when I lose cell reception. Tara assures me that we’re almost there, though. At least the backpack is considerably lighter, though I decide not to think too much about where all the alien bugs that flew out of it came from.

Instead, I think a lot about where they might possibly be going, and resolve to have a long talk with Tara about that soon.

“Just through here,” the alien insists. “This will make the rest of the journey much easier.”

“You mean we aren’t even there y—”

The words catch in my throat as I push aside some branches and suddenly find myself standing face-to-face with a bear.

A motherfucking bear! A brown one, too, also known as the giant kind that I’m pretty sure eats people. I don’t move. I don’t even breathe. Panic kicks in, and for once it is very, very justified. If this thing wants to eat me, I’m probably just straight up fucking dead. It’s over. This is it. The bear lifts a massive paw off the ground…!

…And waves at me.

“Hello,” says the bear.

Oh. I guess I’m already dead. When did this happen? Probably before I met Tara, she’s way too cool for real life.

“Evelyn, are you okay?” The bear growls in a deep but surprisingly feminine timbre. “Oh. Right. This is one of the few predators of your kind. Evelyn, it’s me, I’m not going to hurt you.”

My mouth flaps open and closed a few times before my person-brain finally catches up with my monkey-brain.

“…Tara?” I ask.

“Correct,” the bug and bear say in harmony.

“Holy shit Tara,” I breathe. “I actually thought I was about to die. Please, please warn me next time.”

“I’m sorry,” the bear says, giving me a wide grin that does not make me feel better at all. “I thought it would be a fun surprise. I bet you’re exhausted, and I’m fairly certain you’ve never ridden a bear before!”

“Okay, well, that just begs the question: why the fuck are you a bear!?”

“Well, I’m trying to stay hidden, but I don’t want to just sit around and hide. So I’ve been making bodies that look identical to a variety of common, naturally-occurring animals in your environment. I must say, I am a big fan of bears. Very strong, very efficient. Anyway, hop on!”

“So, what,” I ask, rallying my courage. “Do you just want me to ride… bearback?”

“I can still maul you, you know.”

“…Please don’t,” I squeak.

Tara—who, again, is a giant fucking grizzly bear holy shit bears are HUGE—lies down to let me onto her back. Her hair is coarse, bristly, and kind of smelly but I’m not about to tell her that. My mind is racing. Oh man, forget zerglings. Imagine an army of hyper-intelligent bears! That’s a scary hive mind.

Tara gets up and plods along as I gratefully remove my backpack, out of which Tara steps and finds a spot to nestle in her own fur. Man, she’s just super weird in all of the coolest ways. I guess she either really trusts me or she plans to eat and then replace me.

Oh god what if she plans to eat and then replace me. Is that a thing? It looks like she can make copy-bodies. Holy shit I just went into the woods with the super advanced alien and… and so what? She’s my friend. I trust her and she’s given me no reason to question that trust. I ride the rest of the way in silence, focusing on my aching legs and aching back to distract from similarly toxic thoughts.

“We’re here,” Tara announces. The bear Tara specifically, but it doesn’t really matter, does it?

Tara leads me to the mouth of an oddly-straight cave, dug diagonally-down into the earth. And I do indeed think it was dug; it’s far too smooth and straight to be natural. I dismount my bear-friend, grab my bug-friend, and start heading in.

A large figure shifts as I head inside, a massive armored arthropod almost the size of the bear. It—or her, as it is almost certainly Tara—has six beautiful legs, four thick and heavy ones along with two thinner ones ending in prehensile hand-feet, fingers protruding around her palm with captivating radial symmetry. Her thick shell is a brilliant turquoise, ending in a flexible, tail-like abdomen and starting with a spiny head that reminds me somewhat of a turian from Mass Effect, complete with the vaguely crab-like maxillipeds, but smaller, compact and disproportionate by earthly standards.

“Welcome to what passes for my home, Evelyn,” the giant, beautiful, monstrous wonder tells me.

“Is this… is this what you look like on your home planet?”

The cave resonates with Tara’s shrill, piercing laugh. From this body it sounds fuller, more complete.

“What makes you guess that?” she asks.

“I dunno,” I admit softly, staring in open awe. She just seems… comfortable?

“Well, it’s true,” Tara admits smugly. “More or less, anyway. I’m glad there’s someone here who appreciates it. I was quite the looker back on my planet, you know.”

“Yeah,” I burble.

That horrible, wonderful laugh echoes through the cave again, causing goosebumps to dance over my skin.

“Anyway, we made it just in time,” Tara tells me. “You got those clothes handy? Come this way.”

I follow, utterly entranced. The way her legs move when she walks… it isn’t like earthly arthropods at all, her odd stepping patterns as the little bug-Tara now explained. Her joints are incredibly multidirectional, like having a bunch of hips instead of knees. But wouldn’t that harm stability? Maybe she’s able to lock certain directions somehow. I wonder what her long tail is for. Balance, probably? A counterweight when using her forelegs to grasp things? Oh my god, she’s so shiny…

The part of the cave Tara leads me through looks a lot rougher than the cleanly-removed opening section, clearly dug by something different than whatever made the initial hole. Inside, I find… eggs. Dozens and dozens and dozens of eggs. Some tiny, piled haphazardly like a stack of marbles. Some large enough to fit me, and a couple nearly large enough to fit a full-grown bear.

“Uh,” I observe eloquently, “this is a lot of Taras.”

“It’s one Tara, but yes,” Tara’s home body rumbles. “It’s a lot of me. This whole thing has taken some getting used to, but I am happy to use whatever legs up I can. Ah, one moment.”

There’s a crack as a chunk of shell flies out from one of the eggs, a human fist having punched through from the inside. A few more bangs and the whole front section of the shell collapses outwards, sending a massive yolk gunk and an incredibly naked grown woman sprawling onto the cave floor, coughing her lungs empty of fluid.

“Uh.” I say again, since it bears repeating.

I stare just long enough to confirm whether or not the body has a copy of my face (it doesn’t, thank goodness) and then promptly decide that’s all I need to see and that I should look away. I don’t, and slowly begin to wonder if it would be better for me to reevaluate my position on the Kinsey scale or just die.

The human Tara body coughs a few more times as it struggles to stand up, skin dripping with fluids and stuck with sparse chunks of eggshell. The big bug Tara speaks.

“Could you give me those clothes now? I’d like to get you back to civilization before we end up out here all night.”

“Buh?” I say. “Uh, shouldn’t you, um, wash off all the… uh, gunk?”

The naked lady looks herself over and hums in that frustrated Tara-like way I’ve gotten used to for over a month now. It sounds so eerily like her… because, well, it is her. But not a bug. A human, an alien copy-human, wearing the form of a brown-haired freckled girl and sculpted with an entrancing, fittingly otherworldly beauty.

Considering my words, Tara lifts her arm up and starts licking all the gunk off of it like a dog vacuuming table scraps. The scene is both startling and disgusting enough to act as a splash of cold water, snapping me out of my sexual identity crisis. I still can’t look away though, because now it’s just gross! She just came out of that egg! No, don’t drink what’s left at the bottom of the… aaaagh!

“Look, just… just stop! I’ve got a towel, I brought a towel! Jeez, just wipe yourself off!”

“I’m hungry,” Tara grumbles. “You certainly don’t have to watch. Just leave the clothes and I’ll meet you out when I’m ready.”

“Okay, okay! Sorry! Eat your freaky alien placenta! I’m going to… go barf or something!”

“Outside the cave!” she calls back to me.

I quickly retreat as instructed, sitting down and leaning against the bear. A frightening thought suddenly hits me.

“So like, I assume the human body is because you want to interact with civilization.”

“Naturally,” Tara answers.

“…You’re going to ask to live with me, aren’t you?”

Bear-Tara quirks an eyebrow at me, as if my very need to clarify is confusing.

“I’m already living with you,” she points out.

My face finds its way into both of my palms. Things are about to start escalating, aren’t they?

28 Digging Yourself Deeper

As my diplomat body fills itself with pleasure and tunes out from the stress of actual diplomacy, I’m still very busy on the surface optimizing my living space. I think I’m preferential towards relatively small bodies for now, which is what I’ve gone for when designing my digger. I didn’t want to make them too big to fit in pre-existing Sthrenslian tunnels, but unlike the ETEs, there’s certainly no need to keep them small enough to fly within tunnels. More size means more strength, and more strength is incredibly helpful for digging more efficiently. Also helpful: acid.

The finalized design is my first foray into having six limbs. I started with a relatively tiny humanoid base, about twice the size of my Tinkerbells. The extra pair of arms has Sthrenslian digging claws, and I also have a long tail to help myself keep balanced as I lean forward in smaller tunnels, the tip of which has the first iteration of my acid cannon design. My digging body is only equipped with Sthrenslian acid, not sloth acid, because while sloth acid is substantially more powerful in general, Sthrenslian acid is more than enough to dig quickly underground and significantly less damaging to my own body. Obviously, I also give the body bioluminescence and tunnel whiskers so I can actually navigate underground.

I’ve named the body Evelyn Terrestrial, or ET for short. Unfortunately, no matter how much I wish otherwise, she can’t phone home.

I laid six of her, since I suspect I will probably need to do some significant underground work in the near future. If talks go well, I will be hanging out with Sthrenslians. If they go poorly, I will be needing to at least have a few whiskers in the nearby tunnels to give me early warnings against any ill-advised offensives.

Most of my bodies are hunting, gathering food and resources for OMNIDOME when it finishes growing a stomach. The rest of the ETE squad is en route to the True People, just in case things actually go well and I’m allowed to hang out with them. Speaking of, the mushroom my diplomat is eating is pretty good, I guess. Because it grows underground it primarily spreads itself by allowing animals to eat it and having them poop out seeds; a spore-spreading strategy just isn’t very effective when there isn’t much open space. Outside of a few interesting compounds, however, there’s nothing in this meal that I haven’t already gotten above ground. Still, it’s new and delicious, and I savor it down to the very last thread of mycelium.

I let out a deep, satisfied breath as my meal ends, blinking a little as I catch up on the conscious awareness I allowed to take a backseat. Thankfully, no one tried to disturb me, but as I feared a few people seem disturbed. Upside, at least: the massive influx of dopamine has drowned out my prior panic attack!

Although, thinking back on what I said during the panic attack… holy shit I made myself look like a complete fucking menace, didn’t I? Ah, there we go. The panic is coming back already.

“S… sorry for the wait,” I manage to quietly sputter, as of course everyone else at the table finished eating long before I did. “Thank you very much. It was delicious.”

“Yes, you certainly have a ritualistic way of eating, don’t you?” Chlrehistra comments politely. “Very slow, but very precise. Almost calming, in a way.”

I look away awkwardly, a nervous chuckle escaping my lips.

“Well… thank you, I think?” I say.

Is she serious? Actually, I guess I was just eating a mushroom, not a corpse. That probably looks a lot less creepy?

“I just can’t believe you ate the fucking roots,” Hsthressis mutters, shuddering. “So gross.”

“Mycelium, actually,” I correct.

A pause.

“…Nye-see-lee-uh?” Chlrehistra prompts.

Oops, I said that word in English. I guess they don’t have it in their language. Which makes sense, how the heck would they know the difference?

“Er… okay, how to explain. Plants have roots. Right? But mushrooms aren’t actually plants. They’re fungi—”

“Thun-guy…?” Hsthressis tries to repeat.

Fuck, I keep forgetting Sthrenslians don’t have lips.

“…Sorry, my language has a few sounds you can’t make, but yeah that’s close enough. Anyway, plants create energy by absorbing it from your sun—which is the, um… hmm. Well, it’s the thing that heats the world from above and also does a few other important things that you guys, uh, have no real concept of because you lack any of the organs necessary to detect light. But anyway, the point is, plants turn this energy into food that things other than plants can eat. Fungi do not do that; they gain energy by decomposing dead stuff or parasitizing live stuff or whatever. So while they have structures that look very similar to roots, and those structures perform some of the same functions such as giving stability to the flower, mycelium have a few fundamentally different uses, mainly permeating organic matter to slurp it up.”

The silence that follows my speech indicates to me that I have completely forgotten that I am here to negotiate, not lecture on science, and probably lost my audience almost immediately. Cool. Very cool. I’m doing really good at this so far, I can tell.

Hopefully they just take me up on my offer to kill me over and over.

“I… admit you lost me in most of that,” Chlrehistra starts slowly. “But are you claiming that surface plants eat the Fire of Khlasinas?”

Oh, shit, I probably just stumbled into more blasphemy! Really, just fantastic work here, Evelyn! …But also, this is just science, and it’s objectively true, and they should probably just learn to deal with that. Or I guess more accurately, if they can’t learn to deal with that, I am going to keep slipping up because science is awesome and sometimes I babble about it without thinking. I may as well run headfirst into this problem now.

“I’m not one hundred percent sure that the thing I’m talking about is ‘the Fire of Khlasinas,’ but assuming it’s the big ball of flaming gas in the sky that’s impossibly far away and supplies all heat and light to the surface, then… basically yes?” I hedge. “But it’s less that I’m saying ‘surface plants eat the sun’ and more that I’m saying there is no such thing as ‘surface plants.’ All plants are surface plants. If it survives without sunlight, it’s something other than a plant. …Unless it’s a holoparasite, I guess, but we can ignore those.”

There’s a pause. A long pause.

“This is demonic nonsense, clearly,” Talrissark grumbles.

“Well, no, it has a certain logic to it,” Chlrehistra acknowledges. Yay! Logic! “Plants near the surface are an inherent duality. They start their life in the ground, but half of them grows away from Sss while the other half grows towards him. The part that rises above is tainted, and if it absorbs the Fire of Khlasinas, that explains why.”

Er… not yay logic, I guess. Fuck. That entire train of thought is bullshit, but at least they don’t hate me over it. What’s interesting about that conclusion, however, is the assumption that surface-parts of plants are ‘tainted.’ I know offhand that a significant number of surface plants would be entirely safe for Sthrenslians to eat. I suppose a few are poisonous-ish, but the worst they would do is give them the runs. …I guess that’s enough to make a plant tainted, though. Alternatively, the problem could be poisonous bugs that might have also ended up on the leaves of whatever plant was trying to be eaten. There are some of those that could kill a Sthrenslian.

“Evelyn is always like this, mom,” Hsthressis explains knowingly. “She says all kinds of wacky nonsense that’s kind of understandable but half of it is words that don’t even exist and the other half feels like you’re completely missing the context. I can’t tell if she’s crazy smart or just crazy.”

“Wow, thanks Hsthressis,” I grumble.

“You’re welcome!”

“The worst part is that I can’t even call you wrong,” I tell her, scowling. “I’ve been kinda going batshit up there. But it’s still not fun to listen to people talk about how crazy I am! …Even if it is more fun than listening to myself talk about it. But anyway, back to my point: please let me stay here! I’m sorry I said all that weird and crazy stuff, and I’m just terrified I’ll get kicked out at this point? I really am willing to do whatever you want as long as I can not be alone anymore.”

Talrissark makes a hissing noise that’s more or less the Sthrenslian equivalent of a dry laugh.

“Well, there is something oddly refreshing about a loon admitting their own madness,” he admits.

“Hah, yeah, can’t be that bad if I’m sane enough to know I’m crazy, right?” I joke desperately, because even though Talrissark is a huge jerk I do kind of need him to not hate me. “I’m still hopefully at least like eighty percent Evelyn. It’s fine. I’m fine! The ship of Theseus is just whichever one he’s currently sailing on!”

I scowl for a moment as I realize which words I just spoke in English: ‘ship’ and ‘sailing,’ of course, but most frustratingly, ‘percent.’

“Ugh, you guys don’t even have mathematics?” I grumble. “Gross.”

“I apologize on behalf of my War Leader, Ambassador Evelyn,” Chlrehistra says politely. “Although on the subject of not insulting each other, cryptic comments regarding things that my people lack are… difficult to appreciate.”

Evelyn Experimental, currently lying at the bottom of the river, blushes furiously.

“Oh my god you’re right I’m so sorry, that was thoughtless and dumb and I should not have said that out loud I should have shut up, I need to shut up I just…”

I clamp my mouth closed, actually shutting up this time. Hopefully. At least for a little while.

“If that’s the case…” Chlrehistra hums politely, “would you mind giving us some time to discuss things privately?”

“Oh, uh… n-no! No, not at all, um… go for it!” I babble.

“Thank you very much, Ambassador Evelyn. Hsthressis, War Leader Talrissark, if you would?”

The three of them depart alone, leaving me to sit awkwardly alone with Sthrenslian guards standing firmly at every exit. Hsthressis and the others walk far, far away; it’s nearly ten minutes before they stop and actually talk to each other, which I know because of course I’m constantly aware of Hsthressis’ position and velocity at all times due to my inter-body proprioception. When the conversation starts, I am way too far away to hear even with the incredible acuity of my adapted Sthrenslian auditory system. My ETE has no chance of picking up on any of the words.

…But Hsthressis is in the room, and trying to purposefully ignore the things being said is like trying to not think about pink elephants. I am intensely stressed about the conversation, and no matter how hard I focus on attempting to ignore it I find myself failing, over and over, to meet that goal. I can’t even resign myself to only getting bits and pieces, ignoring most of the conversation as I desperately pull my mind to other tasks, because while I do manage to keep my attention out of the mind of the girl I killed at least ninety-five percent of the time, the five percent I am listening comes with the memories of every conversational bit I missed.

“Okay, let’s get the most important thing out of the way,” Chieftain Chlrehistra says, and then immediately pulls Hsthressis in for a hug.

Sthrenslian hugs are a bit different than the hugs I’m used to considering that Sthrenslians are very horizontal while humans are very vertical—their hugs involve a lot more face-nuzzling than I’m used to. But even as a disgusting voyeur, the vicarious experience of receiving my first hug from someone else since arriving on this planet nearly brings me to tears.

“Mooom…” Hsthressis grumbles. “Mom, cut it out!”

“Hsthressis, indulge me a moment,” Chlrehistra orders. The two of them stay like that for a while, and the disgust I feel at being witness to it quickly starts rising. This is not my place to experience, not my moment. Yet here I am.

“Now then,” Chieftain Chlrehistra declares, finally breaking away. “Before we discuss anything else, I want to hear your version of the events that happened, Hsthressis.”

“May I just say that I am of the mind that this is a mentally unstable demon,” Talrissark butts in. “The fact that it can speak is noteworthy, I will grant you, but if anything that only makes it more dangerous. In our conversation before the meal it gave impossible promises, then offered its own life directly before claiming to be invincible in war and spouting gibberish.”

Um. Wow, okay, that’s fucking rude. I mean, I am absolutely going batshit, but still.

“Talrissark,” Chlrehistra snaps, “I am speaking with my daughter. And may I remind you that you are not a priest, and you are certainly not a chieftain. I will determine, with Sss’s guidance, what does and does not constitute an enemy of the faith. Hsthressis, if you would?”

“Okay, so, I remember digging… and then I found a hole, I think, because I didn’t feel anything above it… but before I could get back to safety a rock fell on me from above and that… hurt. A lot. I was in so much pain and then something lifted the rock off of me and I tried to move and then there was more pain and… yeah. That was the end of that. Then I remember thinking about… no, dreaming about a fight? I dreamed that I was in a frontline warrior band and I was fighting something. And then the dream stopped and I heard Evelyn’s voice. She said she wanted to help me, and I freaked out because I couldn’t feel or hear anything around me, her voice just… was. So I thought she was Sss, but she said she wasn’t. So then I thought she was Khlasinas, but she said she wasn’t him either. She told me she killed me, but she wanted to bring me back. And then she just said the weirdest thing.”

“What?” Chlrehistra prompts.

“I asked if she was sure she wasn’t some kind of god, but rather than give a straight answer she said ‘I’m sure I don’t want to be.’”

I shudder. Yeah, I mean, I don’t. That just sounds like the worst sort of responsibility.

“Anyway,” Hsthressis continues, “I asked her what happened and she told me about your fight with her, I asked her what she was and she said she didn’t really know. Apparently she’s never brought someone back to life before, but she was just kind of… pretty sure she could do it somehow? Which was kinda odd but whatever. Um… she seemed really scared about the prospect of me being brought back to life but then hurting someone? Then she agreed to ‘make my body,’ but immediately afterwards she started freaking out about my soul, I guess? Apparently she ate me—”

“She ate you!?” Chlrehistra yelps.

“That was my reaction! And I started freaking out about it but then I just… I dunno. Something weird happened, and I calmed down like… instantly.”

“That’s incredibly suspicious,” Talrissark grunts.

“Hush,” Chlrehistra snaps back. “Then what, Hsthressis?”

“She told me that my soul was stuck in her body, and she couldn’t unstick it, she could only, uh, do like a merger thing, or make a copy of it? And I didn’t want to be a copy, so—”

“What do you mean by a ‘merger thing,’ Hsthressis?”

“Uh…” Hsthressis hedges, trying to figure out what lie to give. At this point, I don’t care. I’d rather tell the truth.

“I suspect this is related to the way the demon persistently refers to itself in the singular and calls itself lonely despite having multiple allies,” Talrissark butts in, to my surprise. “We know the one in our chambers is not the only demon that can speak.”

Chlrehistra doesn’t chide him for interrupting this time.

“Is that true, Hsthressis?” she asks instead.

“…Please don’t freak out,” Hsthressis mumbles. “I think Evelyn is being honest. But… yeah, she says that she’s one person that can like… separate into other people, I guess? Split apart?”

“That’s hardly the least startling thing you’ve mentioned so far, Hsthressis,” Chlrehistra says. “This is all incredibly concerning.”

“I know mom, but Evelyn really isn’t so bad. I think she actually does want to help us out. Can we at least give her a chance?”

“I do feel like, if nothing else, we are lacking information,” Chlrehistra considers. “It is difficult to compare this situation to any of the teachings within the Stories. This ‘Evelyn’ is a strange creature, but if she wishes to live within the embrace of Sss, we would be remiss to cast her out and force her to continue suffering on the surface.”

“She is a threat,” Talrissark grunts. “I feel compelled to protest the presence of any creature, demon or otherwise, that is capable of manipulating souls, duplicating itself, and other absurd magics. Even if it is friendly now, we all agree that it’s mentally unstable.”

“If it becomes something we must destroy, War Leader Talrissark, I will inform you,” Chlrehistra says firmly. “And your advice is duly noted. That time may very well come, and I will rely on you if it does. But we must keep hope. We must at least offer the chance for salvation, or we risk losing the chance ourselves.”

Talrissark grunts again, but doesn’t protest any further. Wow. Wow, I… I actually might not be banished! This is amazing, it’s… it’s information I stole by spying on these people by using Hsthressis. I shouldn’t be happy about this. I…Shit. Shit! Now I feel morally obligated to tell them! At minimum, Hsthressis deserves to know, I should have explained immediately but I was an arrogant shithead and thought I could just ‘not abuse the power.’ I have to tell them, and there is no way it won’t fuck everything up.

It doesn’t take long for them to return after that. I’m twitching with nervousness and fear, but when the three of them file in it doesn’t take me long to blurt the truth out.

“Thank you for waiting Evelyn. I’m sure you’ll be happy to know that we decided—”

“I-I know,” I stammer. “I overheard everything, I’m sorry.”

Chlrehistra twitches a whisker in surprise.

“Well, that’s… impressive, thank you for telling us.”

“It’s not because I can hear really well,” I explain. “It’s because I can hear through Hsthressis. It’s part of the… soul-thing? I guess? Um… That’s also why I know how to speak your language. I sort of took the information from her, and I didn’t really mean to but I did and I’m scared that maybe more than she wants me to know will leak over sometimes? And I’m really not sure what to do about it. Parts of me might leak over to her as well and I’ve been trying to figure it out instead of saying anything and I’m really sorry that was stupid of me I should’ve told her everything I knew immediately, and—”

“Slow down!” Chlrehistra says. “Ambassador Evelyn. Please calm yourself.”

I shut up and take a few deep breaths, trying to do exactly that. It doesn’t work great, but it sort of helps.

“It’s not Ambassador Evelyn,” I murmur. “It’s just Evelyn.”

“So you can hear through my body?” Hsthressis grumbles. “That’s fucking creepy. What else can you do?”

“Well, I always know your relative position compared to the rest of me, I guess.”

“What do you mean ‘the rest of you?’” Hsthressis asks.

“The answer to that is obvious,” Talrissark growls.

“War Leader, please,” Chlrehistra says calmly.

“Your daughter has had her soul taken by an intelligent demon,” he accuses anyway. “She’s a threat to the entire colony.”

“Talrissark, enough,” Chlrehistra demands.

“Duty requires me not to, Chieftain. Please, hear me out. I am no expert on demons, I will admit, but it explains both your daughter’s story and our guest’s strange behavior. When she said that we can’t kill her, that she would just keep coming back every day… this is why. This monster has tied her soul to your daughter, and cannot be slain unless we kill Hsthressis.”

Silence.

“That’s ridiculous,” Chlrehistra says flatly.

“It’s…. um. Technically true, actually?” I squeak quietly. “But I promise it’s just an unintended side effect.”

The way Chlrehistra tenses up puts the entire room on edge. I’ve fucked up now, I guess. Whatever. I deserve it.

Being a good person sucks.

29 Avoiding Disaster

“Explain,” Chlrehistra hisses, and not just in the usual Sthrenslian way.

Shit, I’m so incredibly bad at talking to people. I did not think about how Hsthressis technically sort of being a living horcrux might come off as, uh, freaky black magic, I guess. Okay, now that I am thinking about it it seems really obvious, but I can beat myself up over it later.

“Ch-chieftain Chlrehistra, I… I promise that my motivations were entirely and completely focused on saving your daughter. But I—”

“It doesn’t matter what the motivations are,” Talrissark grunts. “What matters are the facts.”

“Talrissark, if you interrupt anyone in this room again you will be dismissed,” Chlrehistra snaps. “Am I understood?”

“…You are, chieftain.”

“Good. Explain, Ambassador Evelyn.”

“I, um,” I stutter and stammer for a bit before actually managing to catch hold of any words. “I… okay. So basically, I had two imperfect ways to bring… er, to heal Hsthressis. She sort of… existed inside of me, and I didn’t really understand that until I looked for her. But then I found her and I just don’t have a good way to get her… out of me, I guess?”

“Go on,” Chlrehistra says coldly.

I take a deep breath, knowing that I probably already dug myself in too deep. Just ever so slightly, I give into the temptation to wipe my own anxiety away, clear my head, and try to actually think about a way out of this.

“…So, you have a word in your language that, in my language, is two very different words. When you say soul, in my head I am confused because I don’t know if you’re referring to ‘mind’ or ‘spirit.’ The mind is your thoughts, your emotions, your feelings, your reason, your memories. It is the tangible, demonstrable aspect of who you are. You can prove, at least to yourself, that you have a mind… in fact, it’s impossible for you to disprove that you have a mind because doing so would require the use of your mind. But the spirit is something more than that. The spirit is the parts of you that do not act on the world, the parts of you that are not held within your physical body. A spirit passes to the afterlife on death, a spirit is metaphysical, ephemeral. It cannot be seen or felt or demonstrated. And this distinction between the two aspects of a soul is important, because I know exactly where Hsthressis’ mind is, but I know nothing about her spirit. I don’t know if separating her from me would be safe.”

I am, of course, leaving out all the parts where I don’t think ‘spirits’ even exist at all. That’s a problem for later. For now, it’s a decent enough philosophical shorthand for the continuity of self.

“But you would do it if you knew it was,” Chlrehistra presses.

“Of course I would,” I say. “I mean, I absolutely can separate her from myself. I can do it right now. But I talked with Hsthressis about it, and both of us are leery on what it would do to her soul. Personally, I’m afraid that if I separate her from me, part of her will still be trapped with me and I will have to either keep it asleep inside me or destroy it. And while the Hsthressis we see here would be perfectly fine—or at least I’m pretty sure she would—I would still be sort of killing her as well.”

“And I’m afraid that when Evelyn makes a copy or whatever, my soul will only go to one of them,” Hsthressis butts in. “Or that it will get broken or something. This just seems like the safest option, mom. I didn’t want to go fucking around with it.”

“This is… insane. This is absolutely, impossibly insane,” Chlrehistra sighs.

“I… I’m sorry, Chieftain,” I mutter. “But if nothing else, I absolutely agree.”

“Why would Sss even create a soul-manipulating being such as you? This is not a trial I ever thought I would have to face in life.”

“I mean, same. This is all pretty unexpected on my end, as well.”

“Apologies for the disrespect, Ambassador Evelyn, but the degree to which you share my feelings does not at all alleviate them. You have, not to put too fine a point on it, entrapped my daughter’s soul, used her as a spy, and bound her life to your own. And now you present to me a puzzle that must be solved before she can be freed.”

“Well… on the upside, your daughter is also kind of immortal now,” I point out. “The reviving thing goes both ways!”

“Wait, seriously!? That’s awesome!” Hsthressis says excitedly.

“Enough,” Chlrehistra demands. “I need time to digest all of this. War Leader Talrissark, have your men escort the Ambassador somewhere comfortable, but keep her under guard. And… do the same for my daughter.”

“At once, Chieftain,” Talrissark responds. “I trust that won’t be a problem, Ambassador?”

“It won’t be,” I answer. “Like I said, I will do anything you guys want as long as no one gets hurt. Except me, I guess.”

“Are you serious, Evelyn?” Hsthressis grumbles. “Oh my god, this is going to be so boring…”

“For you, maybe,” I say, letting myself grin a little. “But I’m doing a dozen other things right now, so I doubt I’ll have that problem.”

Speaking of, now I need to figure out what to do with all these bodies I brought into the tunnels. I’m about halfway to the True People’s home with my pack of ETE bodies, but it looks like I probably won’t be super welcome there. Should I just turn around and go home, or what?

Meh, I guess I’ll explore. There are a ton of tunnels branching off every which way down here. Maybe I can find another society of Sthrenslians and get a do-over on this whole ‘meeting people’ thing. I desperately need a do-over. Besides, each of the ETEs are fed enough for about three days of constant runtime before they starve to death, assuming they don’t fly at all. Flying burns a lot of energy.

Speaking of, I think I finalized another body design. Enter the Evelyn Short Take-Off and Landing, henceforth referred to as the ESTOL. I wanted to get a true VTOL body working, but unfortunately vertical takeoff is not at all within the realm of siphon-based fluid mobility, at least with my current musculature. What the ESTOL can do, however, is hover while already in the air, and that’s really important when it comes to being able to defend an area and also accurately aim acid shots so I don’t hit anything I don’t intend to hit.

The body works like this: a fuzzy base platform holds a series of tubes that run through the body and can be aimed in any direction I need them to. Six of them intake and expel air, two of them produce and expel acid. I’ve extended the bat-like wing system stolen from those awful bird-things that ate my cute little fairy-mes into a larger, wider structure, optimized for gliding and able to provide enough air resistance to act like a parachute. My siphons can expel air in order to keep me stable during the slow, controlled descent, and a single flap of my wings will give me significant altitude. It’s not a perfect hover, and I certainly don’t have the maneuverability of something like a modern-day drone, but it should be stable enough to aim and fire the acid cannons without needing experience at being a fighter jet.

While my already-terrible social skills have not at all been helped by my transformation into a horrifying pseudo-necromantic hive mind and everything about my life is horrible right now, I do have to admit I like designing bodies. Even as I squat down to awkwardly plop out an egg half the size of my torso, I can’t help but notice how quickly I’ve gotten used to doing that. I guess it doesn’t hurt (though it doesn’t exactly feel particularly comfortable either) so it just kind of ended up as routine. It kinda feels like that got normal way too fast. Maybe it’s alien brain bullshit but honestly, having a ton of brains seems to be messing with my sense of time and the speed of my mental development in general. I’ve been here for like… gosh, I don’t even know, a week? It feels like months, though.

That train of thought is quickly cut off when I suddenly hear a hissy scream resounding somewhere far down one of the tunnel branches I’ve been exploring.

Immediately, I burst all nine of my nearby ETE bodies towards the sound. That sounded like a Sthrenslian in trouble! Screw my energy reserves, flying is way faster than running and I’m getting there as fast as possible. One of my bodies turns a total corner and immediately has to stop, however, or else I would have rammed headfirst into some kind of sticky, fleshy membrane that has been stretched across the entire tunnel. What is this, some sort of trap? It’s completely opaque and, even at a glance, it seems way too obvious to have any chance of catching anything. But then I remember why I was rushing full speed down this tunnel in the first place: according to my echolocation, there’s nothing here but more tunnel.

To a Sthrenslian, this thing may as well be completely invisible.

Well, shit. I pull three bodies to join me in this tunnel and send the others and other tunnels to try and get around it. This is either some kind of mimic creature or it has the unfortunate position of being between me and someone that needs help.

“Hey!” I snap at it. “Are you smart? Can you understand me? Because I need you to react or get out of the way. If you don’t, I’m going through you and you won’t like it!”

There’s no response, and according to my echolocation my words simply travel down the tunnel as if there was nothing in the way. My eyes, meanwhile, have no idea if there even is more tunnel on the other side of this thing. It’s very disorienting. Still, no response comes, so I step forward and grab one edge of the creature, where it meets with and forms a seal against the tunnel wall.

Immediately, as I expected might happen, the sticky creature snaps shut like a Venus fly trap, deflating and folding itself in half over my hand. There it forms a new seal against my wrist, and a burning liquid starts filling its mouth as I struggle to pull my hand away.

“Acid,” I hiss in irritation. “It’s always fucking acid on this planet!”

The upside of this whole situation is that only one hand of one of my bodies is trapped, and now the tunnel is unblocked. Whatever this creature was doing to render itself invisible to echolocation no longer works while it is trying to digest me, which is interesting, and while I really want to devour it and see how it ticks, right now I need to go find whoever screamed. My free bodies burst past the monster as I struggle over control of my arm and continue on down the tunnel.

Crucial seconds pass as I fly forward, listening intently for signs of struggle other than my own. Eventually, I hear what I’m looking for: another one of these odd sticky membrane traps closed around something. This time I don’t bother to talk to it; I tackle it with a half-dozen bodies and start biting it apart.

These ambush predators are large enough to completely engulf a Sthrenslian, which are already about eight times the mass of one of my ETEs. They do not, however, have any appreciable amount of armor on their bodies, as it looks like they create the seal around the inside of the tunnel by inflating themselves, relying on glue rather than muscle to hold trapped prey in place. In short, I have no trouble biting this thing the fuck open. My teeth tear through its elastic skin, puncturing through to the closed trap that’s now full of acid. The burning, wretched liquid pours over my faces but I shut my eyes and continue my assault, ripping open larger and larger holes. The creature struggling inside was faltering, but it seems to figure out what’s going on and redoubles its efforts to live, thrashing around inside and eventually tearing itself free from its captor. The Sthrenslian bursts out of the fleshy, toothless ‘mouth’ with a good chunk of the glue-covered skin still attached to its body… but no longer attached to the body of its attacker. The Sthrenslian’s entire body is covered in acid burns, enormous chunks of exoskeleton missing to reveal the vulnerable bits underneath. Coughing and choking, suffering from severe internal and external damage, they nonetheless remain standing, trying to walk away from what likely seems to them to be a fight between a predator and an unknown predator. I leave three of my bodies to finish killing the acid-beast, send four more to help my trapped body kill that acid beast, and have the last carefully approach the possibly-dying Sthrenslian.

“Hey! Hey, are you okay?”

Ragged, panicked breaths on my only response as the Sthrenslian continues to drag itself away with only three working legs. All right, so maybe that was a stupid question, but it’s still concerning that they didn’t react to it.

“Hey! Can you hear me?”

Oh shit, maybe he can’t hear me. His whiskers have all been melted away, functionally rendering him deaf and even more blind than usual. There’s absolutely no way he’s going to be able to make it home in this state, but I can’t take him home if I don’t know where his home is. But maybe, if we’re lucky, I won’t have to. I take a deep, deep breath with all of my bodies in the tunnel.

“HEY!” I shout at the top of many pairs of lungs. “HELP! WE NEED HELP! SOMEONE HELP US! HEY!”

The injured Sthrenslian seems to react to my screams, surprisingly. Maybe some internal bits of the whiskers still work, they just can’t pick up sounds very well while damaged.

“YOU’RE GOING TO BE OKAY!” I assure him. “PLEASE STOP MOVING! REST!”

I don’t want to touch him and physically try to restrain him, because I feel like that’s likely to just make him struggle more, and his body is no doubt in a lot of pain that would be exacerbated by contact. Thankfully, my screams seem to reassure him, and he stops crawling painfully down the tunnel. I continue my screams, sending various bodies further down whatever tunnels I can find until finally, after many tense minutes, I hear someone shout back.

“Identify yourself!”

“I’m Evelyn!” I answer. “I found a Sthrenslian that needs help!”

Three or four Sthrenslians scurry towards me, though they stop once they’re close enough to echolocate my shape.

“What are you?” one of them demands.

“A friend!” I promise. “Please, come with me! They’re severely injured!”

There’s a tense, terrifying moment of pause… but then they start following after me. They don’t seem to recognize my name, so they probably aren’t part of the True People.

Time to aim for a better first impression, I guess.

30 Once More, With Feeling

“Right here! Right down here!”

The Sthrenslians scuttle after me as I shoot down the hallway to where I’m with their dying kin. Or at least, he looks like he’s dying, but I really have no idea. I’m certainly no Sthrenslian doctor; even if I have basically all of the biological knowledge about them it doesn’t give me any experience healing them. Just… creating more.

“He’s covered in acid burns!” I inform them. “He was nabbed up by something inaudible up until the point it grabbed him, and—”

Immediately, the three of them stop in their tracks.

“A ghost trap?” one of them says fearfully. “We’re in ghost trap territory?”

I pause, thinking rapidly. Shit, I guess Sthrenslians would be really terrified of these things, wouldn’t they? Invisible ambush predators… yeah, that’s something I would try to avoid as much as possible.

“I will fly ahead first!” I announce. “Follow behind me! If there are any more, I’ll get grabbed before you! Hurry!”

I rush off again, and to my relief they follow after a brief hesitation. Soon, the injured Sthrenslian is in echolocation range and the other Sthrenslians run right up to him, ignoring the feast so many of myself are indulging in behind me. I suppose they have no objections to a dead ghost trap, no matter the source.

“Warrior Katrk!” one exclaims. “Gods, he’s still breathing! Help me carry him!”

He’s not talking to me, I assume, as all the Sthrenslians quickly gather around the injured guy—Katrk, I guess—and lift him up, scuttling away at speed. I follow them with one body, leaving the others to continue eating a good meal.

And it is, to be clear, a wonderful meal. Even as the panic of a person’s uncertain fate fills the tunnel, so much more of my body explodes in the ecstasy of delicacy, incredible knowledge filling me as well as incredible improvements, revolutions. This is one of the most complex and incredible feats of evolution I have ever had the pleasure to consume.

The ghost trap evolved in total darkness, to wait in ambush and devour prey. Prey that was wary beyond belief, that had such precision of senses and sharpness of mind, what could possibly hope to ambush in? By the time Sthrenslians get close enough to ambush they can hear a heartbeat, they can smell even a single breath.

So this creature evolved to sound like an empty space and smell like nothing at all. When its body inflates to block the tunnel, it seals the walls with two mirrored patches of stretchy epidermis that can both detect and project sound. These inflatable balloon-like organs not only hear every vibration they come into contact with but mirror it on the opposite side of the creature. The ghost trap can produce inverse sound waves to cancel out repeat noises as it perfectly fakes the natural effects of echolocation. It’s impossibly brilliant.

It doesn’t even stop there! Powerful pheromones replicate the smell of its surroundings, an unmatched level of chemical crypsis that prevents it from so much as leaving a scent. Then, its two inflatable drum-organs coat themselves with a sticky glue-like substance, so when another creature makes contact it traps them, closes its body up, and then fills the epidermis with acid. During this digestion phase, it’s completely vulnerable to attack from outside and it can no longer use its other advantages, which is a bit of a design flaw but evolution is rarely perfect.

And what does it matter, when I can make it better?

“You’re going to be okay! You’re going to be okay, just stay awake, all right?”

Oh shit, that’s right. I’m sort of here to help make sure the person doesn’t die. We’ve been rushing down a tunnel, and with me too small to help carry Katrk I’ve been taking directions, flying ahead, and using my face to ensure that no one else gets caught in a ghost trap. The tunnels all sort of blur together after a while, though, and before long I detect a much larger cave with Sthrenslians inside. Most of them, therefore, also detect me.

“Hey!” I shout. “We need a healer!”

Shortly afterwards, the injured Sthrenslian in question also gets noticed and to my relief things start to fall into place from then on. I get a lot of confused attention, but the people here at least seem to have their priorities straight and immediately make way for the injured, leaving my mystery alone for now.

They don’t stop me from entering the cave proper, though everyone seems to get immediately more wary when I do. Compared to the home of the True People, this cave is barely a fraction of the size and nowhere near as beautiful. If the True People’s cave was a sprawling urban art project turned living area, this cave is more of a struggling village, where everyone seems so tired and busy that most of them don’t even give enough of a shit to stop doing whatever they had been doing before even though they are currently making first contact with another sapient race. A few people are making significant note of me and I’m pretty sure one of them ran off to grab whoever is in charge, but I carefully stick to floating above the people with the injured Sthrenslian and not trying to get close enough to touch anything, and that seems to be good enough for now.

We finally meet up with someone named Healer Katrs who takes Warrior Katrk into his little healer-cubby or whatever the small homes dug out of the cave walls are called. Katrs, Katrk… geez, I can see why these people append titles to their name. It would take me years to tell them all apart otherwise.

“Scout Klsrenthisah,” a voice intones from behind me, one that according to Hsthressis’s instincts is likely quite old, “what have you found here?”

“Chieftain!” responds the guy that had been doing most of the talking with me. “This… creature called for help in our language and led us to where other members of its kind seemed to have freed Warrior Katrk from a ghost trap. It then led the way so that we could return him with speed.”

“Is that so?” the chieftain hums. “Can you speak, creature?”

I nod my head, turning to face him even though that doesn’t seem to mean much in Sthrenslian culture. He does seem like a pretty old guy, if the cracked chitin his body and slow, shaky movements are anything to go by.

“I can,” I confirm, my heart pounding. This is it, Evelyn. The second chance you don’t deserve. “I am Evelyn. I sincerely hope that Kat— er, Warrior Katrk will be okay.”

“Time will tell, but by my scout’s accounting your actions will have been instrumental in his recovery, if so. I’m afraid you have me at a disadvantage, Ethalyn. Never before in all my years have I seen something quite like you.”

“I… we… um, I mean, my people are from very far away,” I blabber. “I only just met your own kind a few days ago.”

“I see,” the chieftain answers amicably. “So then, what is it that brings you so far from your own home, Ethalyn?”

“I… circumstances outside my control, I suppose. I very much wish I could be home, Chieftain, but that is currently impossible. As such, I am searching for somewhere new to live, and ideally people that I could live with.”

Shit, shit was that too forward? I think that wasn’t terrible, right? I probably haven’t even said any blasphemy yet, which would be pretty great if so.

“I am grateful to you for your assistance, Ethalyn, but fear the Resonant Gems may have little to offer you,” he said sadly, and I intuit that ‘Resonant Gems’ is the name of his clan in the same way that ‘True People’ is the name of Hsthressis’. In which case… I think that’s good! This really is a second chance! You know, assuming that wasn’t just his culture’s way of saying ‘fuck off’ like it is in some of mine.

“I’m not sure I see it that way,” I say as diplomatically as I can. Which means I am doping my brain a little, but I can panic about that later. “My journey here has been lonely, dangerous, and exhausting, both physically and mentally. Just a simple bit of friendly conversation is more valuable to me than you can know.”

His posture shifts a bit at that, though I can’t even attempt to understand the subtleties without plumbing a brain I’m trying to leave alone. I need to figure out a way around that. Still, the tone of his voice seems more understanding when he speaks.

“Ethalyn, there was a time I would be overjoyed to throw a feast in friendly celebration and regale you with words until exhaustion claims us both. But the honest truth is that I and my people have fallen on difficult times. We have little to trade with, and less to thank you with. I dearly wish I could invite you to stay, but I cannot so much as offer you a meal.”

Oh. Oh. Now I understand what I’m seeing. The Sthrenslians here are hungry, and they’re working themselves to the bone so that it doesn’t devolve into starvation. As I watch I can see the signs of it now, though it doesn’t look like how I imagine an ancient starving city to appear at first glance. No Sthrenslians are lying in heaps on the street, wasting away. What feels like a group of children are playing together, laughing hissy Sthrenslian laughs at the edges of my senses, despite the dire straits. Things are not at a crisis level here, but I see the spots where that tipping point is starting to teeter. Workers bring carts of food into a central storehouse that is guarded by warriors, not owned by individuals, and the predominant mood around it is avarice. People move slowly, exhausted in ways far more complete than that of the laborers I saw in the True People city. They aren’t starving yet, but they are rationing, and the rations are growing thin.

Which leaves me a decision to make, and it’s without question the easiest one I’ve had since I got to this damn planet.

“I don’t need a feast, sir,” I said, devoting nearly half my not-inconsiderable brainpower to planning each word of the sentence before it drops out of my stupid mouth. “If I did, or if you wish for one, I can provide the food myself. I have a surplus of both food and labor, and I can think of no greater use for them than to share with friendly strangers.”

People don’t stop working, don’t stop moving, don’t stop the habits that have been formed deep into their exoskeletons by hardship. But the cavern still seems to grow imperceptibly quieter, as the weight of attention on me grows from frightening curiosity to suspicion and hope.

“…Forgive me, but I find myself struggling to respond to such a generous offer,” the chieftain of the Resident Gems answers after a short pause. “Stranger from a strange land, if your words are true it is clear that you walk warmly in the embrace of Sss. But I fear I have nothing to offer you in return.”

I smile, slowly descending to the ground in front of the Chieftain.

“That’s not true,” I protest. “You offer me something to do other than just survive from one day to the next. You offer me a worthy purpose, and I think, right now, that is the gift I need most.”

During the stunned silence that follows, I catalogue my capability to actually make good on such a promise. I estimate that the Resident Gems probably have close to a hundred people in their village, although for all I know there are enormous extra caverns just outside my echolocation reach. And that sounds like a lot of people, but honestly? It’s not really. Sthrenslians are very tiny, and Evelyn Experimental alone probably outweighs everyone in this village combined by a factor of five. Of course, EE eats a fuckton, so that’s hardly an inconsiderable amount to share, but it’s doable. You know, assuming these people are interested in eating a diet exclusively of demons.

…But that should be fine, right? I mean, the True People fucking ate me. Killing and eating demons is probably pretty normal. I should ask, but I really don’t want to. And while I can make myself ask anyway…

“You are altering your brain chemicals more than you promised yourself that you would,” Mr. Mooshi reminds me. “You said that you would deliberate for at least a few days before making changes, but you did this in the spur of the moment.”

“Yeah, and it worked,” I say.

“Which is the opposite of a good argument for abandoning a reasonable Schelling fence.”

…Shit, Mr. Mooshi is right. I peel back the concoction of anti-anxiety chemicals in my brain and immediately feel panic start to set in. It’s a painful thing to do, and my now-anxious brain immediately starts beating itself up over it. Why would I make myself feel like this on purpose!? I hate this! But I grit my teeth and resolve to live with it, at least for now. I’m probably past the difficult hurdles, and I’ve struggled with this bullshit my whole life. The old Evelyn can take it from here.

“Apologies, but I’m afraid I never asked,” the chieftain says. “What is the name of your people? Your clan?”

I blink. Oh, shit, I mean… I’m good at names, right?

“Evelyn,” I say.

Fuck.

“Oh, my apologies,” he says. “So then, may I ask your name?”

“I… It’s Evelyn.”

“Ethalyn… of Clan Ethalyn?”

“Y-yes,” my stupid mouth says.

Ugh, it’s close enough, anyway. All Sthrenslians actually pronounce my name as ‘Ethalyn,’ but for some reason it’s more noticeable when Hsthressis isn’t also in the room listening with me. I’m not going to try to dig into why. Fuck it, I’m just going to go back to mentally correcting them from now on. It’s not their fault they don’t have lips.

“Well, Evelyn of Clan Evelyn, I think the two of us should discuss this in more detail,” the chieftain says. “If that would be acceptable?”

“O-of course!” I stammer. “Well, um… while we talk, would it be okay if I start transporting some food? I live a few hours from here… oh, er, that’s a unit of time. I don’t actually have any idea how you measure time, but it’s, uh… a while?”

His tendrils curl into a Sthrenslian smile.

“That sounds lovely,” he says.

“Great,” I say. “In the meantime, I think I… er, my people will find a way to clear your tunnel of ghost traps.”

“Ah, yes… the ghost traps. Are you sure? What you propose is an incredibly dangerous endeavor.”

Acid burns on one of my hands and many of my faces slowly start to recover themselves as my body’s rapid regeneration kicks into gear with the help of all the meat I got from killing the two ghost traps I encountered so far. Their acid hurts, certainly, but it’s no sloth acid and I’m making sure to regrow the damaged parts with what I believe should be slightly more acid-resilient chitin compounds. Now that I know everything there is to know about these creatures, the solution for dealing with them seems rather obvious. I can see them, for starters, as none of their crypsis applies to sight. From there I just have to poke them with a big stick or hurl a large enough rock into their mouth that they clamp down on it by instinct, at which point I can beat the shit out of them with impunity. I now know exactly where to bite in order to deal the most damage without getting a face full of acid in response, as well.

“They aren’t terribly dangerous to me,” I tell him. “Very little is, more than once.”

31 Creature, Demon, Monster

“Ta-da!” I cheer as eight of my ETEs all carry ghost trap corpses into the Resident Gem cave. “You guys can eat these, right?”

My chat with the chieftain of the Resonant Gems has, so far, been horrifyingly awkward but not anywhere approaching dangerous. The poor man is desperate and tired, and I can tell he wants me to be exactly what I say I am. I can hardly blame him for being suspicious, considering that I’m offering him a bunch of free stuff for what seems to be no reason. Honestly though, I think things are going pretty okay. As long as I don’t talk too much about the surface or let my mouth run off without directions from my brain, maybe I can actually make some friends here.

Now that I’ve actually brought them both food and proof that I can kill the terrifying invisible ambush predators that nearly got one of their own people, things should go a lot more smoothly.

“H-how did all of you kill so many? How did you find so many?”

I allow myself a bit of smugness, since I have clearly earned it.

“I have ways of hearing things that you do not,” I intone mysteriously. “Not even ghosts can hide from me.”

“This is truly an incredible boon,” the Resonant Gem chieftain says, unable to contain the relief in his words. “But it is our tradition that Hunters and Warriors eat their fill of any beasts they slay before sharing the remainder. Please, partake first.”

Yeah, that’s not happening. I lucked out that the scouts beforehand were too busy paying attention to their injured warrior to notice how fucked up my eating strategy is.

“Nah, I’m good,” I dismiss. “I ate earlier, and three day’s run time is about my weight limit for flying anyway.”

A ripple of confusion flows through the gathered Sthrenslians.

“I am not sure I understand,” the Chieftain says.

“Oh… huh, I said the word ‘flying’ in English,” I mutter to myself. “…And you don’t really have a concept of ‘run time,’ nor context for why flight would have a weight limit. Um, you can ignore all that. But for future reference, ‘flying’ is my word for the action of remaining suspended in the air without touching the ground. So this is flying…”

I land.

“…And this is not flying.”

“Oh, I see. Never before have I witnessed a creature capable of walking on air the way you do.”

That’s interesting. I mean, flight is not a very useful adaptation in the cramped tunnels that connect most Sthrenslian caves, but surely there are large, natural caves that have a bat-like equivalent? I’m no bat-biologist, but I’m pretty sure bats are super important to cave biomes because they go and gather nutrients from outside the cave, then bring those nutrients back and shit some of it out. Otherwise, since caves don’t get sunlight, they wouldn’t have any energy entering their system. Something has to supply it to them. …I guess whatever it is just doesn’t fly? That’s reasonable enough, assuming there is a large enough replenishing food source close to natural cave mouths on this planet. Either that or Sthrenslians just don’t go to natural cave openings.

Well, whatever the case, the food is then distributed among the gathered Sthrenslians. I notice that it isn’t being cooked; I’m immune to food poisoning, at least so far as I know, but I don’t believe Sthrenslians are that lucky. Again, though, I have literally never seen them use fire, and I have heard the True People refer to fire as something satanic in a very different manner to the ‘hell just has a lot of it’ way I’m used to seeing from Christian iconography. I need to figure out a way to discreetly ask questions that I think might be blasphemous, and I need to figure it out fast.

Speaking of blasphemy, things could be worse with the True People, but I wouldn’t call them great. Hsthressis and I are both in separate rooms and under guard. Sthrenslian prisons, if that’s what this is, are kind of funny in that they don’t have doors or bars or any sort of cell that could actually keep anybody contained. Instead, they just have us under constant guard. And you know what? That actually makes sense. Literally every Sthrenslian comes equipped with everything they could ever need to dig a tunnel out of prison, because digging tunnels is kind of their entire thing. You would have to guard all the Sthrenslian prisoners anyway, why waste time building a door?

…That or they just don’t know how to make doors, because I’m not sure I’ve seen one. Either way, I’m going to take the fact that I’m in prison as maybe not the best sign.

“Hey,” I greet the guards. “So, any idea how long I might be stuck here?”

“Silence, demon,” one of them grunts.

Yeah, that’s definitely not a good sign. Oh well, if this makes them feel better then that’s fine by me. Hsthressis, however, is more than a little pissed off by this. The way she responds to it catches me by surprise, though.

“Hey,” Hsthressis thinks to herself in what I can only describe as an attention-grabbing manner. “Evelyn. When you said you hear me, is this part of what you meant? You’d better tell me if so.”

Well, fuck. She figured it out. But it’s only fair that I give her an honest answer.

Yes, I cause her to believe she hears in response. Sorry.

“Shit, this is creepy,” she thinks back at me. She also thinks a lot of other things, but I try my best to ignore them. “So we can still do the mental communication thing that I did back before I even had a body? That was part of the soul-link thing?”

That’s a good enough explanation, I guess, I confirm.

“Why do you always do that?” she asks. “You give like these half answers that kind of mean yes but mostly don’t?”

Uh, sorry. I tell her. I just like being very exact in how I speak and explain things? And most of the time you’re using analogies that are adjacent enough to correct to be helpful, but they are not… denotatively accurate, I guess. We have a BIG culture gap, and I forget that you just don’t know the same stuff that I know a lot of the time. We have a lot of words that explain concepts which don’t exist in your language because you just… haven’t had the requisite philosophical or exploratory revolutions to codify them, I guess? So I sort of talk myself into corners where I want to give a more detailed answer but I would just be trying to explain something that makes no sense using something else that makes no sense, so I give up and just allow the partial understanding. But I don’t want to make the claim that your partial understanding is a complete one, so I say stuff like that.

“Okay you’re going to have to start over there because literally none of that made sense,” Hsthressis thinks at me.

I sigh physically, and also send her the impression of a sigh.

Sorry. Basically, when I answer like that I’m saying ‘that’s wrong, but it’s close enough.’

“There you go, that made sense. Close enough is fine by me.”

I grumble at that, as the very idea of it offends me. Exactness matters, clarity of language matters! But I am in a situation where I would need to give Hsthressis years of schooling to get her to understand what I’m saying, and I get the distinct impression she would not at all be interested, and also that half of it would be blasphemy.

You are less concerned about the mind reading thing than I was afraid of, I comment, changing the subject.

“Oh no, don’t get me wrong, this is freaky as fuck,” Hsthressis says. “I’m just bored and have nothing else to do other than chat.”

Huh. You know what? Opportunity seen, opportunity seized.

Why don’t your people have any fire? I ask.

“Aaahahaha holy shit,” Hsthressis laughs, both mentally and out loud. “Okay, to anyone with any doubt that you are a demon, that question clears it. Starting a fire in the domain of Sss fucking kills everyone, Evelyn. Don’t even talk about it.”

What?

But there’s hardly anything flammable here, I point out. Fire safety would be the default, not the… hmm. Actually, how does ‘everyone die?’ Is it by being burned, or something else?

Hsthressis twists her tendrils into a smile.

“Nope, I guess you figured it out with whatever your fancy pants demon knowledge is. Nah, it’s obvious that touching fire hurts, but everybody dies without ever getting near it if you start one. It fills the air with poison that only demons can survive.”

…Okay, cool. So they don’t have fire because of a religious assumption. I hate every part of that!

Okay, well, there are so many things wrong about that, I grumble. For starters, there are toxic byproducts of fire but they absolutely kill demons as well. The problem you are running into is the fact that you don’t have enough air circulation down here. If you just dig a chimney shaft to the surface, all of the poison would leave through there and everyone would—

“Ha! ‘Dig a shaft to the surface.’ That would just let all the demons inside. We aren’t stupid.”

Hsthressis, you literally already have a path to the surface somewhere. If you didn’t, all of you would have already suffocated from natural respiration.

“Sure, whatever. Look, Evelyn, I’m interested in your fire god stuff, don’t get me wrong. Sss seems… lame? But I’m not suicidal. Dark immortality deals are a totally different thing from risking the death of my whole clan. I’m not THAT dumb. Besides, what would be in it for me?”

…Oh my god. Hsthressis is going full satanic bargain on me. This absolute edgelord. ‘Yeah, I know you’re a demon, but it’s cool. Let’s make deals!’

For the record, whatever you think I’m doing is not at all how it works, and if it somehow WAS it would be a terrible idea.

“Uh-huh. Whatever you say, demon!”

I send her a general feeling of indignance and then ignore her after that, my many above-ground bodies scrambling to plan the food supply of every Sthrenslian that will need it. In short, I don’t really like my current setup. I feel like I would be cutting things very close, and I am already running out of sloths to hunt nearby. The conclusion is obvious. I need to expand.

I don’t want to expand, especially not when I’m still gathering enough of a food stockpile to grow my protective OMNIDOME. But I do need to get more food output, now. I have a good reason to. There are people who need my help, so that’s what I’ll do.

It’s getting late in the day, finally. I start making plans for tomorrow: use my new ESTOLs to protect the ETB squad as I attempt to explore the poisonous zone I got stonewalled at a while ago. At the same time, I need to think about the place that is most likely to contain large amounts of replenishable food. If this planet is anything like mine, that’s going to be the ocean. So my second order of business is going to be designing a fully aquatic body, which should be fun! I always wanted to be a mermaid when I was a kid.

Before I know it, night is falling. I once more assemble Fort Moosh to protect me as I drift off into sleep in a big cuddle pile of me. I’ve decided that it’s okay to use my brain-altering abilities to sleep better at night; I need sleep and there’s very little I hate more than being stuck awake in a panic spiral. Besides, it’s no different from using sleeping pills, which lots of normal people do.

After flooding all of my brains with sleeping chemicals, I only belatedly realize that I included Hsthressis in that number. Together, we all fade into slumber.

…

“And you really wear these all the time?” Tara presses, pulling and tugging on the outfit I lent her. “My goodness, it’s so itchy! How can you stand it?”

“Mm-hmm,” I confirm again. The two of us are riding the bear back bareback as Tara complains nonstop about the indignities of not being a nudist. Maybe I’m just hungry and tired, but it’s starting to grate a little.

“And they’re very loose around the waist, you know. Your pants keep slipping down and I have to hold them in place.”

“MMM-HMM,” I confirm more loudly.

“Tight around the chest, too. How do you wear this all the time? I can hardly breathe.”

I inhale deeply and let out a long-suffering sigh. It has been a long-ass day of stress and weirdness, and even I have a limit.

“Look. Tara. Can we stop talking about my clothes? I’m not proportioned like a supermodel, so you’re going to have to get your own if you want them to fit. Okay? Let’s talk about something else.”

Tara blinks her absurdly perfect blue eyes, tilting her head in a way that bug-her never would or could have.

“Okay, I suppose,” she allows. “Apologies. I’m just… new to all this, yes? Your species is very strange, very frail. Skin is so… sensitive. And your muscles are so weak!”

“Yeah, we pretty much specced all our evolution points into big brains and sweat,” I agree.

“Evolution… points? Is that a thing?”

“Not really, no.”

Tara continues to plod along as Tara and I sit in silence. This has been such a strange fucking day. My emotions have entirely overloaded at this point, leaving nothing but an all-encompassing exhaustion. What else is there left to say?

I bottle my urge for introspection temporarily—it’s a bad idea to do that in a bad mental state—instead forcing my mind to move towards interesting, inherently enjoyable topics. For example: what the fuck is Tara? She’s not some cute little bug, oh no. She’s not even a massive beautiful alien bug. She is a massive beautiful alien bug and a cute little bug and a bunch of tiny bugs and a bear and a fucking supermodel, and… a hive mind.

A goddamn hive mind. Wow. Tara said she wasn’t one before coming to Earth, but after only a couple months she has who knows how many bodies and a good chunk of them are perfect copies of Earth creatures. And the copies are too good, especially if this is Tara’s first human body like she’s implying. That’s absurd, isn’t it? If she was designing the bodies from scratch they should be falling hard into uncanny valley or outright absurdity, but thinking back there is no way the human body I just saw was an imitation. Same with this bear. She didn’t just copy appearance, she copied everything. Inside and out.

“Tara…” I manage to ask, “how did you make all this, anyway? The bear and stuff. Can you intake DNA samples to extrapolate whole creatures? Do you have some kind of scanning ability, or something?”

There are probably plenty of non-harmful ways to determine biology, especially in the light of crazy hive mind super-creatures and whatever unknown thing with likely-faster-than-light travel capabilities made her one.

“Not… exactly,” Tara admits, filling my belly with dread. “As best I can tell I have to, ah, absorb fresh biological material. I gain knowledge of biological function by deconstructing it, I suppose.”

She stays terrifyingly still while she says those words, as if not trusting herself to react. That, if anything, is the most frightening reaction she could have made. Fresh biological material. Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. This isn’t supposed to be a horror movie. Things were different. Tara is kind, Tara is funny. She cares about people, and she absolutely sees humans as people. So why?

Why is she eating them!?

My mind descends into a panicked loop. Tara has a human body. Tara learns about bodies by absorbing them. So Tara killed and ate a human. Right? Is there a more sensible conclusion than that to draw? Maybe she dug up a grave or found someone recently dead or something, but… still. It’s everything I have to not run screaming. The way Tara is reacting, the way she subtly joked about killing someone earlier today… it’s all passing through my head over and over. My best friend just openly admitted to being a murderer and a cannibal. I’m shaking. I want to throw up. Oh god, this is it. I didn’t pay enough attention, I was just trying to have fun with a hyper-intelligent advanced alien monster and now it’s too late. She’s spying on people, she has human bodies, she can be eating and replacing anyone in the world…!

No. Calm down. Calm down! Don’t make assumptions. Characters in the movies always lose their heads and jump to dumb conclusions and that’s when everything goes to shit. At those key moments, the whole audience knows what the hero should say, right? Dramatic irony. Everyone knows it’s all about communication. But every time, the hero fumbles it, gets mad, or fails to find the words, and everything falls apart. If even a single hint of what I’ve been trying to teach Tara about fiction means anything, I need to focus and ask.

“Tara,” I say, trying to pretend that there’s any chance she doesn’t notice my whole body shaking. “Sorry if this sounds like it’s, y’know, coming out of nowhere or something, I just… um. Did you kill someone?”

There it is. The question is out there. We skipped the stupid part of the movie that’s entirely uncomfortable dramatic irony. She can just say no, I’ll try to awkwardly laugh it off and not pretend this is an enormous failure of my trust in her, and we can go back to having fun times as illegal roommates. That’s how it should go. But when I see the look on her face when she turns to me, my heart drops like a stone through my stomach. I already know what she’s going to say.

“Yes,” she admits. “I did.”

32 Parallel Paths

I sit stock-still, not trusting myself to respond, to move, or to even breathe. Tara, similarly, stops plodding along in her bear body, the pair of us waiting alone in the wilderness as the sun starts to set.

Is this it? Is this where I die?

“I’m sorry,” Tara blurts out.

In my panic, my initial interpretation of that phrase is an advance apology for the fact that she’s about to eat me, but as my brain starts to kick in, I notice her hands clenched in her lap. I look at her face, drawn with an expression of intense pain, gazing downwards at her wet and muddy socks. I hadn’t thought to bring extra shoes, after all, and mine would probably be too small for her anyway. The way her eyes won’t meet mine, the way her jaw clenches… she’s not angry, she’s not intending to hurt me. She’s sad and scared and struggling.

This isn’t a monster. This is a frightened friend.

“I… I’m so sorry, Evelyn,” Tara repeats. “I should’ve told you sooner, I should’ve told you immediately. I was just afraid. Please don’t hate me.”

I take a deep breath.

“Tara…” I manage to answer. “What happened?”

“Promise you won’t hate me?” she pleads.

I open my mouth to accept the promise on reflex, but I stop.

“I can’t do that,” I say instead. “This is a really big deal, Tara. Killing is something I feel very strongly about. But I can promise that I will listen, and I promise that I will still care about you.”

The alien nods, her poofy, watering eyes all too human.

“Okay. Thank you, Evelyn,” she says, trying to turn her choked sobs into chuckles. “Goodness, this body just keeps trying to pour water out of my eyes. Why does your species cry?”

I shrug.

“According to Pixar, it’s to demonstrate to others that we need help.”

“Okay, I get that, but…” a real laugh manages to escape from the tears. “I also need to see. C-come here. I need to try to explain. Look out thataway.”

Scooting closer, I do as she asks, my gaze following a pointed finger to a small mountain peak in the distance.

“All this wilderness outside your city… it’s not a natural park. It’s privately owned by a single widow, living alone.”

Out in the distance, halfway up the mountain, I see it. A cabin in the woods. Well, not exactly; it’s far too nice of a house to call a simple cabin, with two sturdily-built stories and doubtlessly plenty of space inside. It must be quite the lonely house for anyone who lives by themselves. A small dirt road snakes down from it into the valley, winding and twisting in ways that would give me a heart attack to actually try to drive.

“When I first got here, Evelyn, I was terrified out of my mind,” Tara begins. “My body… I mean, the body you saw in that cave that looks like how I used to look, that’s not truly my original body either. It’s similar in shape, but larger, stronger, tougher. Many parts of the same, and it still looks like me, but it’s an… altered me. Too altered. It cannot be the body I had at home.

“Anyway, immediately I start to panic. I didn’t know what to do. I mean, I was alone and scared on an alien planet of all places. But I ended up finding a river, had something to drink, and then found a small crustacean that I believe is called a ‘crawdad.’ And some part of whatever I am now demanded that I eat it on the spot. Raw.”

She shudders, memories hitting her. Her hands clenched and unclench, the bear beneath me almost shrinking down on itself at the thought of it.

“It was horrifying, and I believe it is the single most pleasurable experience I have ever had in my life. I could. Not. Stop. I kept eating from there, each new creature filling me with ecstasy and knowledge. I don’t know what I am, Evelyn, but whatever it is can learn nearly everything about anything alive, just by digesting it. The fascinating beauty of your planet… oh, Evelyn, the way I see it now is literally indescribable. But to my shame, I got… swept away, for a time. I’m not a fool, I knew it was dangerous. Wrong. Downright evil, even. But after that first moment I just ate and ate and ate everything in sight before I eventually stopped.”

I swallow fearfully.

“What’s ‘eventually’ mean?” I ask softly.

Tara chuckles again, although this time it’s humorless.

“Oh, don’t worry. It was more than I would’ve liked, less than I feared might be the case. This isn’t yet the part of the story where… you know. There’s just a small clearing in the forest nearby where everything, every damn living thing is just… gone. I ate even the trees to nothing. It’s all gone. I’d rather not show you, to be honest. I hope no one ever sees it, it’s…”

She takes a deep breath.

“It’s terrifying, Evelyn. I feel insane.”

“We don’t have to go there,” I assure her. I can imagine what it’s like.

“Thank you, Evelyn,” Tara says, smiling softly. “So yes. Insanity, brief but unpleasant rampage, and then all of a sudden I started laying eggs. Now unlike you humans this is hardly the first time I’ve laid a clutch before, my people… hrm. Well, at the risk of oversharing we, ah, fertilize externally. But our eggs are nowhere near the… size of my first on this planet. Imagine my surprise, hmm?”

Yeah,” I allow. “I can see that being scary and awkward, for sure.”

“Oh, goodness yes. And then of course it hatched despite a lack of male involvement and suddenly I had two brains!”

“I’m guessing that was even weirder?” I ask.

“I would go so far as to claim you literally cannot imagine how weird it is, Evelyn. Even with your ridiculous imagination.”

“Yeah, that’s fair. So what happened next?”

“Well, I send my new body out into the wilderness to explore. What else was I to do with myself? And it stood to reason if I could live with one body and make more, perhaps I could still live with one body if I lost one. I was expecting to die a rather horrible death, in fact, when a strange alien making strange noises suddenly picked me up and started to feed me crickets.”

“This is strange alien sounds familiar,” I coyly prod.

“Yes, you’ve met her actually,” Tara confirms. “Although you don’t seem to like her very much, which hurts me to see. I think you’d love her if you just gave her a chance.”

…Ouch. My heart cracks, but I slap on a smile.

“Prodding my shriveled self-esteem is a technical foul, Tara! Tell your story!”

“I am. Anyway, this alien was obviously intelligent. She had crafted coverings, tools, and her sounds seemed to be language. Most importantly, she was kind. Thoughtful. Observant. I was worried for a moment when she put me in a cage, but it didn’t last. She showed her love even for unintelligent creatures, and took little time in realizing I was no unintelligent creature. There were no more cages from that point on. The moment she suspected, there was no patronizing, no mistreatment. I, a complete stranger and other unknown to her, was immediately treated as her equal and guest.”

A blush rises through my face, creeping all the way down to my shoulders as Tara’s complements refuse to stop.

“I immediately thought to myself, ‘what a wonderful planet I must be on, to be populated by a kind and caring species such as this.’” she continues, and it’s like a bucket of ice water. Shit, here it comes. “So naturally, I wanted to find other humans as soon as possible, but I’m… shy. Not in the same way you are, but still… there were a lot of humans around you but I felt more comfortable seeking out the small, lone structure on the hill. I thought I understood what that was. So that night I set out with my first body to the lovely little home on the hill. Maybe I would be feared, maybe I would be turned away, but your kindness gave me the will to try.”

She pauses, the night silent but for the loud breathing of the bear below us.

“…What happened?” I eventually ask.

“I walked right up to the door. I knocked. Then when she answered, her face went white and she shot me.”

Oh, god.

“She’s an old woman. Was an old woman. Maybe seventy or eighty? She had been carrying the gun from the moment she answered the door, but of course I had absolutely no idea what it was. Not until she raised it and nearly killed me. Instead the bullet pierced my shoulder, damaging my leg. She would’ve killed me if she had just hit me a foot to the right. I’d be dead. I never imagined such immediate, lethal violence would’ve been possible. No one outside the military would have had a weapon of that power on my planet, and they certainly would have never used it without warning. For all I know killing my original body would be the death of me, all of me. So of course I was terrified and I immediately turned to run… and then she shot me again.”

Tara is shaking at this point, her tears flowing once more.

“I tried to run away and she fucking shot me again! I had nowhere to run, I was too big to hide, and and just a moment of… of… fuck! I made my choice, that’s all. I could’ve made another one, but at the time it… it felt like the only choice to make. I had to. I had to, or I…”

She chokes, the words vanishing under them for a few seconds.

“Dammit! W-why does your body do this?” She rubs at her face, trying to scrub it dry. “I can’t even… your brain just…!”

Sobs roll out of her, completely cutting off anything else she might be trying to say. I sit next to her in silence, not knowing what to do to comfort her. Do six-land giant bug people hug? Do they hug if they are in human bodies? I don’t know. But I remember Tara comforting me by grasping my finger, so the least I can manage is to reach out and hold her hand. It’s awkward, it’s difficult. Touching another human is very different from touching a cute little bug. I think it’s the right thing to do here. I clasp her fingers tightly, and she squeezes me back, her other hand occupying itself with drying the ever-replenishing tears falling from her face.

Five minutes later, her sobbing finally starts to abate. The sun set a little while ago, which would normally be a problematic issue for someone as far away from home as I am. Ironically, I suppose, it’s much less problematic for the person so much further from her own. So I’m not worried. Tara will know where to go, so I sit in silence, watching the stars with her.

“Your autonomic processes are ridiculous,” Tara eventually complains, her voice a bit scratchy. “I can’t believe I went all-in on the authentic human experience.”

“Hey, don’t blame me,” I retort. “I didn’t make the body. Remove the tear ducts if you don’t like them.”

She laughs. For whatever reason, she still makes that horrible, shrill screeching, even in her human body. It’s excruciatingly terrible. I love it.

“I could, I suppose,” she admits. “And I think… I think I could have flooded myself with endorphins, too, wiping away the sadness like it was nothing. Don’t ever let me do that, though. I should feel horrible at a memory like that. It assures me I’m still sane.”

I squeeze her hand again.

“So…” I awkwardly breech. “You’re saying it was self-defense. Right?”

“It was definitely self-defense,” Tara agrees. “I don’t… I don’t know if it would be legally. But I was attacked first. She wanted me dead. I would never kill someone for less. Never, ever, ever.”

I nod. It still makes me a little sick, but I understand. This world can be terrible.

“I forgive you,” I tell her. “I don’t hate you, Tara.”

Immediately, I see her tears threaten to flow again… but for the opposite reason. The alien girl leans over, burying her face into my shoulder and wrapping her arms around me. It turns out six-limbed giant bug people hug after all. They give very good hugs indeed.

“Thank you, Evelyn,” Tara whispers. “Thank you so much, for everything.”

…

I wake up the next morning with tears in my many eyes. Oh, Tara. Beautiful and wonderful Tara. I… I wish I could remember what happened next.

“Point of order,” Hsthressis thinks at me, her whole body stiff. “What the fuck was that?”

33 Reflections

Hsthressis’ words jolt me instantly from blearily soaking in the melancholy of the dream to wide-awake panic. All of my bodies leap to my feet, my mind racing with questions and terror. Did she just see all of that? Why? What should I do? I didn’t mean for her to—

“Aaah, stop it! Evelyn, stop it stop it what are you doing!?”

Oh fuck. I’m moving Hsthressis’ body too.

Sorry! God, I’m so sorry! I’m stopping, I’m stopping, it’s yours.

I allow Hsthressis to use the body I gave her once more, and I experience a brief feeling of disorientation as something else starts controlling me… but then I realize how fucked up and backwards that is and get my brain back on track. That’s Hsthressis. She’s not me. She’s not me. She’s. Not. Me!

“What the fuck was that?” Hsthressis demands. “What the fuck was any of that!? Sss’ whiskers, you… I was you! But it wasn’t you, it was some other you with someone that’s… that’s like you? And everything was so narrow! Is that how you see the world? With things in the way and all that… that… agh! What did you DO to me!?”

Okay, so I apparently just shared intimate emotional memories with an alien teenager, but you know that’s probably not at all as big a deal as the extreme violation of personal agency I imposed on her so I’m just going to ignore that for now. And by ‘ignore’ I mean ‘set the EE brain to think about it, because that body is capable of both crying and hugging Mr. Mooshi and is therefore the optimal pick.’

I’m so sorry, Hsthressis, I didn’t intend for any of that. I will try to figure out a way to make sure that never happens again, okay?

“Wait, wait, hold on a second, you can’t just not explain! With the crazy world and all those thoughts in my head and another thing like you? And you look at the world by… wait, that was the surface, that was what the surface is like! Why was it so beautiful?”

Oh no.

Hsthressis I really appreciate that but it would probably be helpful to us both if we kept blasphemy to a minimum.

“That’s what you meant. Oh my god I understand so much more of what you were talking about… it’s like… no. Fuck fuck fuck! I’m going insane! I have to be, I… the things you showed me aren’t… there aren’t even words! You can hear but you don’t hear really. You have something else and it only goes in one direction but it never gets blurry. And you have all that… that… agh! I used to know these things! I was you and I knew everything and now I—”

Hsthressis, you’re not going insane, I assure her, trying to figure out how to unobtrusively check the integrity of her simulation to actually confirm that. I’m so sorry for accidentally giving you my memories like that. It’s pretty embarrassing, if I’m going to be honest. But I promise, it makes perfect sense for all of that to be confusing. It sounds like you believed you were me during the dream…?

Hsthressis is barely listening to me, however, wrapped up in the aftermath of being something truly alien to her. Not even I’m totally sure what that’s like; I’ve purposefully avoided immersing myself in Hsthressis’ memories, after all.

“This is why you talk gibberish so much, isn’t it? You aren’t. We’re the ones that… that… nnngh. It made sense. It all made sense when I was you. What are you, really? You’re more than a demon. You have to be. It was like… like the whole universe had its secrets peeled apart. You knew what we were experiencing, you knew what makes things fall towards Sss, what fire is made of, how to heal the sick, how to know how far something is without ever even being there. And I did too but now I’m just… me again. Agh!”

I can only imagine what it must be like to suddenly have unfathomable knowledge about things beyond my realm of experience slammed into my head, comprehended, and then yanked out again. I mean, I guess I’ve experienced two out of those three steps, but it’s the forgetting stuff that’s apparently really fucking her up.

It would be quite easy to just insert that knowledge directly into her memory, but I feel like that’s more than a little prone to problems. Which leaves just one alternative.

I can teach you that stuff, I tell her. It’s difficult and it will probably challenge a lot of what you already think is true, but it’s not like magic, unknowable knowledge or anything. It’s just normal information about the world that you can see for yourself. Um, so to speak.

“I want to see it. Actually see it, I mean. That was so… so… agh. I don’t understand how you can think of yourself as anything other than a goddess. I don’t know if you’re good or evil, but you have to be divine.”

I don’t believe divinity exists at all, I admit. I’m a person, same as you. Just… well, a lot more biologically and culturally advanced, I guess.

“Then I shudder to think of the kind of being you would consider a god.”

Like I said, I don’t think there is one. If there is… I don’t think I would be a fan of them.

“Excuse me, Evelyn of Clan Evelyn?” a voice asks me in a small cave far from the True People prison. “Are you all right?”

All the way over at Resident Gems cave, my nine ETE bodies are of course awake along with the rest of me. I was kindly offered a small room to sleep in, although the Sthrenslians seemed very confused at the concept of my entire ‘clan’ sleeping at the same time. I suppose without a day/night cycle, it’s just inefficient, but I’m worried that if all of my bodies do not sleep simultaneously, I won’t get proper benefits of rest. Sleep is very important not just because of the physiological requirement, but because it’s a psychological reset. It forcibly cuts off thought and refreshes my mind all at once, which to me is essential for making sure I don’t stay in any particular downward spiral for too long. When everything is overwhelming, when depression hits hardest, all I can really do is endure the day and hope for a better tomorrow. Without that… well, for obvious reasons I figure I need every bit of mental health that I can get.

Of course, with the whole Hsthressis situation I’ve devoted all of my ETE bodies to assist with mental processing. So for the entire conversation so far they have been standing stock-still, doing absolutely nothing other than breathing. Then, at the sound of my name I instinctively turn to look at the source of the noise… with all of my heads simultaneously.

The Sthrenslian takes a defensive step back, their body tensing. Oops. I make a point to relax all my bodies, have them all start stretching in different ways while I randomly pick one of them to speak.

“Oh, sorry!” I apologize quickly. “Yes, I’m okay! How can I help you?”

The Sthrenslian relaxes, but only a little.

“Well, ah… I actually intended to be of assistance to you,” they say carefully. “My name is Priestess Saslitak. I’ve, ah, volunteered to show you around, Evelyn of Clan Evelyn.”

Well, at least I know ‘priestess’ means she’s probably female. At her words, though, I wince, awkwardly scratching my cheek.

“Er, just Evelyn is fine,” I insist. “Please.”

The less said about my embarrassing choice of clan names, the better.

“I… oh! Well that’s… erm,” the priestess stutters awkwardly. “If… if you insist, I suppose I would be happy to! Thank you for the honor.”

I blink. What? Oh, right, titles and stuff are important to them.

“Sorry, I think there might have been a miscommunication here,” I admit awkwardly. “Dropping titles is a much more casual thing where I’m from. Being called ‘Evelyn of Clan Evelyn’ is more embarrassing than expected.”

“Oh! I see,” Saslitak wiggles agreeably. “I understand. Thank you for clarifying. Now, do you need to finish, ah, whatever it is you were doing with your clanmates here? Again, I apologize for bothering you.”

“No, no it’s fine,” I assure her. “I was… I mean, we were pretty much done. Thank you. Do you want us all to follow you, or…?”

“Oh, please don’t let me keep you from anything you need to do,” Priestess Saslitak insists. “But if it’s not too rude, I was wondering if I could be introduced to the other wonderful members of your clan…?”

Oh no. Am I going to have to think of a unique name for every individual body and then remember it and not accidentally mix them up? Is that going to be a thing I’m even remotely capable of?

…Yeah, not a chance. Fuck it.

“I’m Evelyn,” I say with one of my other bodies. “And this is Evelyn, Evelyn, Evelyn, Evelyn, Evelyn, Evelyn, and Evelyn. It’s great to meet you, Saslitak. I mean, uh, Priestess Saslitak. Sorry.”

If the priestess is offended by my faux pas, she doesn’t show it. The unsung advantages of being confusing as hell, I guess.

“Er, I’m very very sorry, but I couldn’t tell the difference between any of those names…?”

“Oh, that’s okay,” I say magnanimously. “Don’t worry, we’ll figure it out. It’ll be like a Marklar thing.”

“Er, a what…?” she asks.

I walk up to her and give my best smile… which means I’m careful not to show my teeth. Now that I’m not being actively wracked with guilt for murdering someone this particular Sthrenslian knows, I allow myself some time to acknowledge that before me stands an adorable talking bug person! Like holy shit Sthrenslians are so cute!

“Like I said, don’t worry about it,” I tell her. “I’d love to get the tour of this place! Oh, and I should have some more meat coming in a couple hours, as well. Oh, er, that’s a unit of time, sorry. Approximately equal to the amount of time it takes to say ‘one Mississippi’ twenty-four thousand four hundred… wait what? I mean three-thousand six-hundred… no, wait. How the… it is twenty-four… oh! That’s weird. You guys use senary. Wow, that’s going to be a pain.”

“Er… pardon me?” Saslitak says, half confused and half nervous.

“Oh, no no, it’s fine! You guys are fine. It’s just that I’m surprised you guys have such a mathematically noteworthy counting system when you don’t like… have mathematics, really. See, base six is really cool because six is divisible by both three and two which is handy for… I dunno, things probably. Math is neat but I’m not into the theory much. Anyway, you don’t even really like… have a formalized concept of what division is. So why do you count in multiples of six?”

“Oh! Good question!” Saslitak answers happily. “I mean, I didn’t understand most of that, but we count up to six because we have six whiskers and six limbs. It just makes it easier to remember, you know?”

Okay, that’s fair. That’s all humans really did to decide stuff, as far as I know.

“Don’t you have eight limbs though?” I ask. “Four legs, two claws, two tendrils?”

“Tendrils are tendrils, not limbs,” Saslitak says firmly.

Well, okay then. Mystery solved I guess?

“Evelyn, hey, I need to talk to my mom about this,” Hsthressis suddenly sends me, still sounding like she’s in a mild panic.

Er, about what?

“About everything. About what I remember. About what you know! Talrissark really wants to fight you still, I think. But we can’t let him do that, or… or… I don’t know! We have to know what you know. I have to know what you know!”

Okay, okay, calm down Hsthressis. I’ll happily teach you what I know.

“You need to teach me how to see again!”

What?

“Please! Please, you have to teach me how to see!”

“Anyway, shall I begin showing you around?” Saslitak asks pleasantly. “I of course won’t be able to show you our Homewyrm, but other than that the tunnels are yours to explore.”

Woah, okay. That’s an interesting word. ‘Homewyrm’ isn’t exactly what Saslitak called it, but it’s a portmanteau of the Sthrenslian words for “home” and some kind of massive, legendary, serpentine animal from their own mythology. So… Homewyrm. That’s a good enough English equivalent for my brain.

I also note that whatever it is I’m not allowed to see it, and it’s apparently such common knowledge that I’m not allowed to see it she didn’t even think to elaborate on the matter to a literal alien. In other words, it’s setting my conversational ‘danger: do not touch’ signal off. And like, hell, if I’m picking up a social cue it’s gotta be a pretty big deal. …Or I’m just being paranoid and completely off-base. One or the other, I suppose.

“Well, uh, I don’t really have an itinerary in mind,” I manage to say. “So… take me wherever you want, I guess! The only place that I can think of as something I really want to check on is your healer. I’d like to know if that guy I rescued is doing okay!”

“Of course, of course! We can see Healer Katrs right now, if you like!”

“That sounds wonderful!” I agree. “Should I, uh… I mean, should we all come, or is it okay if we look around on our own a bit?”

“Oh, um, yes, if only one of you wants to come that’s okay!” Saslitak agrees. “The Homewyrm tunnel is guarded, so you don’t need to worry about stumbling in on accident.”

“…Er, how convenient!” I thank her, then start spreading myself around the cave as she leads me back to the healer’s alcove.

Thanks to the wacky world of echolocation, I can sense the inside of the hut long before I can see it. Healer Katrs is there, along with the apparently-still-alive Warrior Katrk, though the latter is still in a bad way. He’s lying in a little divot on the floor, covered in what I can only assume are poultices of some sort.

“Greetings, Katrs!” Saslitak chirps happily, startling me so hard I nearly zip up to the ceiling.

I’m still not used to Sthrenslians talking to each other long before they have line of sight! It’s just so weird! Also weird is the fact that Saslitak just called this dude ‘Katrs’ instead of his full name, ‘Healer Katrs.’ I wonder what that means. Family? Friend? Superior? Inferior? Or is she just as socially helpless as I am?

“Greetings, Priestess Saslitak,” Katrs grunts back, seeming rather grumpy. “What brings you here?”

“I’d like to know the status of our fallen warrior, if you please!” Saslitak tells him.

“Oh. Him. He’ll die.”

My bodies go stiff. All of them.

“What?” I demand. “No, we… we’ve got to save him. What’s the problem?”

The healer snorts.

“His wounds are diseased, and I’m out of popmold. He’s a goner.”

Unconsciously, I buzz my wings and lift off the ground, rising upwards. I have to move, I have to do something. I can’t let this person die. I won’t.

“Where can I get more popmold?”

The healer, unlike most everyone else in the cavern, doesn’t seem affected by my sudden intensity.

“If I knew the answer to that, I wouldn’t be out of it,” he grunts. “Sometimes it grows in the mushroom fields. Usually it doesn’t. Without it, the disease will—”

“Yes, I got it,” I snap. “You need a general antibiotic, fine. Describe it to me.”

As he starts doing exactly that, Hsthressis starts bothering the guards to send a message to her mother, one that will no doubt end up as another crisis on my ass. But the thing I’ve come to learn about Acidsucks is that it is never quite content leaving me with such basic crises. So I can hardly even say I’m surprised when, back on the surface, a massive monster with a mouth bigger than a Mooshian suddenly stomps out of the forest and turns towards the huge pile of meat and Evelyn eggs at the center of Fort Moosh.

I sigh twelve times over. What a typical start to the day.

34 Triple Trouble

The massive monster with designs on my meat pile looks unfortunately familiar. It walks on two thick, powerful legs, ending in wicked claws. It has no head, only a mouth that stretches most of its upper body length, big enough to swallow any of my bodies whole. Four limbs ending in barbed spikes surround the circumference of the mouth, ready to impale a target and feed it into the beast’s awaiting gullet. It looks to be a few feet over EE’s eight in height, which is more than big enough to crush any of my bodies. This thing’s face-grabber limbs kind of remind me of the Reaper Leviathan from Subnautica, so one of my brains decides to name it the reaper maw instead of responding to panic in an appropriate or helpful way. The reaper maw is the same species as the monster I saw caught in that giant scary wire-trap mega-antlion thing, but this one is a lot less injured, a lot less trapped, and seemingly just as angry. Growling, it makes its way slowly towards my pile of dead sloths and fish.

Not to mention the Mooshians. I refuse to let anything happen to my beautiful protectors. I start to expel pheromones of danger and panic, trying to encourage the little friends to scuttle away, but instead of fleeing they all clonk down into their shells and become completely motionless. Somehow I doubt that will help, considering this thing’s grabby face parts seem perfectly capable of lifting up a Mooshian and swallowing it whole.

“Come on, Mr. Mooshi!” I plead, running over to him with EE as the monster stalks closer to us. I shove and tug at him, but he is a whole lot of Moosh. I can barely lift him, and I certainly can’t carry him and any of the other Mooshians at the same time. Further use of pheromones can’t encourage him to move, either. He’s too scared.

The hungry animal roars threateningly at me as it continues to plod closer, likely trying to get me to give up my hoard without a fight. But with the Mooshians here, that’s a no-go. Besides, those rippling leg muscles look delicious.

I have Evelyn Experimental, both Evelyn Borks, and a handful of Evelyn Tinkerbells here in this clearing. OMNIDOME is yet to sprout, and my ESTOL bodies don’t feel ready to hatch yet. So I have eggs to defend on top of everything else.

Fine. Fighting it is.

“My name is Evelyn Montgomery!” I shout loudly at it in Sthrenslian. “This is mine! I won’t let you hurt anything here! I don’t want to hurt anyone, so if you’re smart, please let me know or leave! If you don’t… I’ll eat you! So I’ll say it again: my name is Evelyn!”

“Evelyn, is it?” Healer Katrs drawls at me in that arrogant tone of an expert annoyed with a layperson. “Popmold is spongy, thick, and wet. You won’t find it, however. I’ve had people scouring nearby caves for it for days.”

While my adrenaline pumps in my bodies above ground due to an impending monster fight, the ones below ground are freaking out over Warrior Katrk dying due to a medicine shortage. One that I’m going to fix.

“And you’re completely, entirely out?” I press. “I just need a single intact sample and I can make you as much popmold as you could ever need.”

“I’m completely out,” Katrs grunts. “And I wouldn’t give you any regardless. You can’t farm popmold.”

“Don’t tell me what I can’t do,” I bite back, all my other underground bodies breaking off from other tasks and conversations to start searching immediately. “You have no idea what I am.”

“Then why can’t you let me see again!?” Hsthressis whines. “You can’t just show me that and then take it away forever!”

We need to have this talk later, Hsthressis, I insist. I’m currently fighting a massive demon. Also, do you know what popmold is?

“Popmold? Evelyn, come on! Don’t change the subject. I—”

TELL ME.

Immediately, I retrieve my memories of popmold, understand how it feels to echolocation, gain a smattering of information on where it grows, and intuitively understand where the True People store their medicine. I’m aware they likely have a stockpile.

“…Wh-what was that?”

Shit, I hiss. Sorry. Someone’s dying and I need that mold now.

“That stuff is precious. You’re not—”

Fuck it. I don’t have time for a better plan.

If you convince your mom to feed me some popmold, I’ll grow that body some eyes. Afterwards, I’ll give her all the popmold she could ever want.

The reaper maw continues to stalk closer, ignoring my attempts to communicate both verbally and through writing. It’s cautious, likely because it doesn’t know what I am and because it’s used to fighting slightly smaller prey, but it must be either tempted enough by my stockpile or hungry enough to be desperate, because it refuses to back off. So be it. I flood my muscles with all the right chemicals, letting fire burn in my limbs.

Shrieking out a furious roar, I charge right at it, Evelyn Experimental dashing head-on while each Bork body moves to flank it. Startled, the creature has to spend a few precious seconds deciding whether to flee or meet my charge, leaving it slightly off-balance when our attacks meet. It stabs forward with its terrifying, barbed limbs and I duck underneath, tackling it around the waist. The tentacles on my back shoot up to grab and hold the limbs trying to stab me while my Borks rush in from behind to bite into its ankle. My teeth sink deep, injecting the wound with acid as the monster roars in pain. Next thing I know there’s a brutal crunching noise in my face and I’m watching myself get sent flying by a powerful kick.

That hurt like hell, but the blood was delicious. I roll to a stop along the river shoreline, my own blood leaking from EB2’s shattered nose. My cute doggy snout has seen better days. Meanwhile, EE starts losing the wrestling match with the far larger and stronger reaper maw, despite its damaged leg. Acid hisses within the wound, but the reaper maw has phenomenally thick skin. I want its skin. I grit my teeth, ignoring the pain as my tendrils slip and hooked limbs stab into my back. My undamaged Bork body moves in for another bite.

Then two additional yet much smaller reaper maws jump out of the trees towards my injured Bork.

“Damn it,” I mutter. “What is with this planet and making me kill children?”

“P-pardon me?” Priestess Saslitak stutters.

Oh, whoops, I didn’t mean to say that out loud.

“It’s… sorry,” I mutter. “Out of context. Anyway, I’m in contact with another clan. I’m going to try to barter for popmold. Katrs, how long does Katrk have left?”

Saslitak goes stiff, but the healer just barks out an answer, for some reason suddenly a lot more compliant.

“Without medicine?” He grunts. “Five cycles, at most. I’m doing all I can to prolong that, but—”

I don’t bother to ask, my panicked brain instinctively querying Hsthressis’ memories for the length of a cycle and getting an intuitive answer. It’s a very vague time frame, but it’s about eight hours. So Warrior Katrk has only a day and a half to live?

“Er…” Saslitak butts in politely. “When you say another clan, could I ask…?”

“They call themselves the ‘True People,’” I answer. “You know them?”

The tension all around the cave suddenly becomes thick enough to cut. There’s rage in the air. I can smell it.

“They… killed most of us and drove us from our home,” Saslitak answers softly. “We are at war.”

God damnit.

“I guess I won’t mention you, then,” I groan.

“So she won’t say why?” Chieftain Chlrehistra grumbles. “Hsthressis, popmold is extremely valuable. We cannot just give it away to a possible demon.”

“Mom, she’s not a demon,” Hsthressis insists. “She’s something way, way more than that. It’s like… agh. I don’t know how to explain it, mom, but she’s not crazy. Not like she sounds. It all means something, everything she says. And she… she can multiply it! She can make more popmold! As much as we need!”

“We have no reason to believe that’s true,” Chlrehistra grunts.

“It is!” Hsthressis insists. “I remember it, that’s something she can do. She showed me, I… agh. But I promise, we’ll be able to use as much as we need!”

Chlrehistra squirms with irritation and worry, seemingly thinking about the implications of that.

“…That would certainly be a boon,” Chlrehistra agrees. “But even if her copied popmold isn’t just a cruel way to deliver surface-curse, which it very well may be, there’s still a problem. If she supplies us all the popmold we need, if she allows us to use it liberally and freely, we will start to rely on her for its production. Even if she is as sane and clever as you say, daughter… no, especially then, we must be cautious. There are ways beyond war to crush a people.”

Agh, this paranoid bitch! I’m not attempting a damn economic takeover, I just need medicine! But she’s obviously not interested in sharing out of the goodness of her heart… shit!

When the young reaper maws enter the fray, the mommy stops trying to eat Evelyn Experimental and instead tosses me into a tree, moving back to support her babies. I nip at her injured leg, but fail to bite any deeper than my first chomp. Meanwhile, my injured Bork is beset by two smaller reapers, and with what I’m fairly certain is a serious concussion I wobble around, trying to escape them. I let a handful of Tinkerbells above ground go limp, rerouting their brainpower to the injured Bork just in time to avoid getting my back leg bitten off.

Each ‘baby’ reaper maw is as big as one of my Borks, and I am justifiably terrified of each of them. All of a sudden I lack the numbers advantage and the strength advantage. If I want to take these things out I’ll need a plan.

Okay. Tactics. This is a boss fight. We’ve got the big bad and two minions; game logic says gank the summoned minions ASAP. Focus the squishies! I shoot up into the sky, using a Tinkerbell to scout the fight from overhead and imagine myself as units in a Starcraft skirmish. I may suck at strategy games, but you can’t really get more noob than straight-up non-sapient. They’re going to fight what’s in front of them and flee from anything too dangerous… hopefully.

I dance away from my aggressive prey with my injured Bork, leading the two babies to where I can surround them as I send two Tinkerbells at the adult to attack its eyes. RPG bosses without status resistance? Easy! I dive-bomb it from above, punching and biting at its bulbous black sight-organs. It shrieks in pain, headbutting a tree to try and kill me, but I manage to flit away just in time and resume the attack.

This gives me enough time to send both Borks and EE to attack the babies. I feint an opening with my most injured body and then lash out with the tongue of my uninjured Bork, wrapping up the legs of a baby reaper and knocking it over before I punt it as hard as I can with EE. I don’t send it flying; my Bork holds it in place so the impact rings hard, crushing bones. The monster goes limp, and while I don’t know if it’s unconscious or dead either is good with me for now. At the brutal display, the other baby starts to back off, keeping significant distance from me as it tries to return to its mother’s side.

“Sorry, buddy,” I mutter. “I have to Bambi you.”

I use a Bork tongue to lash each ankle of the momma reaper maw, yanking when it tries to move and tripping it. It lands on the ground with a crash as I run at it with Evelyn Experimental. The remaining baby works up its courage to try to save mom, but I let go of one ankle and intercept with a Bork, jaws closing down hard on its leg. I twist my head, feeling the bone snap as I pump acid into its veins. The baby shrieks, immediately sending mom into a terrified fury.

It’s too late, though. Hmm… how did Talrisark phrase it? ‘The big creatures always forget the justice of the fall?’

Footsteps heavy, EE runs up the monster’s tree-trunk legs and with a final burst of effort leaps as high as I can jump. The body I made on a whim may not be well-optimized. It may not be well-planned. But it’s big, it’s full of food, and it’s heavy. Both feet together, I stomp down hard on the giant monster’s back, shattering the beast’s spine and pushing a final scream out of its lungs.

The remaining child struggles and cries, but with a broken leg there’s little it can do. I don’t really want to kill it. Its widdle pedipalps are so cute and it’s just a baby…! Except, y’know, it isn’t really. It’s as big as I am and at least as hungry. There’s no way I can tame this thing like I did with Mr. Mooshi. It still hurts me a bit, now that adrenaline is fading, to clamp my jaws around what passes for its ‘head’ and crunch down. The poor thing doesn’t really deserve it.

Then, right when I kneel down and prepare to eat my kills, I feel the ESTOLs wake up, ready to hatch.

“…You stupid bodies,” I grumble. “I needed those acid cannons.”

The ESTOLs don’t have much in the way of limbs, and are inherently not very self-sufficient. I’m repurposing the ETBs as support units for the larger and heavier ESTOLs, but in the meantime I walk over with EE and have to punch all my eggs open from the outside, extracting my weird, fighter-jet-inspired goop-covered selves. Then I collapse, because I’m bleeding profusely. But it’ll probably be fine. Worst thing that happens is I die.

Anyway, I set my injured Bork to munch on the prizes. It’s as beautiful and unforgettable of a meal as I expected. Fear grips me as I eat the brain, but… it’s an animal. It’s only an animal. It has no name, no dreams, no culture, just instincts and habits. Thank fuck. I stop thinking and let myself enjoy it properly.

The catching spines on its massive pedipalps are similar to a fishhook in structure, which explains the profuse bleeding on EE’s back. Getting tossed really ripped open my insides. I was also spot-on when I assumed these things might eat Mooshians whole: the stomach is nearly as tough on the inside as it is on the outside, clearly designed to crush and burn anything that gets caught inside with—you guessed it—acid. At least a stomach is a normal place to have acid, I guess.

What I really love about this body is the tough, flexible skin that offers far better protection than my current epidermis (chitin included) and the drastically more efficient muscular structure. I can use this to make my bodies a lot stronger, which I will need because there are apparently ten-foot-tall dinosaur monsters in the forest. This is just my life, I guess.

I flick a brief bit of attention to Hsthressis to confirm she hasn’t convinced her mother to give me lifesaving medicine or to come talk to me so I can try to convince her to give me lifesaving medicine. Likewise, my ETEs are scattering through every tunnel I can find in a desperate search for this mold stuff, but obviously I haven’t had any luck. But that can’t possibly be the only general antibiotic in the world, right? There has to be something else, and I have an easy way of finding it: I just need to put it in my mouth.

And so my instincts sing with delight as I decide to go to the highest-biodiversity biomes I can find and eat everything I see.

This is risky, stupid, and dangerous. But I don’t care. I cannot, will not let Warrior Katrk die. I refuse to allow another person’s life to pass when I could have saved it. This is about something far more important than my ephemeral ‘humanity.’

“Are you sure this is the decision you’ll regret the least?” Mr. Mooshi asks, finally peeking his head out from under his shell.

“Mr. Mooshi,” I greet him, exhausted and anemic. “You were worse than dead weight in that fight, you meanie.”

“D-don’t change the subject,” he chides.

“Mmm,” I groan. “Well, that’s an interesting way to phrase it. ‘The decision I’ll regret the least.’ No, I’m not sure. How could I be sure? I know more or less exactly how much I’ll regret letting him die. But how much or even if I’ll regret eating a planet? Who knows. It might be a different Evelyn that answers that question.”

“You’re afraid of losing yourself, then,” Mr. Mooshi says. “You’ve already made questionable decisions today, but I’d argue your panic has more of an impact on that than anything you’ve consumed.”

“It doesn’t matter. I’m doing it. I can’t let him die. If I can’t save anyone after the people I killed, I just… I don’t know what I’ll do. The idea of him dying is just too terrifying.”

Especially because, if he does die in front of me, I’ll feel morally obligated to eat him. And I still don’t know whether or not that’s a fate worse than death.

35 Efficiency

The ESTOLs are in the air. It’s time for Squad Evelyn’s next mission, and I dare any stupid bird monsters to try and stop them. I experiment with the acid cannons on a particularly unfortunate tree, and damn do these things melt shit. They also really hurt to use, and if I fire them too often it will disable them until I heal, but… I doubt that’ll be a huge deal. Sloth acid is brutal, and between six ESTOL bodies I have twelve acid cannons. Two of these ESTOLs will remain at Fort Moosh to defend, and the other four will join Squad Evelyn on recon and recovery.

In the meantime, I have an entire other body to design: a mobility-based aquatic hunter. I’m looking to get into the ocean as quickly as possible, and I figure the easiest way to do that is to follow the river downstream. I want a relatively large body that can hold enough energy storage to reliably travel very long distances through the water and lay a bunch of eggs at my destination. I could give it gills, but I only have fresh water fish stored in my memory so I’m worried about a salt water problem. I’ll stick with high-capacity lungs for now, and simply create improved bodies when I get the designs for them ready.

So. Design details. Hmm… I kind of want to be a mermaid. Four-year-old Evelyn would freak at being able to do that. It sounds fun, so why not?

The only concern I have with a mermaid is land mobility. The river is super deep right now, but that may not always be the case and I don’t want to get stuck on a shoal. So I have to make sure my cute fishy tail and arms are strong enough for at least mostly-efficient overland movement. Not super hard, just… something to keep in mind for the finalized design. This body also needs to be able to kill and eat things, because that’s sort of the point. Claws on the hands and powerful teeth are obvious, but I want something a bit punchier and longer-ranged. Tentacles are good, but I did just get reaper maw stabby-parts that would be ideal for spearing fish, so I may as well make myself a mini Subnautica leviathan. Now I just need to be able to roar loud enough to make someone pee their pants! …Hmm, that’s super doable. Sthrenslian tunnel whiskers are not at all optimized for underwater echolocation, though, so I’ll probably wait on that and just eat something that is. Surely something in the ocean can echolocate. In the meantime, I’ll stick to bioluminescence because it’s really pretty and cool.

Speaking of pretty, the final point—one I hesitate to even bring up—is related to my vanity. I want to be a mermaid because mermaids are cute. And I like being cute. It makes me feel less terrible about myself. But unfortunately, despite all the media to the contrary… I really need to not put boobs on the mermaid body. I’ve gone so far as to give tiny chitin chesticles to the ETEs for literally no reason other than my own amusement, but swimming at high speeds with big badonkadonks is my final straw. Big wobbly fat deposits are not hydrodynamic, and they also hurt like hell to be stretched and flopped around. Speed is important here, and that means flat is justice. I’ve gotta be smooth as hell, like a shark. Er, a shark from the meme about smooth sharks, anyway. What was I thinking about?

Oh, right! Mermaid body: finalized! Name: The Little Evelyn, or TLE for short! Engorging: commence!

EE is bleeding pretty badly, but I think that body will survive. Which is good, because I’ve figured out a trick for speeding up hatch rates that requires her. I want TLE to hatch full of energy and ready to go, which means I need whatever body that births her to be as big as possible and have as much spare energy to give her as possible. This should also allow me to develop more of the body in the womb rather than the egg, reducing overall time from conception to hatch. As long as I never think too much about how weird it is that I’m trying to mathematically optimize my own birth rate, this will probably be a strategy I employ and refine further for every new body here on out. The only downside is that it requires a food excess, but… I currently have one, and intend to keep one.

“Which is why I can trade you food, if you prefer,” I offer Chieftain Chlrehistra.

“Surface food,” she clarifies dismissively.

I sigh. I appreciate that she took some time to talk to me in prison, but holy shit she is difficult.

“Your people literally ate my corpse,” I remind her. “You can’t possibly have a taboo against consuming demon flesh.”

“Weren’t you insisting that you aren’t a demon?” Chlrehistra asks blandly.

*“Yes, of course! But you thought* I was a demon when you ate me, and you did it anyway! Therefore you eat demons!”

“Hmm,” Chlrehistra considers. “Well, you came across people that were clearly not demons, and you ate them anyway.”

I twitch in frustration.

“Yes, and that was the biggest mistake of my entire life, but I know you eat non-demons all the damn time. Other than the major fact that they were people, which I didn’t know, how could it possibly be an issue that I chose to eat one? Are you trying to gaslight me?”

“I don’t know what that means,” Chlrehistra answers. “But I’m trying to judge your ability to reason. My daughter insists you are not as mad as you appear, yet you seem to have infected her with madness in your place. It is not endearing me to you.”

I sigh. Right, that makes sense.

“I’m sorry,” I answer honestly. “I promise your daughter isn’t crazy. It’s just that the connection is going two ways. I told you I could see through her and pick up some of her memories. Well… the reverse happened. So she got a bunch of context on what sounds like random babbling without that context, and it was… a lot. She’s processing it. She should be fine once she does.”

“I rather dislike dealing with ‘should be,’ especially when it comes to my daughter’s health.”

I nod.

“I know. I’m sorry. But it would be a lie to give you any guarantees. This situation is as new to me as it is to you, Chieftain.”

She lets out an annoyed hiss, rubbing the front of her body with a tendril in what I interpret as an exasperated gesture.

“You mentioned that you believed you were going crazy, before,” she grumbles at me. “But now you’re sane?”

“I was going crazy from constant danger and isolation,” I clarify. “Neither is a problem for me anymore.”

She twists her body back and forth in affirmation.

“I see. Why do you want popmold so desperately?”

“Why would anyone desperately want medicine?” I ask. “I need to help someone sick.”

“And who would you like to help?”

I grit my teeth. I can’t very well say ‘someone you’re at war with,’ but any explicitly vague answer would more or less imply that whoever it is, I don’t think she’d want to help them.

“Right now, I want to help someone who got caught in a ghost trap,” I say honestly. “I found him there, struggling for his life, and barely managed to free him. But he’s badly burned and his wounds are infected. More than that, though, I want to be able to help anyone that needs help. That’s the right thing to do.”

Chlrehistra hums noncommittally, her whiskers twitching slightly.

“I cannot at this time give you what you ask in good conscience,” she answers. “Regardless of how noble the cause.”

I scowl at her, though I doubt she’ll understand the expression.

“…Fine,” I say. “Just know I’m already doing what I can to get popmold or an equivalent on my own. You don’t get to decide if I help this man, Chieftain. It’s going to happen, one way or another.”

“Then it sounds like you don’t need me,” Chlrehistra counters.

I am not, in general, an angry person. Rage struggles to burn in the great, all-consuming vacuum of depression, and I’m very used to looking at any problem and finding a way to determine that it’s my fault. If someone punched me in the face, I’d probably just apologize. But when it comes to a situation where someone else is the one suffering because of a dick move? That’s when I start to get a little ticked off.

“Chieftain Chlrehistra,” I say evenly. “I have to admit, I’ve always wondered about the meaning of your clan name. It pretty much means ‘chosen ones uniquely capable of receiving salvation,’ right? Do you believe that the people outside your clan aren’t worthy of being saved? Do they not also live their own lives, full of hopes and dreams and love, from birth to death, without ever visiting the surface? Are they not truly people too? Why kill them? Why wait around for them to die, without lifting a tendril to help?”

Chlrehistra taps the ground with a foot, considering her answer.

“You misunderstand the same thing as Talrissark,” she says eventually, “though you come at it from the opposite direction. Sss smiles on us, and he frowns on our foes. That is why we win wars, but it is not why we fight them. We fight because we must. War is a means, not an end, and it is gruesome but sometimes it must be done, and damn the other side. You ask why a Chieftain cares for her own people first? You may as well ask why roots grow and why worms dig. It is my purpose. A Chieftain fights for her clan, makes the world better for them. I would be a failure to do anything else.”

“It doesn’t have to be zero-sum,” I argue. “Everyone can benefit if you just cooperate with each other!”

Chlrehistra laughs.

“Ah, Evelyn, what wonderful creatures your kind must be if they so easily cooperate all the time.”

I clamp my mouth shut, still scowling but with nothing else to say. Chlrehistra smugly excuses herself, and I’m left to stew underground while up above Squad Evelyn makes it to the swamp.

Just like before, a slowly-rising veil of thin fog ascends from the ground at the intersection between swamp and forest. It’s a gradual change, the forest becoming more and more sparse until it’s all but completely dead in the area in front of the fog wall. Which is, y’know, understandable, because the fog is poisonous enough to kill me in a couple breaths.

This time, I’m not going to let that stop me. My guess here is that the airborne poison is kept away from the rest of the island by the air current in front of me that pushes it up into the atmosphere. I don’t know what the poison is, but what I do know is that there’s life on the other side of this fog despite said poison. It wouldn’t make sense for only the fog to be poisonous, it’s probably throughout the entire swamp. So all those living things inside? They must be immune.

But I still have to get in there. ETBs are small and can’t hold their breath for long at all, but that’s okay. I use the advanced eyesight of an ESTOL to spot some bugs flitting about just inside the poison zone, then zip forward to catch one with an ETB. The source of the beautiful colors are more obvious on this side of the fog. Yellow rocks, purple blooms of some kind of algae, and a smattering of beautiful flowers compliment the deep, near-black brown of the trees and vines growing above. There’s no time to appreciate it, however, as I’m in and out before I need to take a breath. After successfully retreating to fresh air, it’s time to eat.

Before my first bite, however, I take a shocked moment to realize I’m far more excited to eat this alien bug than I am to appreciate the fact that I have an alien bug here. It’s just not important anymore. Gone are the joys of exploring a forest and delighting in the presence of arthropodic friends. The bug is still cute, sure, but I barely even notice unless it’s a variant I haven’t consumed yet. I’m too busy fighting for survival, mine at first but now for Warrior Katrk. If I could have come to this planet in a more peaceful, more prepared way? It would have been immensely enjoyable. But all of that has been stripped away in the short time I’m here, replaced with panic and desperation. My hobby, the thing I love, has been broken.

I’m a very, very different kind of ‘weird bug girl’ now, and I don’t know if I can ever go back.

I take a deep, shuddering breath. There’s… no need to be dramatic. It’s still a cool alien bug, it’s still adorable. I just have important things to do, and not much time to do them. I can appreciate this world later, when people aren’t in as much immediate danger. With that reassurance bolstering me, I sink my teeth into the captured insect and learn.

…Except that I don’t. One consumption later, I fail to identify even a single organ in this bug that could filter, mitigate, or metabolize the poison in the air. They’re a bit more resistant than I am, and that’s nice, but it’s nowhere near enough to survive the concentration I inhaled. What the hell is going on? What am I missing? I start running mental simulations, running the poison through different parts of this alien arthropod and seeing the same result over and over again: death. Frustrated, I dive back into the swamp and retrieve a second sample, to identical results. Why is this happening? How could this thing not have any organ designed to… hmm. What if it’s not an organ?

I go a step lower, halting most of my bodies to run detailed simulations on the cellular level. It’s a crazy amount of work, as there are a fuckton of cells in a body and they’re much more difficult to intuitively understand. I cycle through them, over and over, until I finally find something that catches my interest.

“One of these cells is not like the other,” I sing happily. “One of these cells doesn’t belong…”

“Are you doing okay, Evelyn?” Mr. Mooshi asks.

“Yep, as well as can be expected!” I confirm. “Though I’m a little embarrassed I didn’t immediately think of symbiotic bacteria.”

And not just any symbiotic bacteria, but chemosynthetic symbiotic bacteria! They don’t just negate this poison, these things eat it! Yum yum, free energy! And the best part about this? I can just produce these things in my crazy super-womb and release them directly inside my body, and being monocellular they’re ready to go pretty much immediately. It’s only about ten minutes before I’ve created what I believe to be a stable internal flora system and sent my first ETB into the fog to take a deep breath.

Ugh, oh my fucking god it smells awful in here. Like rotten eggs and farts! The air kinda burns my throat, too, but other than that…? I keep breathing, monitoring my vitals. No headache, dizziness, nausea, shock, or apparent internal trauma. Nice! I send an ESTOL in to verify I have that body’s immunity working, to similar results.

The terrifying alien landscape of the swamp stretches before me. Bubbling pools, beautiful swaths of color, and off in the distance is of course that flickering, magical glow. I allow myself to be at least slightly excited. After all, this is somewhere no human has ever been. …Though I suppose, even when I’m done exploring, that will still be the case.

But that’s okay. I don’t have time to worry about that. Bugs are cool, I’m a bug, and I have another wonderful bug-person that I need to save. It’s time to let myself be what I’ve become.

It’s time to eat.

36 Discord Ping

It’s a little difficult focusing on classes nowadays.

The part of me raised as a nerdy teacher’s pet still screams in agony whenever I skip class, and lately that has been happening far too often. College is important, education is important. These are universal truths that have been drilled into me since the dawn of time, and I don’t believe in them any less just because I happen to have an illegal alien roommate in more ways than one.

However, I do indeed have an alien roommate, and that makes it really, really difficult to care about… gosh, what is she even talking about? Mesopotamia? Yeah, it’s really difficult to care about Mesopotamia. Especially when said alien roommate keeps distracting me every five seconds. Another red blip appears on the bottom of my computer’s taskbar, indicating I have yet another Discord message.

KidnappedCthulhu why does this building have twenty books on color theory but only one on interpersonal communication

EightFriendlyLegs Are you at the library? I promise you there is more than one book on communication.

While I have successfully commandeered my laptop back in order to take notes in class, it sort of completely backfired because I let Tara commandeer my phone. Then she figured out what messaging app I prefer and proceeded to bother me constantly.

KidnappedCthulhu there is only one copy of the book i wanted and it is checked out

KidnappedCthulhu i don’t want to read the books that say they are for dummies it is demeaning

KidnappedCthulhu meanwhile a single color theory book has twenty copies it is ridiculous

EightFriendlyLegs Yeah that does sound…

EightFriendlyLegs Wait.

EightFriendlyLegs Tara.

KidnappedCthulhu yes this is tara was that not clear

KidnappedCthulhu this is why i was against the screen name idea

EightFriendlyLegs No, it was clear. Tara, “Fifty Shades of Grey” is not a book about color theory.

KidnappedCthulhu oh

EightFriendlyLegs Please don’t read that.

KidnappedCthulhu ok

I quickly add the next few mental images to the “things to never think about again” bin and try to get back to struggling through class. I don’t know why I bother, Tara is probably taking better notes than I am considering that she is sitting in on… every curriculum in the school, I think? At the very least, I’ve spotted one of her camo bugs in every class I’ve attended, and she’s getting a lot better at hiding them. I certainly can’t fault her for trying to get an education, though it is starting to get a little creepy. Actually, that raises some good questions I’ve been meaning to ask… no, no wait. Class. Got to focus on class.

I successfully resist the urge to continue chatting with the coolest person alive for about five entire seconds, which honestly isn’t a bad record.

EightFriendlyLegs How do you handle having so many bodies at once? Isn’t it disorienting?

KidnappedCthulhu it is a very odd experience

KidnappedCthulhu in many ways it feels natural though i can find myself not even thinking about it sometimes

KidnappedCthulhu i do not know how to describe it to you but it is very liberating

EightFriendlyLegs Liberating?

KidnappedCthulhu hmm let me attempt to craft an allegory

KidnappedCthulhu i have noticed some people in your culture are born without legs

KidnappedCthulhu to an individual confined to a wheelchair there are many limitations to action

KidnappedCthulhu especially alone

KidnappedCthulhu they cannot operate most forms of motor vehicles for example

KidnappedCthulhu which drastically limits what they can do by themselves in a culture as widespread as yours

KidnappedCthulhu this is fine though

KidnappedCthulhu your people have taken great pains to ensure the most important elements of day-to-day life are accessible regardless of a person’s physical limitations

KidnappedCthulhu I like that

KidnappedCthulhu people can rely on others for the assistance they need which is wonderful

KidnappedCthulhu it is not perfect but i would argue you do a better job than my people at that

KidnappedCthulhu there are also a lot of things a handicapped person can do by themselves that is simply a bit harder than it is for others

KidnappedCthulhu they can still do these things alone but it takes more effort and time

KidnappedCthulhu imagine being that person for your entire life

KidnappedCthulhu and suddenly having legs

KidnappedCthulhu a world you never even dreamed about being able to access without significant help

KidnappedCthulhu suddenly it is all available to you

KidnappedCthulhu as well as far more than you ever dreamed about

KidnappedCthulhu things that were ridiculous for you to even consider are now not only possible but imminently achievable in a reasonable timeframe

KidnappedCthulhu multiply that fantasy by a hundred

KidnappedCthulhu that is what having multiple bodies is like

That… that sounds really cool, actually. Two bodies is twice as many things that I could do every day, and if I could make them however I wanted… yeah. That’s a pretty massive increase in freedom. How big, though? How many bodies does Tara really have?

EightFriendlyLegs Wow. Okay, I guess that makes sense.

EightFriendlyLegs That, uh, actually brings up a question I’ve been wondering for a while. I have to ask. How many bodies do you have now?

KidnappedCthulhu why do you have to ask

KidnappedCthulhu are you being coerced

EightFriendlyLegs What? No, it’s an expression! It means I’m anxious about asking but my curiosity is outweighing it.

KidnappedCthulhu ah yes your two driving motivations

EightFriendlyLegs Hey!

KidnappedCthulhu 226

EightFriendlyLegs Huh?

KidnappedCthulhu I currently have two hundred and twenty six bodies

EightFriendlyLegs That’s it?

KidnappedCthulhu what do you mean thats it

KidnappedCthulhu its 225 more bodies than you have

KidnappedCthulhu what basis are you using to judge this

EightFriendlyLegs Well, I just mean, I’m pretty sure you’ve made more than that? Like, just from the eggs your Blubie-body has laid in my room this week would be at least a hundred.

KidnappedCthulhu oh

KidnappedCthulhu yes i lay a lot of those because they die a lot

EightFriendlyLegs What??? Are you okay? What’s happening???

KidnappedCthulhu i am fine thank you

KidnappedCthulhu i am not being harmed

KidnappedCthulhu a few have been eaten by birds which was traumatizing but i am fairly good at avoiding them now

KidnappedCthulhu most of them starve to death

KidnappedCthulhu it is a design feature technically

EightFriendlyLegs A design feature???

KidnappedCthulhu yes i just typed that

KidnappedCthulhu it is not ideal but it is the best i can do

KidnappedCthulhu brains take a very large amount of energy

KidnappedCthulhu and they also take a large amount of space

KidnappedCthulhu i am just barely capable of creating a sensory and optical system sophisticated yet compact enough for my purposes

KidnappedCthulhu and designing a nervous structure that can interpret that data and hold some semblance of my consciousness in just as small of a space was an absurd amount of work

KidnappedCthulhu the energy requirements are almost nonstop

KidnappedCthulhu the bodies starve in a couple hours and preventing that would require me to hunt almost constantly

KidnappedCthulhu which rather defeats the point of a recon unit

KidnappedCthulhu so they starve

KidnappedCthulhu they get the energy they hatch with and then i eat the body with its replacement right after it dies

EightFriendlyLegs You self-cannibalize???

KidnappedCthulhu its efficient

EightFriendlyLegs It’s gross!!!

KidnappedCthulhu ok yes it is disgusting and a source of significant stress to me

KidnappedCthulhu but i want to leave my own corpses lying around even less

KidnappedCthulhu that seems like a recipe for disaster

EightFriendlyLegs How so?

KidnappedCthulhu i dont know it just does

EightFriendlyLegs Hmm… okay, that’s kind of a red flag and we should talk about it, but maybe there’s a way to make it more efficient! What if you took their brains out?

KidnappedCthulhu they would die obviously

EightFriendlyLegs Nono, like… you don’t want these spy bodies out eating all day because then they can’t spy, right? But you can’t just have them take shifts because they need too much food.

KidnappedCthulhu they are not spy bodies they are recon bodies

EightFriendlyLegs Whatever. Anyway, your bodies are all connected somehow, right? Wouldn’t it be possible to make like… a stationary body that handles the brain functions for your tiny bodies wirelessly? The recon bodies can be, like, remote-controlled drones, and you can store the controlling bodies somewhere with enough food to satisfy the brains. That way the drones shouldn’t take as much energy, and maybe you can finagle a rotating system out of it instead of the self-cannibalism thing?

KidnappedCthulhu huh

KidnappedCthulhu that might work actually

EightFriendlyLegs Oh, woah, really? Awesome!

KidnappedCthulhu did you suggest it thinking it wouldn’t work

EightFriendlyLegs I mean, it was just off the top of my head…

KidnappedCthulhu you are clever creative and resourceful

KidnappedCthulhu that is part of why i like you so much

KidnappedCthulhu i honestly would not have considered removing my own brain but it is actually a very good idea

KidnappedCthulhu trust yourself more

Aaaaaaa! Don’t start blushing in the middle of class don’t start blushing in the middle of class don’t start blushing in the middle of class don’t start blushing in the middle of class—

“That’ll be it for class today,” the professor says. “Read pages 435 to 521 for next time, and don’t forget your projects are still due next Wednesday. Have a lovely day, everyone.”

Oh, perfect, I can just blush in the hallway. I slap my laptop shut and quickly gather my things, rushing out to the chaotic mess outside the classroom before I turn completely beet red. Don’t worry! It’s college, so nobody cares about me! Don’t! Worry! Nobody! Cares!

“There you are, Evelyn! Hello!”

My extremely red face looks up and straight into the grinning mug of someone who cares about me very much. What!? Why is Tara waiting in the hall for me to exit!? My blush deepens, and her grin widens.

“I thought you were in the library!” I hiss, covering my face.

She leans in and throws an arm around my shoulder, jostling me playfully.

“I am,” she whispers once the shaking stops. “I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve borrowed another outfit.”

“Tara! Clothes are expensive! So is food, for that matter!”

“Yes, I know. Apologies. I will find a way to pay you back.”

“Did they really let you into this building?” I ask quietly. “This is a private campus, you know.”

Tara shrugs.

“I just walked in behind someone with the key card, same as always. No one questioned it, despite me having nine hundred thousand times more mass than usual.”

“I guess you do look like a student here,” I admit. “You sort of stand out, but not in a way that would get people to be suspicious of you.”

More in the way that she’s a fucking supermodel in clothes that are obviously too small for her.

The two of us begin to head down the hallway towards the exit. This is my last class of the day, thankfully. Tara meeting me outside is surprising… but not entirely unwelcome.

Tara spends as much time with me as she can, it feels like… and I’m not really sure what that means. After all, when I consider the time she spends with me, I have to take into account the fact that she spends many times that amount of time doing all sorts of other things due to multi-body shenanigans. In reality, it’s really not much of an investment on her part, so is it actually as special as it feels?

Well, despite all my mental arguments about how it isn’t actually that impressive, it still makes me feel happy. My dumb perma-anxious monkey-brain is absolutely all over how much I’m being liked and appreciated and constantly reaffirmed. It’s embarrassing, but it’s sort of the salve my horrible insecurities need. To have someone that genuinely likes me and always has time for me is just… nice. She has more time for me than I can even handle! I spent the better part of a day trying to say ‘Tleshkinat Tarakanora Se Ktahn-Hashlenesa,’ getting amused corrections every time I attempted to pronounce her name. We pretty much spent the entire time giggling.

It’s bright yet cool outside, beautiful weather for walking. Which is good, as I have no other method to go to and from my dorm room. Despite my constant chatter over the internet, though, I find myself with nothing to say in person. The words don’t come as easily when spoken with my voice. That’s okay, though. Tara seems happy to look around as we go, enjoying the breeze and watching people pass by.

Everything must be so new to her. She has experienced the world as a human (or at least as sort of a human) for all of a week. Until then she’d been living in a hole in the woods on what is, to her, an alien planet. It really makes me think about everything I take for granted: houses, roads, vehicles, plumbing, electricity… humans have made so many massive, incredible projects for the purposes of improving the lives of everyone around them. And their own lives, of course, but still…

“We really do make wonderful things when we work together, huh?” I muse.

“Yes,” Tara agrees. “I think that’s why the nation of Haslken-Rkto took over my planet, honestly. They must have gotten so tired of seeing so many fractured nations fight when they could all just be… better.”

I look up at my friend and raise an eyebrow.

“All right, all right,” she laughs, raising a placating hand. “I’m fully willing to admit at this point that Haslken-Rkto might be a little too… controlling, shall we say. And overly invested in maintaining that control. The parallels you have pointed out in your world are concerning, as are many of the stories you’ve given me. But surely, there is merit to the wish of bringing people together?”

“Well yeah, of course,” I say. “It’s just hard sometimes, because we don’t all agree on how things should be done. And…”

I pause for a moment.

“Uh, sorry if this seems like it’s out of nowhere, but you’re not planning to take over the world or anything, are you? This sort of seems like the start of a manifesto or something.”

“What? No!” Tara gapes. “Goodness, no! I want to go home, not rule your home. Ugh. I honestly can’t think of anything I’d want to do less. So much work, so much conflict, so much war! No way. I would hate that.”

“That’s good, I think,” I say with a nod. “I can’t imagine ever wanting to be in charge of something like that either. But what if it was your only way to get home?”

Tara’s brows furrow in confusion. It’s wild how she has facial expressions down so naturally. Did she somehow take those from the woman that attacked her? I suppose that makes sense, if she took language.

“…What sort of ridiculous scenario would require me to take over the entire world before I could leave it?” she asks, dumbfounded.

“It’s just a hypothetical,” I say, trying to be as nonchalant with my inquisition as possible. I’ve read books! I have to be sure about these things!

“Hmm… well, in that case, still no,” Tara answers after some thought. “I miss my home very much, but I couldn’t abuse your planet like that for my own sake. There’s little sense in returning to a family as someone they wouldn’t even want to see anymore. Besides…”

She bumps my hip with her own, causing me to stumble. Though it’s more from surprise than the impact.

“… It’s not so bad here,” she admits. “I miss my home very much, but I think I could enjoy living here as well, if I must. It is a wonderful planet, with wonderful people.”

“We screw up really often, though,” I protest.

“Everyone does,” Tara dismisses. “What standard should you be held to? Sure, my home has you beat on worldwide unity, but this place is still wonderful! So clean, so bright and colorful. People are safe, people are happy, people are here to learn things and make their futures a better place. It’s a far cry from the nonstop ‘work, work, work’ of my home.”

“This is a particularly nice neighborhood,” I point out. “We have plenty of crime and suffering and back-breakingly hard work, you’re just not seeing it here.”

Tara laughs again.

“What is this, a contest on whose planet is worse? Evelyn, please. I’ve seen the news. I even have a Twitter account now, you know.”

“Oh god,” I whisper in horror.

“Look, Evelyn, it’s fine. The terror of my condition is finally starting to feel a little less raw. Let me enjoy your world! It truly is a beautiful place when you look for it.”

Reaching out, she pulls me into a side-hug, shoulder to my significantly shorter shoulder. More shoulder-to-tricep, really. Still, despite my body screaming in silent panic, I don’t pull away.

Then someone behind us clears their throat, breaking the moment.

I turn around in a startled panic, breaking from the hug. It’s… it’s that girl! The one who made fun of me at Arby’s! Well, kind of. Mostly I just flipped out in the middle of a bunch of people and splashed her with soda like an insane cavewoman just to catch a bug.

Alex is also there, and while better than the mean girl, that’s still another witness to my insanity and it only makes my heart beat faster to see. Why? Why now? What do they want?

The girl hesitates, probably noticing all the color drained from my face. Then Alex punches her in the shoulder.

“Ow!” she complains. “Okay, okay. Um… Evelyn. I wanted to say I’m sorry.”

…Huh?

“I was sort of a, shall we say, ‘huge bitch’ to you, as my friends have repeatedly pointed out,” she continues, glaring at Alex. “I didn’t really think that I was that—” Alex raises a fist threateningly. “—but any amount of bitchery is too much bitchery when meeting people for the first time, and I sincerely regret making you uncomfortable,” she quickly concludes.

“Good,” Alex says smugly.

“You don’t have to hit me,” the girl whines.

“Sure I do. I’m allowed to hit girls.”

“Not legally!”

“Um,” I manage to butt in, grabbing their attention. “Thank you, uh…”

“Sasha,” the girl offers, to my intense relief.

“Sasha,” I repeat, trying to commit it to memory this time. “I… I’m sorry I acted like such a weirdo and sprayed you with soda and stuff.”

“Oh, you didn’t ‘spray me’ with anything,” Sasha protests, waving me off. “A few droplets hit me, at most. I was being overdramatic, trying to be funny. But I understand not everyone can appreciate my ingenious sense of humor.”

“I will punch you a second time,” Alex warns.

“Don’t, I’ll bruise! God, you are such a brute. Anyway, Evelyn, that’s all I wanted to say. My mouth runs away from me sometimes and I forget where it’s going. If you’re willing, I would love to make it up to you sometime.”

“Um… make it up to me how?” I ask.

“Well, I was looking at you—and please, please, please don’t take this the wrong way, honey—but would you like to go shopping with me sometime? I’ll buy you anything you like, as long as I get to make some recommendations.”

I blink. Why would a shopping offer be something I take the wrong… oh, she’s calling my clothes ugly. Or she’s afraid that I’ll assume that and telling me not to. Which, of course, she has to do because my clothes are ugly.

“You should definitely do it,” Alex loudly stage-whispers to me. “Sasha is fucking loaded. Just so much money. Take it from her. Use it to gain strength.”

“Now, Alex, if you keep saying things like that I will be forced to assume you only associate with me for my wealth.”

“Oh, I totally do though,” Alex responds instantly. “And on the subject, I regret to inform you that Sam and Thomas only hang out with you for your boobs.”

“Oh, well, obviously,” Sasha allows, suppressing a smirk.

Somewhat overwhelmed by the bit routine, my brain sputters a few times before reminding me that I am, in fact, quite broke and in need of new clothing.

“I… can Tara come?” I ask.

“Hello!” Tara waves.

Sasha nods politely at Tara but then quickly does a double-take, approaching her and starting to circle around like a shark.

“Goodness gracious,” she mutters. “Tara, you said? Hello, I’m Sasha, this is Alex, and… god. Is any of that even remotely comfortable?”

“Not at all,” Tara confirms happily. “All of my clothing is on loan. I, ah, was not exactly able to pack before arriving here.”

“Yes, I can see that. Goodness, woman, you must be in agony. Come on, follow me.”

Sasha begins storming off, wearing the facial expression of someone mortally offended.

“Um… where?” I ask.

“Shopping!” Sasha confirms. “We’re going now! Please bring your friend, she needs help!”

Alex shrugs.

“You’d better follow her. She’s in her zone. Sasha’s a maniac, but she’s a really nice maniac when you get to know her.”

Alex follows after, looking back with a lopsided smile.

“You are gonna walk home with a lotta free shit.”

37 Fish are Food, Not Friends

I’ve heard people talk about body dysphoria, and while as a human I certainly understood the feeling of considering myself to be hideous and disgusting, by my understanding it’s an experience distinctly different from my own bouts of dangerously-low self-esteem. I remember being told it’s more like a revulsion of the body itself not only in specific details but in concept, in that at its most basic level there is some disturbing, creeping wrongness permeating every level of one’s self-awareness. I worry that, given my current circumstances, I should feel like that too. But… I don’t.

Every day I fall further and further from human, and while that terrifies me on an intellectual level in practice it only makes me feel better. The ESTOL bodies are the furthest things I’ve ever made from human; they have no head, no arms, and no legs, only wings and siphons. The way I twist my jets and glide on my wings feels like nothing I’ve ever experienced before. I pull air in through holes in my body, gaping tubes that run through my entire torso, pressurize it, and rocket it out through the other end. I can open them completely and feel the hollowness, letting the wind twist inside of me as it pleases while it dances over the short, sleek fur of my torso. And while I’m quickly getting lots of experience adapting to new sensoriums, the ESTOLs once again use systems totally new to me; the dome-like black heads of the eagle-bats are actually eyes, ones that can see in a full hemisphere around themselves. I’ve adapted them for the ESTOLs, so they don’t bulge out very far and don’t have quite the same range of vision, but I’m still seeing and processing an absurd amount of visual data from a single body at once. The dome-eye lacks much depth perception, but the eagle-bats are also capable of echolocation, and those senses combine unconsciously to let them—and now me—perceive the world with an intuitive three-dimensional understanding. The entire experience of being an ESTOL is completely and utterly alien in every sense of the word, and rather than being disturbed or confused as I would have expected, I just find it all extremely goddamn cool.

I mean, I made this! I know exactly how it works down to the internal anatomy. I considered all of this while I—Evelyn ‘Weird Bug Girl’ Montgomery—designed and crafted every aspect of this body knowing I would end up being it. When looking at it that way, how could I find it strange? How could I consider it dysphoric? It is quintessentially, categorically, unambiguously me in every possible way. Flying is cool, biological pseudo-jet-engines are cool, acid cannons are cool, and I’m kinda fucking cool. There, I said it. I’m awesome. Fuck yeah!

…Or maybe I just feel this way because I’m currently eating four unique swamp-species at once and my brains are absolutely overloading with a dopamine rush I would call ‘orgasmic’ if not for the fact that being an alien hive mind has turned me asexual. In the biological sense, I mean. I don’t have sex organs so an actual orgasm isn’t physically possible. …Actually, wait, am I also asexual in the orientation sense now? I haven’t felt even the slightest longing for that kind of thing since coming to Acidsucks, but maybe that’s just the terrifying threat of death and/or loss of personhood. Hmm. Let’s test this by thinking about dicks. Actually, now I’m curious, how would I even make one of those? Every species I’ve devoured so far uses a cloaca or external fertilization or something like that. But it wouldn’t be that hard, you just basically take the tract which normally moves the sexual fluids, separate it out into its own tube, elongate the… wait. This isn’t what I intended to think about. It answers the question, though, doesn’t it? I’m way more interested in the puzzle of reverse-engineering a dong than I am in actually looking at one.

By the way have I mentioned that eating a new species is really fucking delicious!?

“…Er, Evelyn? Are you okay?” Priestess Saslitak asks me.

I jerk my head her way, belatedly realizing the body I’ve been using to follow her around is shaking while an open-mouthed grin showing lots of teeth splits my face. Right, yeah, I’m also doing things other than enjoying meals and I definitely shouldn’t be acting like a total weirdo creep in public.

“Fine! Yes!” I say a bit too loudly. “I’m fine, having a great time, very good, what were we talking about?”

“Er… you wanted to see our farms,” she answers. “I’m taking you to one of the public ones.”

“Yes!” I snap my fingers, which causes a few nearby Sthrenslians to flinch. “I remember that, yes. Please continue. Um. Actually, when you say ‘public’ farms, how does that differentiate from private farms?”

“Farms that use the blessings of the homewyrm are only tended to by the best of our workers,” Saslitak explains.

Hmm. ‘Homewyrm’ again. That thing I’m not allowed to see, whatever it is. Dang, that makes me suspicious and curious, but I really need to focus on not fucking up and doing an accidental blasphemy.

“Great, makes total sense,” I lie poorly. “Lead the way!”

She does, and I’m taken through a series of strange, winding pathways that seem like they must have some kind of purpose for their shape but it isn’t one I can divine until I can finally start to get closer to the farm. These tunnels must be some kind of ventilation system, because down here it very literally smells like shit.

I’d never really thought about it before, but how does a limited-space underground society dispose of their own poop? The answer, apparently, is that they don’t: they recycle it. As I buzz down the tunnel and finally start lighting up the farm itself with my bioluminescence, I come across an impressively-sized room with literal fields of fungi, all of it growing from what is clearly composted poop.

“…This is pretty incredible,” I admit. “Efficient use of waste product.”

I recognize one kind of mushroom here from my meal with the True People, and while I’m tempted to ask for one of each of the others I know these people are in a food crisis. My own gluttony can wait until I’ve solved that for them. Saslitak beams at my compliment, wiggling in agreement.

“Indeed! Sss’ teachings have brought us great wisdom.”

I nod absentmindedly and buzz into the huge cavern, impressed with the scale of this operation. With this many mushrooms, it’s surprising that they struggle from a food shortage… no, wait. My city girl energy is showing. How long do these things take to grow? I run some mental simulations on the subterranean mushroom I’ve already eaten, determining that, on average, they don’t finish forming spores until they’ve been growing for fifteen weeks. Assume a Sthrenslian eats an average of one fully-grown mushroom a day, assume the Resonant Gems have one hundred members, assume that between this and their other fields they grow ten thousand mushrooms at once… yep. That’s below breaking even, and I’m pretty sure I’m being generous with those numbers. There are at least a dozen workers in this field, and since I couldn’t hear this far I wasn’t counting them when I made my initial estimate for how many Sthrenslians are in the Resonant Gems.

That’s when I realize the reverse is true for the workers; they’ve been here since I showed up at the Resonant Gem cave and they have no fucking idea who or what I am.

“Oh, u-uh, hello everyone!” I greet, waving. “My name is Evelyn! I know I’m probably, um, a little weird, but I’m here to help! I hope we can be friends!”

Complete silence answers me. I’m utterly ignored as the workers continue to toil away, checking mushrooms for damage and proper growth, carefully extracting the spore-filled ones and depositing them into a small leather-lined woven basket, the top of which is then sealed except for two holes that the worker sticks tentacles through in order to pop the highly-pressurized spore cap and trap it all inside. They then pass off the basket to another worker who goes around and evenly spreads the spores wherever mushrooms have been already picked. It’s kind of neat, but I do feel increasingly embarrassed as I just float in the air, continually ignored.

“U-um,” I manage to pipe up eventually.

“Could you stop making that horrid buzzing noise up there?” one of the workers grunts at me. “It’s distracting.”

I blink, taken aback.

“I… erm. Are all of you really not even remotely interested in the fact that I’m a talking, flying alien?”

There’s a pause.

“…Not really.”

I… huh. I float down to the worker who said that. They’re still hard at work, despite the conversation.

“Um, is there somewhere I can land?” I ask them quietly. “The air-walking thing I’m doing causes the buzzing, but I don’t want to mess up your pretty fields.”

I also don’t want to walk around in their poop, but I diplomatically avoid saying that.

Briefly, the Sthrenslian stops what it’s doing to reach over with a tendril and grab me around the waist. I let out a chirp of surprise, but he just gently deposits me on his back.

“Oh, um, th-thank you?” I acknowledge, sitting demurely down with my feet under my butt.

“You’re light,” he grunts in acknowledgement.

“Oh, u-uh, being heavy makes it hard to fly.”

“‘Thly’ is air-walk,” he clarifies.

“Oh, yes,” I confirm.

“Good, simple word,” he grunts.

It really is a simple word by Sthrenslian standards. The nature of their language is more than a little difficult for me to transliterate so I mentally autopilot it ninety-nine percent of the time and ignore the ridiculous nuances, but damn are there some ridiculous nuances. Sthrenslian is a language where diction matters, certainly, but you can have a bunch of words with exactly the same diction but are completely different due to relative duration and pitch. Whenever you speak in Sthrenslian, the very first syllable out of your mouth isn’t a word at all; it’s spoken like one but it has no inherent meaning by itself. I’m going to translate it as the ‘base note.’ Every syllable of every word in Sthrenslian not only has a sound in the way English words have sounds, but they have a certain pitch and length difference from the base note. You’d have to use musical notation to write down the Sthrenslian language at all, and for obvious reasons the Sthrenslians have no real concept of ‘singing.’ They’re always singing, it just sounds like discordant, annoying hissing because the pitch changes are meaning-motivated, not aesthetic-motivated. Anyway, when this worker says he liked my word because it’s ‘simple,’ it’s because whenever I say a word in English I default to matching the pitch and duration with the base note exactly. It’s actually pretty uncommon for a word to be like that. (This is presumably because, like the creators of English, Sthrenslians wanted their language to have as much complicated bullshit as possible.)

“Thanks,” I manage to say rather than ranting about any of that out loud. Go Evelyn, flex that atrophied self-control muscle!

“My name is Worker Rshult,” the Sthrenslian answers. “You may stay, but please do not try to help.”

“Uh, alright then,” I nod, flying a different nearby body to Priestess Saslitak so she can continue the tour. I’m not really finding anything growing in the tunnels anyway. “Thanks.”

In the meantime, I’ve finished peeling apart and slurping down every flower and bug on the outside of the swamp. Disappointingly, none of them seem to be a magical miracle cure, though I’ve learned some interesting things about the soil here. It’s incredibly rich, but also incredibly poisonous. It’s the same poison as the air, though, so this might be a good place to farm stuff…? Stuff for me to eat, anyway. This would totally kill a Sthrenslian.

With the local environment sampled, I move Squad Evelyn deeper into the swamp. It has the soggy ground and misty, humid air I associate with swamps, anyway, but unlike the very dark and brownish-grey environments I think of when considering common descriptions of Earth swamps, it’s difficult to think of this place as the same. It’s just so ding dang colorful here! Blue flowers with red leaves bloom near purple algae growths growing around yellow rocks next to green-tinted pools of water. It’s also really, really hot! I rest the squad next to one of these pools, sampling the flowers and sniffing at the yellow stones. Considering that recognizable stench they’re almost certainly sulfur, so I wonder if these green pools are like… geysers or something. That’d be cool. I can feel the warmth of the water from here.

As I stare into the pool, though, I notice something incredible. I call it a ‘pool’ rather than a ‘lake’ because it’s pretty darn tiny, but as I glance down it’s apparently super deep! It looks like there might even be a complicated system of underwater tunnels down there. And wait, is that… a fish!?

It is! There’s a fish here! It’s tiny and hard to see, barely the size of a minnow and exactly the same color as the water. But its small size means I can probably out-fight it with my ETEs. I tense up, going completely still as I wait for it to get closer to the surface. Some of the purple algae blooms float around the edges of the pool, and it seems to be moving up to nibble on them. I lock onto my target, unleash my strength, plunge into the water, and immediately start to fucking die.

My body no longer feels anything but pain as I jump into what is clearly not water at all but—and may I just say fuck this goddamn planet—a startlingly concentrated solution of all-natural acid. Even my highly resistant chitin starts rapidly burning away in an excruciating, agonizing explosion of nerves and agony. But who cares about pain? There’s a fucking fish swimming in this shit and that means I want what it’s got. Whatever kind of acid-resistance it has must be insane! I grab for it even as I feel myself dying, but it unfortunately and somewhat predictably gets away. Then I drag myself out of the not-water, accepting more burns on some of my hands in order to prevent myself from completely biting the dust.

“That fucking hurt,” I grunt.

“That was incredibly stupid,” Mr. Mooshi opines.

“Hey! How was I supposed to know it was a pool of murder-acid? There was a fish in it.”

“Given what we know, the pool is probably sulfuric acid,” Mr. Mooshi says, ignoring me. “Which means the poisonous gas is probably hydrogen sulfide.”

Hmm, okay, that makes sense. There are sulfur deposits here, everything smells like farts, and I died really fast the first time I tried to navigate around this place. It still doesn’t explain the way this place glows at night, though.

“I think it might,” Mr. Mooshi argues. “And we might have a solution to our sub-caveman tech level here.”

Shit, I think what he’s getting at. I send one ESTOL and a couple of ETE supports further into the swamp, trying to follow wherever feels warmest. It doesn’t take long until I find the source, but I’m still startled to see it.

A door to Hell.

…Not literally, of course, because Hell is not real. But back on Earth, in the Turkmenistan desert, there is a place called the Darvaza gas crater, also known as ‘The Door to Hell.’ And it’s called this because it has not stopped being on fucking fire since 1971. It’s just a rocky hole in the middle of the desert, and yet the stones continue to burn. Why? Because it’s actually a slowly-leaking natural gas deposit.

This pit in the swamp is similar, but the fires burn much brighter and hotter in the twenty-foot diameter hole than the Darvaza gas crater has ever been known to. It’s a moderately-sized bonfire, and one that the local flora and fauna seem quite adapted to. Black-barked trees hang branches out over the inferno, where a red-scaled pterodactyl-like creature rests happily above flames that I’m scared to even approach. I set about collecting and devouring nearby mosses and flowers, but my mind is already forming plans on how to kill and eat that big dino-bird.

Meanwhile, in less on-fire parts of the surface, I notice the sun start to set as The Little Evelyn finally gains consciousness and I punch myself out of her shell. Considering Warrior Katrk’s condition, I’m definitely pulling an all-nighter tonight, but maybe I’ll luck out and some nocturnal creature will be the key to saving him. Who knows?

I flex my fishy body, stretching my webbed fingers and playing around with the wicked Reaper Maw claws growing from my shoulders and cradling my head for optimal catching-and-eating purposes. Swimming with a fish tail is predictably simple and natural, but even having purposefully designed this body for speed, I’m startled by how fast it can go. Well, no reason to waste any time. I’ll get used to being a cute mermaid as I go.

Rocketing off down the river, I start the second phase of my rescue mission immediately.

38 Expand, Adapt, Overcome

When you don’t have to worry about running out of air, swimming is basically the same as flying.

In some ways, it’s even cooler. When high up in the air, it’s kind of a huge deal if you want to stop flying. If my tiny bug bodies stop beating their wings, or if my ESTOLs put their wings away and stop jetting out air, I sign myself a one-way ticket to ground city. Wings and siphons can get pretty darn sore working themselves nonstop all day, same as any other muscle. Even if I’m just gliding, I have to keep my wings outstretched to catch enough air and that takes serious effort if I’m going fast or turning hard or if the atmosphere is tumultuous. But in the water… I can just stop.

Darting forward down the stream, I give into just a little bit of indulgence and let my body relax, going slack in the water and allowing the current to take me wherever it pleases. I went swimming a decent amount back on Earth, especially in the summer when I was a little kid and my mom just wanted to lie by the poolside and let the lifeguards be the ones making sure I don’t kill myself for a while. I’ve always thought the idea of being in space was pretty cool, and to me being underwater was the closest I ever thought I’d get to zero-G. I’d fantasize about floating around the inside of a starship, swimming through air instead of water, watching the Milky Way out the window… I thought it was really fun.

And then that fantasy would end ten to thirty seconds later, at most, when I inevitably had to come up for air. With my lungs burning for oxygen, it never really gave me much time to appreciate how incredibly comfortable moving around underwater can be. My current lung capacity is better measured in hours than seconds, though, so I’m definitely reveling in it now.

I’m not just slowing down because it’s fun and cool, either! As I coast to match the river’s speed, I let out a bit of air and start to sink to the rocks at the bottom, grabbing any loose ones and moving them in an attempt to reveal any space-crustaceans, also known as Water Friends. Crustacea is well below Chelicerata, Myriapoda, and Hexapoda on my “favorite arthropod subphyla” list, but they are still buggo-adjacent enough to trigger my cuddle instinct. And who knows, maybe on this planet the water bugs will be extra cute! I never found any when searching around with EE, but that was only in one super-tiny segment of river. So maybe now I’ll luck out!

…And, uh, hopefully the space crab will cure diseases. Somehow. Which is why I’m out here.

I do eventually find something, but it’s not at all what I expected. A radially symmetric set of flat, interlocking chitin plates suddenly darts away from me as I start investigating nearby, waving its body rhythmically in order to dash through the water. It was disguised as a river stone until that moment, brown and hard and smooth. Four equally-flat limbs jut out from around its body, and after quickly catching and eating the cute little guy I learn they possess the majority of its sensory organs. Beyond the impressive camouflage and the delightfully sour toxin running through its body, though, there’s little noteworthy to say about the creature. At least it was pretty easy to catch.

I’m having no such luck over in the swamp. Like, sure, there are big, juicy, awesome organisms all over the place. (I found a family of six-legged pigs! Space bacon!!!) The problem is that I didn’t quite anticipate the downsides of being able to murder things with superacid. Namely that a full volley of ESTOL shots kills things incredibly dead, but also reduces those things to chemically cannibalized mush. The results are edible, but so much biomass gets burned away in the process that I struggle to get much information out of it. I might be able to get a complete picture if I kill multiple members of the same species and make sure they all die with differently-placed holes, but for now I’m leaving the piggies and that sweet fire-loving pterodactyl thing alone until I get some larger bodies in the swamp as backup. There are plenty of bugs and plants to eat in the meantime.

On the subject of larger hunting bodies: enter DB, the Dire Bork. Bigger, tougher, and not even a little bit meaner, the Dire Bork integrates the best features of my new biological data into the classic bug-dog design that everyone knows and loves, and by everyone I mean literally just me. I’ve mostly removed the acid bite effect and doubled down on bite strength, packing the reaper maw musculature as powerfully as I can into huge, toothy jaws that should absolutely shatter anything that gets caught inside them. With the reaper maw’s tough skin reinforcing my whip-tongue and the ghost trap’s glue making it even more difficult to escape, most of the rest of the Dire Bork is details like increased size (DB is slightly larger than a tiger) integration of general upgrades (the ghost trap’s chemical crypsis is basically just an extension of the pheromones EP started with) and small details (chitin spikes make me difficult to attack, and more importantly are incredibly cool). I’m obviously making myself immune to hydrogen sulfide poisoning as well. With EE still healing, I have little else to do with that body beyond devour food and plop out bodies, so I do exactly that, making two DB eggs before I run out of food stockpile. The OMNIDOME’s stomach should finish growing soon, but unfortunately I’ve acquired more important problems than my own safety since designing it.

“I’ll save you, Katrk,” I mutter to myself, staring at his unconscious, poultice-covered body. “Don’t worry, just rest and wait.”

“I’m not entirely sure how you intend to do that while sitting around and clogging up space in my home,” Healer Katrs complains.

“I have to be here,” I insist. “When I find something, I’m going to recreate it on-site. Odds are that will be faster than transporting it.”

“…Okay, but how are you going to find anything if you’re in my house.”

I huff in annoyance. Right, I’m still keeping the hive mind thing on the down-low.

“I’ll know when something is found,” I answer simply. “Sorry for bothering you.”

As the hours pass by, however, my frustration rapidly mounts as I continue to find nothing. It’s well into nighttime by now, and while the fires of the swamp help a lot with visibility, my ability to hunt near my home and in the water have been significantly hampered. I have The Little Evelyn focus instead on speed, rushing downriver to the ocean as quickly as possible. This is exhausting, but I focus as best I can on optimizing my movement, learning when to push my muscles and when to wait for them to cycle out waste. It’s like a rhythm/puzzle game, almost, and it helps distract from my repeated failures in the swamp.

When dawn breaks and Warrior Katrs has an estimated one day left to live, I finally spot the ocean. Poking my head up out of the river water, I can see how the river widens and briefly splits into a massive delta before all flowing into the sea. Part of the swamp Squad Evelyn is exploring is actually right to my left, which is somewhat embarrassing, but in my defense I’m still many miles from any of my other bodies. The swamp is just really big! And I’m sure, I’m sure that the terrifying purple tint to the ocean water is just a trick of the sunrise, and not evidence that this horrible, awful planet has god damn acid oceans. Nope. I won’t believe it. Acid oceans are just too much! How the hell could carbon-based life even form unless there was a proper, non-murdery ocean?

I swim hesitantly forward, kicking my fish tail carefully through the winding waters of the Mooshi River Delta (I just now remembered I discovered all this stuff, and that means I get to name it). It’s quite beautiful here, I have to admit. To the right of the delta, facing ocean-ward (and what I think should be south of my position, assuming the sun rises in the east like it does on Earth) is an actual beach, complete with gorgeous, white sand that goes on for a ways before the shoreline rises and transforms into a cliff face about a half mile or so away. The water does actually start to get a bit more purple as I approach the ocean but it does not, thank fuck, start scouring my flesh from my bones. Hmm… algae blooms, probably? I confirm my suspicion when I make it to the ocean proper, a largely calm and not-very-wavy mass of water and salt. The water is quite shallow near the beach, and when I submerge myself it’s obvious that the purple color is some kind of colonial organism congealed to the surface of the water. I’m not sure how much biological data I can get from a colonial organism devoid of any organs or tissue, unfortunately, but… wait. No, I can absolutely comprehend organisms on the cellular level, it’s just difficult. That’s what I did in order to allow myself to metabolize hydrogen sulfide, after all.

The smartest play here is obviously to start chugging salt water.

It tastes terrible, and my body immediately starts getting angry at me as it tries to metabolize and filter out the excess of salt, but somehow this absolute zero-IQ strategy actually works. My head starts to explode with information about microorganisms, enough that it’s paralyzing to try to consciously analyze them all. Excited, I start scanning for any that might hold the secret to a general antibiotic, but… nope. No luck. I grit my teeth and get back to swimming.

At least I understand the purple crap. It’s similar to the purple blooms of life around the sulfuric acid ponds in the swamp, and in fact is probably here due to the proximity this part of the shoreline has to said swamp. This algae eats all the dangerous acids that pour out from that nasty biome, protecting the rest of the ocean from the awful pH dump that is the acid swamp. Or, y’know, arguably just ruining this part of the ocean instead. There doesn’t seem to be much life here. I find and eat a few very sad clams, who are just absolutely driving the struggle bus trying to get calcium carbonate shells to work well on a planet literally named Acidsucks. CaCO3 kinda gets fucked by acid. Maybe it wasn’t always like this? Or maybe—and this is me being unreasonably optimistic here—maybe the whole planet isn’t an acid hell world and most of it is generally pretty normal and nice!

“Hah!” I laugh to myself. “Ah, Evelyn, you crack me up.”

“Thanks, Evelyn. I’ve always thought humor is one of the best ways to deal with stress.”

“That and making up imaginary friends, apparently,” Mr. Mooshi butts in.

I flinch.

“Mr. Mooshi…” I grimace. “Please don’t talk about Hsthressis like that.”

He must be embarrassed, because he just returns to eating grass instead of responding. Well, good! In the meantime, I have more things to eat. A very flat, wide, and lazy-looking fish floats near the surface, its wide-open mouth obviously filter feeding. I easily catch and kill it, ignoring the spicy, gooey toxins covering its flesh as I peel it apart and systematically swallow its organs. Oh boy, baleen filter feeding, oh boy, poison slime… but still nothing useful! God damnit!

Yet more hours pass, and soon the sun is high in the sky. The most interesting thing that happens during this time is Priestess Saslitak taking me to see where the Sthrenslian weavers work and, more importantly, where the Sthrenslian children play. They’re even tinier versions of the tiny bug people! It’s quite possibly the most adorable thing I’ve ever seen, and I just had to join in.

“EEEEEK! It’s the sky monster, it’s the sky monster! Everybody run!”

A gaggle of giggling Sthrenslian children bolt away from me, shrieking with glee. I buzz after them, making playful growls as they zip down through the tunnels they’ve been allowed for their game. These parts of the cave are rough and unfinished, the efforts of little kids just getting their acid glands, learning to dig in a quest to expand their area of play. I’m a bit surprised at first that Priestess Saslitak seems to have no objections to me playing with the kids, but I suppose that, despite being far smaller than an adult Sthrenslian, not one of them is less than twice my weight. If the strange fairy monster threatens a child, perhaps the expectation is for that child to beat the shit out of me. Though I should be pretty well-known by now for hunting ghost traps, so they should know I’m scary in a fight… ah, well. It’s not like I expect it to be a problem. I’m honestly having the time of my life.

“Grr! Hiss! I’m the sky fairy! I’ll cook you all into a stew!” I growl, eliciting another round of delighted shrieks.

“Eat Threslets first, sky monster!” suggests one of the children, causing a chorus of frightening laughter.

“Just for that, I’m coming after you!” I respond in my most evil voice, zipping towards the offending Sthrenslian.

The whole group screams and scatters down every which-way, splitting up to flee down different paths in the maze of tunnels. I imitate a Sthrenslian laugh as best I can (hopefully it sounds as creepy to them as it does to me) and zip after, easily keeping pace with my quarry through the scattered tunnels. He runs through circles of tunnels as I cackle madly behind him, buying time for the other children to hide where the tunnels re-converge. As I pass by an intersection they all leap at me, and I purposefully swerve to let the smallest of the bunch hit me with a tackle.

“Curses!” I gasp, wind knocked out of me from the impact. “I have… huff… been captured!”

They all cheer and lift me onto the back of my vanquisher, which I gratefully rest on as the parade featuring my broken body begins. That tackle is gonna bruise.

So worth it, though.

“Momma, momma!” the little one says, still deep in the tunnels. “I caught the sky monster!”

“You did!” his mom encourages absentmindedly, having watched (well, listened to) the whole thing from far above.

“Okay, kiddos, the sky fairy is pretty exhausted,” I tell them. “She’s gonna need to take a break.”

The chorus of disappointed noises hits my heart like a bullet.

“Well… okay. Maybe one more.”

The positive energy from that one lucky body is perhaps the only thing keeping me sane, though. My Dire Bork hasn’t hatched yet, Squad Evelyn has been having less and less luck finding new organisms small enough for them to eat the deeper they go into the swamp, and The Little Evelyn has been traveling the shoreline, trying to find where the algae bloom that seems to be choking out the expected biodiversity ends. I’m hesitant to head out to the open ocean; while there are no doubt countless organisms out there, oceans are massive, and if I don’t know what I’m doing (I don’t.) there’s a high chance I’ll end up somewhere with absolutely fuck-all except water. So I’m looking for some kind of shoreline or shallow-water biome with a high concentration and variety of life, like a coral reef or—wait. What’s that patch of color?

I finally distance myself from the purple mass of algae, and now that the water is brighter and clearer I spot many more animals swimming or scurrying around on the ocean floor. That’s kind of nice, but none of them are that helpful and there really doesn’t seem to be much this close to shore. Glancing out in the other direction, however, something beautiful catches my eye. Something stretching throughout the deeper surf, full of movement and flashes of beautiful color. It’s a reef!

I can’t help it. I let out a high-pitched scream, the likes of which hasn’t left my lungs since I was six years old. Holy shit, yes! An alien coral reef, or whatever the coral equivalent was going to turn out to be! This is incredible! I can already spot hundreds of fish from all the way out here, I can’t even imagine how much stuff there must be! There has to be something that can save Katrk here, and on top of that I bet it’s going to be fucking gorgeous.

I’m not disappointed. Skimming just under the surface of the water, I stare down as the ocean floor curves steeper downwards. Below me, the reef begins, just barely touching this close to shore. The sun still gleams brightly through the waters, and it highlights the most beautiful display of color I have ever seen.

As much as I liked to swim I never lived by the ocean, back on Earth. I’ve been to aquariums, but I certainly never swam around in them. This is all gloriously new. So much color! It’s not like the reefs on Earth, either: the multicolored “coral” is shaped in long, thin spindles that span incredible lengths, sometimes dozens of feet. They seem individually fragile, but they form and grow together into vast, spiderweb-like networks of living stone. The structures are anchored to the ground, growing up from it in long sticks about two fingers thick and randomly branching apart, intersecting with other branches, splitting off again… it all looks so brittle! How does it stay together?

Fish swim not just around but in, over, under, and through the beautiful network of color. Hanging gardens of moss-like growths drape from them, flowing in the current, getting nibbled by smaller fish. A long, pulsing, tube-like creature twists itself among the net, pushing water through its hollow body and trapping the tiny organisms that get sucked in. My eyes spot movement shifting on one of the coral strands; a camouflaged shell creature I wouldn’t have otherwise seen scuttles along the side. And not to mention, every color and shape of fish imaginable swarms the area, swimming and munching and relaxing and doing whatever fish do all day. Most of them swim away from me as I approach, but many don’t seem to care, content to hang around as long as I don’t make any sudden moves.

This! Is! So! Cooooool!

Okay, first thing’s first. I form and lay two more TLE eggs at the edge of the reef zone, trying very very hard not to think about the lubricant that splorted out into the water alongside the eggs which I am now swimming in trace amounts of. I have plenty of biomass and it’s important to quickly multiply myself so I can sample things as efficiently as possible. Then I start fuckin’ eating, catching and chomping down on every new animal I see as soon as I see it. Swimming through the coral web is like navigating an underwater maze, and I nearly make a game out of twisting, turning, and weaving my way through the beautiful underwater garden when suddenly my back feels like it just caught on fucking fire.

Ow, ow, ow, fuck, shit, stop. I do not have any time to panic. Numb the pain. Investigate the area. Swelling? Inflammation? Puncture? Stupid to be here with just one body, no external reference. Fine. Don’t need to see. Focus on cells. Mmm… puncture. Microscopic. Venom barbs on the “coral.” Immunoresponse… succeeding. Toxin not lethal in this quantity. I’m fine.

Don’t touch the coral, got it. Fuck. That explains why big creatures don’t bump into it and break it all, I guess. Well, if it has these barbs it’s probably alive, so I guess I’m going to try to eat it.

I follow a tube of coral upwards to a point at which it ends. Hmm… the tip is actually kinda different from the rest! Glossier. Ah well, down the hatch! I chip it off and chomp it down and let my mind shriek with pleasure and comprehension.

It’s an animal. A delicious, fascinating, but ultimately very simple animal. The creatures excrete calcified tubes, pushing themselves along as they go. They grow towards others of their kind, finding them in the current through scent, and after months of growth they join together, creating stable connections that enable them to climb higher, fertilize each other, and eventually branch off again. Together, over months and years of effort, they do the work of a single spider in an afternoon… but on a massive scale, creating not a trap but a home for thousands upon thousands of other life-forms.

One of said life-forms being the creature that poisoned me. Tiny and completely separate from the calcite-producing worms that create the network they live on, these microscopic animals have a symbiotic bond with the coral-producers, protecting the networks from destruction with their agonizing venom in exchange for having somewhere to grow and collect plankton that swirls around the ocean.

Mmm-mmm! Pretty yummy, overall: crunchy, and with a kick! I’m gonna name this tasty duo the Spiderweb Snail and its good buddy the Pain Polyp. Two in one! Now let’s see if either of them can work as Sthrenslian medicine. Hmm…

The simulation once again says no.

With a pained sigh, I flush away the excess dopamine from my meal and return to eating more new creatures. More time passes, and the sun starts to set. Hours into the night, I still have nothing. The Dire Bork bodies are too big; I miscalculated how long they’d take to hatch and it’s unlikely they’ll be able to do anything in time. The swamp is a bust. The tunnels are a bust. Even the reef is a bust.

I watch as Healer Katrs starts changing out Warrior Katrk’s bandages and poultices, revealing a horrid mound of infected pus that happen to be in the shape of a Sthrenslian. If not for the fact that I have conscious control over my autonomic processes, I would have vomited. The smell is wretched, the infection pooling in wounds all over his body… it’s bad. It’s incredibly bad.

“It’s too late,” Healer Katrs grunts. “He’s dead.”

Time seems to slow down as he says those words. No. False. Liar. Katrk is breathing.

“He isn’t,” I insist.

“Sure, not technically,” the healer shrugs off. “But the infection has progressed too far. Even if you brought me popmold now, I wouldn’t be able to save him.”

“I… I should have another four hours.”

“I don’t know what that means, but it doesn’t matter. I gave you an estimate. Now I’m giving you the facts. No amount of popmold is going to bring this guy from the brink. All we can do now is hope he doesn’t wake up and suffer before he dies.”

“No,” I say firmly, my mind blank.

“Look, I appreciate that you’ve been searching for a way to help. I appreciate that you brought him back to us. But this happens. He’s dead.”

“No,” I repeat, snapping my wings out and floating up above Warrior Katrk. “He’s alive. He’ll stay alive.”

Katrs says something in response, but I don’t hear him. Every other body I possess goes limp, all of my brains fully devoted to the problem in front of me. He’s sick. He has no medicine. I have no medicine. I am not a Sthrenslian doctor. Even with arguably-perfect knowledge of Sthrenslian biology, how am I supposed to help him? He has an infection. He has an immune system. It’s losing. What can I do to make it win? I have poison, but it will hurt him as much as it would bacteria. What can I do? If only I knew what exactly the infection was…!

Wait. I’m so fucking stupid. I swallow, staring at the pus-rich discharge of blood and bacteria leaking out from all over his body and twisting my perception to recognize it not as the instinctively revolting substance my human brain evolved to recognize as dangerous, but as the complex microbiome of potential food my new body knows it to be. I can comprehend and produce life on a cellular level.

I can save him.

“Don’t touch me while I do this,” I order Healer Katrs. “I might hurt you to make you stop.”

Then I drop down next to Katrk, bite one of his wounds, and start to drink.

39 Evelyn Medical Technician (EMT)

It’s a testament to the sheer inhumanity of my current existence that drinking deeply infected bacteria-rich pus tastes great.

Normally it wouldn’t, I think, but I’m making a point to focus on the microbiome, and from that perspective I’m ingesting quite the smorgasbord. Most of it I don’t care about, though; I need to break apart and identify this disease, and I need to do it now. Frustratingly, the reality is worse than I thought. One particular strain of bacteria is causing the bulk of the damage, but plenty of others have moved in as well, causing a rapidly-escalating problem. I break them all down into component proteins, frantically searching my memory for the knowledge of something that should be there, that should be absolutely fucking everywhere. I don’t have antibiotics, sure. But since I can craft microorganisms, I should have something just as good.

Bacteriophages.

It’s an open question whether or not viruses are alive, but my body doesn’t seem to care about those semantics: it’s still a construction of biological material, so I can still reverse-engineer them. Sure enough, one of my hard-working brains dredges up information that will be useful: a virus that hunts and infects bacteria in the same way these bacteria are trying to infest the cells of Warrior Katrk. These little bastards are like microscopic alien chestbursters, overriding the genetic code of victim cells and forcing them to produce more and more baby bacteria until they literally explode. Well, two can play at that game. Bacteriophages are pretty damn cool because they do this exact thing to a specific kind of bacteria, and only to that specific kind of bacteria. They’re actually being developed and tested back on Earth to combat our growing superbug problem, and while I’m not really a medical biologist I think that whole thing is pretty fucking exciting. If I can rapidly develop a series of bacteriophages to combat the diseases in Katrk’s body, I should be able to—

“What in Sss’ name are you doing!?“ Healer Katrs demands, lashing a tendril around my body and pulling me off of Katrk.

My teeth are still around the wound, so the yank pulls a tiny chunk of Katrk’s flesh as well as my body. I instinctively swallow it, turning to glare at Katrs with wide-eyed fury as every Evelyn Tinkerbell Enhanced I have in the area returns to functionality and starts zipping this way.

“Let go,” I order, digging my tiny bug claws into the tendril around my waist and starting to peel it off of me. Katrs responds by catching me in a claw as well.

“You will not eat my patient like some kind of demon!” Katrs snarls. “You are no longer welcome in my home!”

“I’m not eating him!” I snap. “I can heal him! Let go!“

“He’s beyond saving, you foul creature. Let him return to Sss in peace!”

I pump fluid into my limbs, damaging my body for the strength needed to start opening his claws. I don’t have time for this religious bullshit. Katrk needs help now.

“Let go,” I repeat. “Last warning.”

Two seconds later, he still hasn’t started to release me so other parts of myself fly straight into his home and slam into him, ganging up to hold him down. My Evelyn Terrestrial bodies—the larger, more digging-focused specialists that I’ve been using to drag food from the surface down the tunnels to help feed the Resonant Gems—drop what they’re doing and start running into the Resonant Gem city for the first time. I’ve been keeping them secret so as to not spook anybody, but I just don’t have any fucking time for that anymore.

While I wrestle with Healer Katrs and various other nearby Sthrenslians that have started to join the melee, I’m still devoting most of my collective brainpower to designing the bacteriophages. I’ve identified a slew of different kinds of phages that I’ve ingested recently, and by simulating their function I can create ones built to target the infections inside Warrior Katrk. The problem I’m worried about is mutation. I need to make my phages exceptionally fast and efficient. There are millions, possibly billions, maybe even trillions of harmful bacteria cells inside Katrk during an infection of this scale. If my phages work, they’re going to end up even higher in number after the fact, and I have no idea how much genetic drift that’s likely to cause now, let alone months or years down the line. Like, literally, I don’t know how that works and my crazy super-simulation brain doesn’t have anywhere near enough processing power to extrapolate a guess. I’m built around intelligently designing life; the natural process of evolution isn’t part of how my body functions in any way. So, you know, something something checkmate atheists, except not actually because I’m obviously a major exception and the more I learn about myself the more convinced I am of philosophical materialism.

I buzz one of my bodies over to Warrior Katrk while the others keep the slowly-growing mob busy, since someone had to yank my teeth out of him and now he’s bleeding. I put pressure on the new wound, mentally cursing the healer. The last thing Katrk fucking needs is blood loss on top of everything else!

“Evelyn!” I hear priestess Saslitak shriek. “Evelyn, what are you doing? Stop!”

“Make Katrs stop!” I snap back.

“This one bit my patient!” Katrs protests. “They’re all insane!”

More and more Sthrenslians arrive and immediately start peeling my bodies off of Healer Katrs, despite my discordant hisses of frustration. But before anyone can pull me away from my lifesaving duties a second time, they all feel the ETs arrive. With six powerful limbs, an acid-spewing tail, and an upright anatomy alien to anything Sthrenslians have seen before bar me, my tunneling bodies garner a level of fear and respect far beyond anything I’m used to as I thunder into the cave to back myself up. I’m so angry right now. I don’t have the spare goddamn brainpower to waste on idiots trying to stop me from saving a life!

“Leave me alone!“ I roar with an ET, to the obvious confusion of many Sthrenslians present. Right, the not-a-hive-mind lie.

“We are also of clan Evelyn,” I explain. “Katrs has declared Warrior Katrk beyond his ability to save. He’s not beyond ours. So step the fuck off, because I am going to save him with or without your permission. I’m not going to let him die!”

“I… Evelyn,” Saslitak stammers, addressing one of my smaller bodies. “I don’t understand. These are your clanmates?”

“Trust me, Priestess Saslitak,” I ask her. “Please?”

There’s a pause as everyone seems to wait on the Priestess’ decision. Apparently only a chieftain can overrule an order from a priestess. Despite all the time we’ve spent together over the past twenty-four hours, though, I don’t know how she’ll react to this. Part of that is just because I’m only dimly aware of the entire conflict. One of my ETEs has a broken arm, two have wings that are now too shattered to fly with… it’s not a fight I was winning before my ETs showed up. Yet it’s difficult to care much about it when the vast majority of my existence is devoted to the mental war between the fear of creating a deadly super-virus beyond my control vs. the need to save Katrk right now, or else it might be too late.

Perhaps the trick isn’t somehow preventing random mutations—because like, how would I even do that—but somehow controlling the outcome. I can control my body’s internal functions, and I can even make modifications on the fly. Clearly I’m capable of exerting control over cells somehow, at least as long as those cells are part of me. So come on, you damn stupid brain. Show me how I work.

I tear through knowledge of my own cells, searching for hints. When I try to investigate my antennae cells, though, my thoughts just seem to slide right off of the damn things. There’s something worthwhile to see but I can’t focus on it! Why? All of my bodies need to have antennae, and I designed all my bodies, so why can’t I figure out how they work!? Tara’s human bodies never had antennae, so what did she figure out that I haven’t? I try to brute force the issue, but focus has never been my strong suit and it doesn’t take me long to feel helpless in front of what is clearly an unnatural compulsion on top of my already brutal ADHD.

“Fuck it,” I hiss, and reach over with one of my ETEs to bite off another one’s antenna.

The Sthrenslians shout in alarm as I shriek in agony, but I render that body unconscious and try to focus on the antennae again now that it’s in my mouth. It’s just a dense cell cluster of… of something. It’s small. Organelle-size at most. There’s a ton of them, maybe billions of them, all packed densely into the long stalks poking out of my head. They must send and receive the signals between my body somehow. Will they work if I put them in… hmm. They will. They’re already present in some of my cells. I try to create a few bacteria containing the microscopic receptor, though, and I’m gripped with the same terror that attacks me whenever I leave my own corpses lying around. God damnit, instincts, what do you want now!?

“What’s happening?” Saslitak squeals. “Why are you doing this? Stop! Everyone, just stop!”

Bodies can’t be left behind, no matter how small. Ugh. Can I create some kind of self-disintegration feature into my bodies, triggerable on command or death? Maybe I can keep like… an acid capsule in the communication organelle that will remove any non-elemental trace of it. Hmm, would making a bunch of viruses with tiny drops of acid inside them hurt a Sthrenslian…? No, looks like the acid quantities are so comically microscopic that they’ll finish reacting with my organelles long before they can enter the body, at which point they’re just useless but perfectly filterable waste product. Good. Great. Now I just need to produce enough of these to overpower the infection! They’ll multiply like crazy, but I’ll be able to destroy them when their job is done. Frustratingly, I have to step in with a few ETs to hold the Sthrenslians back while I work. It’s pretty damn annoying to do so without hurting any of them.

On the subject of pain, I guess I should check up and make sure none of my bodies are dying. Hmm… the aquatic bodies need to take a breath. Borks are fine. Squad Evelyn is fine. None of the injured ETEs are going to bleed out, I keep hearing Hsthressis’ mother scream her name but nothing in that area is damaged… I guess we’re good. Back to saving lives.

The infection has spread so completely that some bacterial clumps are visible. I’m not going to be able to produce sufficient phage numbers from food stores alone, but that’s fine. I’m literally made out of biological material. I start forcing the ETE tending to Warrior Katrk to metabolize itself, creating as much bacteriophage-filled gunk as I can. I’m dimly aware that just dumping it out from between my legs over an open wound would be kind of disgusting, but more importantly it would be an incredibly inefficient method compared to intravenous injection. I open the necessary holes in my organs to pump the biomedical goo up into my mouth so I can push it into smaller punctures that way.

My millions of virus bodies flow into Warrior Katrk’s bloodstream, immediately setting out to attack his infection with extreme prejudice. I suppose calling them ‘my bodies’ is somewhat of an overstatement; viruses are far too simple in structure to do anything beyond following the natural commands built into their protein structure, and my control over them basically amounts to ‘activate the kill switch’ or ‘don’t activate the kill switch.’ I can feel them with my interbody proprioception, though, allowing me to vaguely track their progress and reproduction rate. The other part of the goop I’m injecting into Katrk is basically an extremely ghetto IV solution, which my mental simulations report as likely to improve his survival rate. It’d be kinda bullshit if I killed all these bacteria just for him to die of dehydration. Which is exactly what I do, now that I’ve converted most of a body’s internal organs into phages and fluid.

My desiccated ETE winks out of my perception as she flops off of Warrior Katrk, stone cold dead. I move the corpse out of the way, taking its place with another body so I can better try and monitor Katrk’s condition. Damn it, I wish I had more medical training. All of this bullshit had better fucking work.

I’ve no way to know other than wait, though, so slowly but surely my adrenaline starts to wind down and my bodies start to be more completely aware of their surroundings, my mental capacity no longer shunted into a single, extra-complicated task.

The Sthrenslians in and around Healer Katrs’ hut have finally stopped fighting me, at least, barring the couple aggressively holding the body that ate and swallowed another one of my body’s antennae. Katrs is arguing furiously with Priestess Saslitak, whose responses are much more quiet.

“They’re bringing in warriors and casting curses in my home, priestess! You must be mad to—”

“We do not know if these are curses or magic, Healer Katrs,” Saslitak responds. “As much as they seem gripped by some foul affliction, I—”

“Seem!?” the healer snaps, cutting her off. “You would say they seem to—”

“Katrs,” Saslitak says firmly. “You are respected, but do not forget your place.”

Clearly seething with fury, he still shuts up. I return to cataloguing the rest of my bodies as they wake up and start stretching, noting with some concern that one of them seems to have gone blind. I stand up and move it around, trying to figure out which… oh fucking hell! I quickly bring Hsthressis back to consciousness, and she yelps in surprise as her mother picks her up in a grateful hug.

“You’re moving!” Chlrehistra sobs, or at least performs the tearless alien equivalent. “Oh, Sss’ whiskers, you’re moving again. You wouldn’t wake up, you wouldn’t wake up and I thought I’d lost you again…!”

“Wh-what? Huh?” Hsthressis asks with a jolt. “What are you talking about? When did you get here, mom?”

Sorry, I send to her. This is my fault. I accidentally knocked you out.

“What the fuck, Evelyn!?” she sends back. “Are you fucking serious? Again? This isn’t goddamn working!”

Yeah. Sorry.

I retreat from her mind to try and not bother her time with her mother any more. God, I’m such a fuckup. Warrior Katrk needs to live…!

“Evelyn?” Priestess Saslitak says quietly. “Er, whichever Evelyn wants to answer. Are you alright?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I say, sighing. “I mean, we’re fine.”

“One of… um. One of your clan members isn’t breathing.”

I glance down at where I’ve left my corpse, its presence always pulsing in the back of my mind with the urge to consume and reclaim it.

“Yeah, I mean, this one’s dead,” I admit. “But hopefully Katrk will be okay as a result.”

Silence. The weight of disbelief and horror is heavy, but I’m officially burnt out, physically and emotionally. I’ve been awake for nearly forty-eight hours now, I think? Two of however long an Acidsucks day is, anyway. I don’t care. I’ve used up all of my care. I just have to stay awake a bit longer, so I can monitor Katrk’s condition until I’m certain he will survive. I’m winning against the infection, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he’ll heal.

“Evelyn, no,” Saslitak whispers. “You have already given us so much. Do not give us the lives of your clanmates. Please. We cannot accept such a tainted gift.”

I pick up my dead body, passing it over to an ET so I can walk out of the cave and eat it.

“Don’t worry about it,” I tell her. “That body is not dead in the way you understand death. We’re all still Evelyn. This death is a setback. But Katrs? His death would be a tragedy.”

I’m still not the best at reading alien body language, but Saslitak at that moment appeared so fundamentally sad that I couldn’t have missed it if I tried.

“You mustn’t think of your people that way,” she insists.

Heh. That hard-to-translate word again. ‘People.’ In this case, what she really said was ‘you mustn’t think of your subordinate Sthrenslians that way,’ referring to my other bodies as Sthrenslians because they just don’t have another word to use.

“We aren’t Sthrenslians,” I say firmly. “We’re Evelyn. The way we work is very different from the way you work. I just don’t really want to explain it. Okay?”

“What? But… why not?”

“Because I just spent two days trying to save this guy’s life, got nearly snipped in half by your fucking healer, and then I died again converting my insides into bacteriophagic mush! I’m fucking tired, Saslitak! Leave me alone!“

Everyone seems shocked and mildly offended by that outburst. What the fuck did I… ugh, right, I forgot to call her ‘Priestess Saslitak.’ Well fine, from now on Evelyns are above priestesses in this stupid bullshit caste system they have. I don’t give a shit anymore!

“I… I think the chieftain will want to speak with you, Evelyn,” Saslitak says.

“I’ll talk to him after I rest,” I grunt.

“May I ask when that will be?”

I glower at her a bit, though the expression is no doubt lost on her.

“When I’m no longer needed,” I decide.

40 Girl’s Night (Plus One Alex)

“Goodness gracious, I can actually breathe!” Tara announces emphatically, inhaling deeply to prove it. Loaded down with a dozen shopping bags, she nonetheless seems more lively than ever before.

“Of course, honey!” Sasha coos, sliding her long, painted nails down the sleeve of Tara’s shirt. “Have you never worn something that actually fits? You poor, tortured soul!”

“I’m sorry, okay!?” I blurt out. “I knew it was bad but I couldn’t buy anything. I don’t have any money!”

It has been a stressful shopping trip, to say the least. Not only am I extremely uncomfortable hanging out with Sasha and Alex at all, but they’re fawning over my friend and making me feel like garbage for trapping her in my shitty clothes. And then there’s all the money Sasha keeps throwing around! I tried to avoid letting her spend anything on me but I think she’s snuck things in anyway. I’ve never seen anyone spend this much money in my life!

“Oh, Evelyn…” Tara starts, looking back sympathetically. It’s Sasha that gets to me first, though.

“Honey, please!” Sasha implores, running over, grabbing each of my arms and immediately sending my entire body into a panic. “You don’t have to apologize for giving someone a place to live and not having it be a luxury hotel! I’m happy to do this!”

“I know! I know. Sorry,” I respond, trying not to completely lose it. Holy shit, she’s so touchy! Why is she touching me!? Sasha is not at all on the list of people I’m comfortable letting touch me.

“Yo, Sasha,” Alex says, stepping in and flicking the crazy rich girl on the forehead. “I’m hungry. Let’s head to the food court.”

“Alex!” Sasha stage-whispers indignantly. “Is now really the best time?”

“I promise you, it is,” Alex insists, pulling Sasha off me with a yank. “You like Chinese food, Eve? The Chinese place here is way better than it has any right to be.”

“Um, yeah,” I stammer. “That sounds great?”

Alex gives me a thumbs up and shoots Sasha a triumphant smirk. Sasha, bewildered but thankfully not touching me anymore, throws her arms in the air and stomps towards the food court. Tara stares back at the exchange, a twitching smile on her face mere moments from laughter. She follows after Sasha as the exasperated young woman passes by, leaving Alex and I in the back.

“Sorry, she’s handsy,” Alex whispers at me. “The Chinese food really is good, though. I hear you shouldn’t get the orange chicken because they just tried to copy Panda and it did not fucking work for them. Everything else, though. Damn! They sub tofu for anything and it’s fucking delicious, you have no idea.”

I definitely don’t have any idea, because I’ve never liked tofu, but I’m glad Alex does I suppose.

“Yeah,” I answer, nodding. I don’t really have a lot of words left right now.

Alex gives me a critical glance, then nods in return. The two of us make the rest of the walk to the food court in silence, letting Tara and Sasha do all the chatting ahead of us. I start to relax a little, my assessment of the situation changing. Alex may in fact be Pretty Cool™.

I take the advice I’m given and try out the Chinese place, which does indeed turn out to be far better than it has any right to be. What is a place like this doing tucked away in a mall food court? Sure, it may make me want to chug water until I explode, but MSG is dang delicious. Tara and Sasha continue chattering away as I munch in silence. Mmm… General Tso’s.

“So, where are you from, exactly?” Sasha comments offhandedly. “You speak English quite fluently, so it can’t be that odd of a place.”

“Ah, well… it’s somewhat of a personal matter, I’m afraid,” Tara deflects. “Suffice to say I did not have adequate time to pack my things before I was forced to move.”

“Is it okay if I guess?” Alex asks. “Because now I really want to guess.”

Tara chuckles awkwardly.

“I suppose, but I reserve the right to remain silent.”

“You ran away from home because you’re gay,” Alex says, causing me to choke on a sprig of broccoli.

“Er, pardon?” Tara asks, taken aback.

“It’s just my first guess,” Alex shrugs. “I have a friend from Pennsylvania and one from the South who had to run away from home cuz of abuse over stuff like that. I guess you could also be from Europe, but if you’re already from Europe there are way better places to flee to in Europe than all the way over the Atlantic, so… y’know.”

Tara looks genuinely flabbergasted.

“Er… no,” she says slowly. “I’m afraid I don’t know at all. You’re talking about homosexuality? I was not aware that’s considered okay anywhere.”

Alex tenses up a bit.

“Is there a reason it shouldn’t be…?”

Tara hesitates, her eyes flicking away nervously. Shoot, this is kind of my fault, isn’t it? I’ve avoided talking to Tara about anything related to relationships or sex on account of me being an awkward loser, but of course that’s coming back to bite me. Shit, what if her culture is actually super homophobic? She catches my gaze, taking a nervous sip of water.

“I, ah, can’t think of a very compelling one…?” Tara admits slowly, causing Alex to relax a little. “Please excuse me, it was just an ignorant assumption. My knowledge of cultural issues is about on the level of… er, well, of an old hermit living in the woods for fifty years, I suppose.”

Oof. Tara and I both wince at that. It’s not inaccurate, but it’s a bit too soon. Sasha and Alex don’t pick up on the context, of course. In fact, they smile.

“Oh, you’re good, girl!” Alex happily answers. “Nothing wrong with that. The way we see it, though, oppressing people for doing shit that isn’t hurting anyone is just plain fucking evil. Lots of cultures and religions dress up being a bastard to certain groups as a noble thing because old books told them the afterlife is better that way, but it’s all a load of horseshit.”

“I… see,” Tara murmurs, her eyes flicking back and forth almost like she’s reading something. Actually, one of her bodies is still at the library, isn’t it? I wouldn’t put it past her to be rapidly looking up these issues as we speak. “Please accept my apologies. I have quite honestly never thought about any of this before.”

“Hey, it’s cool!” Alex reassures her. “You’re a lot more chill about it than most fifty-year-old hermits are, so give yourself some credit.”

“Thank you,” Tara responds formally. “I am… out of my depth lately, and trying very hard to keep an open mind. I think I am learning just as much about my culture as I am about yours, to be frank.”

Alex laughs, and that seems to be the end of it. Tara deflects any further questions about her homeland, pushing Sasha back to clothes, a topic she’s all too eager to discuss. I, meanwhile, managed to find myself in a conversation about videogames! Although it turns out Alex doesn’t seem to like strategy games very much, so minus two coolness points there. What kind of wacky opposite favorite game selection is “The Wind Waker’’ and”Resident Evil 4?”

“Well, what’s your favorite game?” Alex challenges.

Oh boy. I hate this question.

“I mean… I like StarCraft?” I hedge.

That’s a pretty popular game, and I definitely like it a lot, so that should pretty much settle it. Alex is too sharp, though.

“So lukewarm! Where’s the passion? Come on, what’s your actual favorite game? The game you keep going back to and never get tired of? The game you have nostalgia goggles on so tight for that nothing compares or ever will?”

“Um, I don’t know if I’d describe it like that…”

“Tell me!”

I sigh.

“…Drone Tactics,” I mumble.

“What’s that?”

“Drone Tactics!” I repeat more loudly.

“No, I mean, what’s that?” Alex asks. “I’ve never heard of it.”

“Oh, um, it’s just a turn-based strategy game for DS,” I answer truthfully.

Alex pulls out a phone and immediately starts looking it up. Curse that ambiguously-gendered sleuth!

“…You’re studying to be an entomologist, right?” Alex says.

“Yes,” I squeak, my face reddening.

“I can’t help but notice this is a game about giant robots that are all shaped like bugs,” Alex points out.

“…Yes,” I squeak more quietly, my blush reaching critical mass.

“That’s cool,” Alex says enthusiastically. “How does it work? Tell me about it.”

Instinctively prepared for an onslaught of jokes and jabs, I barely even hear the response until I go back and think about it a second time. Did Alex just ask me to talk about Drone Tactics? Nobody asked me to talk about Drone Tactics! Tara doesn’t even care about Drone Tactics!

I take a deep breath.

“Well basically, these kids who really like bugs get teleported to another planet…”

My ramble starts and I instinctively know that it won’t stop. Someone has just prodded one of my hyperfocuses and so I am going to talk and talk and talk and be horribly embarrassed about it later. Yet I’m dimly aware that Alex actually seems to possess genuine interest about the topic, which is… I don’t even know what that is!

Half an hour later, the conversation is still going strong. The food has long since finished, and while Tara grilled Sasha for fashion questions she was all too happy to answer, I continued babbling away about my weird bug game for children. It’s actually really cool! I don’t feel like I’m being overwhelmed by strangers. I’m just having a fun conversation with a single person, and the fact that two other people are also here isn’t bothering me as much in that light.

“…So honestly the inclusion of a butterfly unit doesn’t make sense from a design standpoint,” I complain, “because while I get that they’re popular insects for their superficial qualities the developers probably could’ve just ditched the concept of beam weapons and made better insect-themed long-range attacks like silk bindings or formic acid sprays or something.”

“Yeah, it sounds like they’re kind of double-dipping on the mech crowd and the bug crowd,” Alex agrees.

“They absolutely are!” I grumble. “It sucks because there’s so much conflict there. I wish it was full-on insect stuff. Like maybe have the main characters shrink down and command actual intelligent insects instead of huge bug robots? Or maybe have them turn into insects? Or maybe just ditch the whole isekai part of the plot and let you play as bug people? I get that they’re trying to keep it kid friendly and not too violent, though, so robots are a good way to manage that.”

“Oh yeah, because blowing up robots is way less violent,” Alex scoffs. “You said these robots are intelligent, right? So aren’t you fighting other intelligent robots? That’s still killing people.”

“Eh, you’re just kind of fighting ambiguously evil robots,” I hedge. “The game is not exactly carried by its plot.”

“Darn ambiguously evil robots,” Alex curses. “It’s a good thing our society cultivates children and teenagers, their only known natural predators.”

Tara does a startled double-take, her attention suddenly pulled into our conversation.

“Did I miss something?” she asks.

Alex gives me an accusatory look.

“Have you not shown her anime?”

“I don’t think she’s ready for anime,” I admit solemnly.

“No one is ever truly ready,” Sasha intones. “To this day, I still haven’t recovered.”

“What’s anime?” Tara asks. “Why are you all grinning like that?”

Before I know it we’re out of the food court, in the parking lot and laughing loudly on the sidewalk back to campus, the four of us scrunched around Alex’s phone laughing at clips from Yakitate!! Japan. We’re about halfway back to campus when it starts getting very dark out, which automatically sets off my anxious danger senses. Clearly, my brain insists, I’m about to get mugged because the sun has set and I have boobs. I’d better make sure to hold my keys in my hand as I walk so that I can use them as a makeshift knife in case of attack! Sure, my logic brain knows that it’s not particularly late, and even for a group of girls (plus one Alex) there is little to fear in my quiet, peaceful town. On my left is a busy street, on my right is a fancy residential district. Everyone but Tara has their own cell phone, and if things really get down to it Tara has a history of coming out on top against violent people with guns. For all my history of problems, my stresses, my panic attacks, and my tears, right now I almost believe I’m safe. And if nothing else, I know I’m happy. I can, sometimes, get nice things and keep them.

I’ve made a new friend today, I think. I’m still not totally sure about Sasha, but Alex is a shoe-in for the Pretty Cool™ category after all. Plus, my amazing alien friend now has clothes that fit her, more friends that care about her, and more knowledge every day of what it means to be human. These are good people. As a helpless loser who’s never dated anyone before I’m not the right person to teach Tara about a lot of this stuff. And that’s okay.

“I truly cannot thank you all enough,” Tara says, turning around to address the three of us at once. “Today has been quite enjoyable. I am touched by your kindness and patience.”

“You talk like such an old lady!” Alex laughs, to which Tara and I carefully don’t react. “We’ve had fun too, right Sasha?”

“Oh, absolutely!” Sasha agrees. “And don’t listen to Alex, you speak like a person with dignity. Our conversations have been quite enjoyable!”

“Thank you both,” Tara nods. “And Sasha, I will seriously consider your offer to pay me for the photographs. It sounds entertaining, and I could certainly use the—”

Tara suddenly stops speaking, her expression switching to shock. She drops her bags.

“Tara?” I ask, panic rising.

“Evelyn, is it normal to… I… no, this can’t…” Tara stammers, her whole body tense as she glances around in shock.

“Tara!? Is everything okay?”

She looks me in the eyes. My phone buzzes. She bolts.

To my surprise, I react quickly, sprinting after her. I’m not out of shape, but Tara is like lightning, blitzing down the street at speeds that don’t seem humanly possible. I suppose they probably aren’t.

Tara is running directly into the cluster of residential housing we were just passing by. She takes a sharp turn through a fancy, well-kept lawn and leaps onto the porch, slamming her shoulder into the front door. A thud resounds through the night, followed by more as she kicks the door twice, three times, until finally the wood shatters and she breaks into the home.

“Tara!” I scream, “Tara, what are you—”

I sprint up the houses long after her, mind screaming in full panic mode. What is she doing? Why did she suddenly smash someone’s door in? Should I keep following? Should I run away? No. She’s my friend, and she’s a superpowered alien. I’m somewhat responsible for this. I have to know.

Breath ragged, I barrel into the house after her. I hear a scream, an enraged shout, a clatter. Tara’s voice swears furiously in her home language. I follow the noise, dashing down the hallway, feet springing on the fancy carpet as I burst into the kitchen.

Tara has her knee on the sternum of the screaming man, bone jutting from his very broken arm. Her hand covers his face, fingers poised as if to pluck out his eyes as she screams right back in a language no one else understands. I’m beyond horrified. What is she…

Quiet sobbing erupts from my right. I turn my head, and sitting on the floor I spot a bloodied woman huddling in a corner, bruises already forming around her neck. I try to swallow, but my mouth is dry.

Tara had been spying on these people, and she witnessed something horrible.

41 Authority Figures

Blood is on the floor.

Two strangers lay in an unfamiliar kitchen, Tara pinning one as she snarls in fury. The man under her is just as wrathful, one of his arms broken and the other bent painfully in her grasp. They spit curses at each other.

A woman lies to my right, propped in a barely-sitting position against her kitchen counter. Bruises line her neck, more still welling up beneath the skin as I watch. She wears long sleeves despite the hot weather. Desperate tears pour down her face, head in her hands. She does not look at or acknowledge me.

What should I do?

Ha. Such a useless question. What can I do? I open my mouth to speak to her, but no words come out. I kneel down to offer comfort, but I only collapse to my knees. It’s hard to focus on anything other than how fast I’m breathing, how much I want to vomit.

“Tara, Evelyn, what the fuck is—” Alex demands, storming into the room.

“Ambulance. Police,” Tara growls, interrupting. “It’s nine-one-one in your country, yes?”

Alex only needs a second to do a double-take, face hardening as the bruised woman sobs silently.

“On it, ma’am.”

Alex’s phone is out and numbers are being pressed before I finish processing the conversation. Am I shaking? My eyes dart around the room, to the ceiling, in corners… there. That’s the bug. That one is Tara. She stares back at me, the glare somehow seeming exasperated through compound eyes. That’s fair. Am I really too useless to do anything other than find a bug? This is a crisis, and I’m… I… inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale.

Alex steps outside to handle the call. I wish I was there too, away from this. No. Focus. I have to help.

“I’ll have your fucking head for this!” the man roars, struggling in Tara’s grip despite his injuries. “You’re going to rot in jail for life!”

Fed up, Tara lets go of the man’s uninjured arm. Immediately, he goes for her throat, wrapping a huge hand around her neck and squeezing as hard as he can muster. Tara doesn’t even blink, instead leaning her face even closer to his and taking a deep breath.

“You think I’m afraid of your threats, you pathetic, disgusting man? Here’s a threat: one more word and you’ll be swallowing shards of your own jaw.”

That chills me enough to finally get my own jaw working.

“T-tara,” I manage to stammer. “That’s excessive.”

She turns on me with a furious glower.

“Really, Evelyn?” she snaps. “That’s what you manage to focus on?”

I lock up again. Tara’s disdain is a stake to the heart, and the worst part is that she’s not wrong to be disgusted. Look at how useless I am. She just saved a woman from abuse and I’m chastising her while that woman cries on the ground next to me. But what can I do? Treat her? I don’t know how. Reassure her? There’s not a single word I can say. Hug her? She’s a stranger, and one traumatized by someone touching her. What an insipidly stupid idea.

I’m worthless, and I remain worthless as emergency services arrive. The EMT people quickly take over when they get here, and I only manage to snap out of my daze when one of them starts trying to treat me. Still wobbly, I wave them off with mortified embarrassment as I try to extract myself from the house, but the police arrive seconds afterwards. I comply with them, of course, and thankfully Tara does as well. It’s a struggle to answer their questions coherently, however, and they kindly but firmly request that I return to the station with them.

I agree to, because of course I do. Outside, Alex holds back a furious Sasha, who is flailing and yelling at a rather annoyed female cop. Spotting Tara and I being escorted out, she swaps to yelling at us instead.

“Don’t you two tell them anything!” she demands. “I called my lawyers! You have rights!”

I’m dimly aware it would almost be comical, if not for the circumstances. We’re not being arrested. Technically. We still let them lead us into police cars. They try to put Tara in a different car, and succeed, but she slips into my car as well. Her new scout bodies are smaller, their camouflage better. Chillingly, I realize I’m not sure if having her watch over me is comforting or worrying. What’s she even going to do if something happens to me? Break out of a police car on the road?

…Actually, she might.

It doesn’t come to that, thank goodness. We’re led into the police station. Sasha’s promised lawyers come in short order. They tell me what to say, and I say it. I eventually leave. Tara doesn’t, but I’m not surprised to find her already waiting at home regardless, wearing a different outfit.

She’s sitting on my bed despite having her own, face contorted in a pained expression. She doesn’t look up at me when I walk in, but then again she’s probably looking at me anyway.

“Are they going to keep you at the station?” I ask softly.

“Well, I am an illegal alien,” she chuckles mirthlessly. “Their words. Regardless of what they think about the break-in, they seem disinclined to let me walk out when they have no way to contact me. I’m not a citizen, I’m not otherwise in their records, I have no address or phone number…”

She trails off, waving a hand to indicate the implied ‘etcetera.’

“Are you going to be okay?” I ask.

She snorts.

“Of course I will. What are they going to do, put me in jail? Oh no, one of my bodies will be fed for free and I can just make any number of others to replace it. They can’t fine me because I don’t own a single thing. They can’t deport me because I’m stateless, and even if they give me the death penalty… I’ll still be alive.”

Ah. Tara is… kind of unpunishable, isn’t she? There are no consequences large enough for her.

“They’re not going to give you the death penalty,” I assure her anyway.

“I know,” she answers tiredly. “I’m just saying. There’s not a single thing they can do to me. It doesn’t matter what they think.”

I nod slowly, carefully trying not to let my tension evolve into another full-blown panic attack.

“But you care anyway, don’t you?” I whisper. “About what they think?”

She smiles sadly, nodding. I relax a bit. Of course she does. I know she does. People matter to her, it’s why I trust her.

“Their opinions are mixed,” she admits. “The two female officers insist I’m a hero, as well as a few of the men. Most don’t. One described me as a ‘terrorist,’ and the rest change the subject when asked. Well, all of them change the subject if they think I’m listening, but… well, you know.”

“Yeah.”

I approach the bed, sitting down next to her and leaning back with my feet dangling over the edge. I’m exhausted, physically and emotionally. But Tara doesn’t have anyone else she can talk to, so I listen.

“It’s… a bit of an odd divide,” she eventually ventures.

“There’s valid points on both sides,” I say, shrugging helplessly. “It’s illegal to break into someone’s home because they have a right to property. It’s illegal to spy on people because they have a right to privacy, even if no one knows you did that. You saved someone from violent abuse by taking both of those rights away from them and their abuser.”

The words feel like they come out of me so callously. Part of me says it’s just exhaustion, but part of me reminds myself that I’ve never been the victim of anything even close to that before. Tara turns her head towards me, looking at me through her human body for the first time since I walked in. Her expression is… searching.

“I don’t care about that man’s rights,” she says bluntly. “Not if they let him strangle someone without retaliation.”

“Yeah,” I agree. “You did the right thing.”

We stare at each other for a while, neither of us sure what to say. In the end, Tara finds her words first, as she usually does.

“…I’m sorry,” she manages, looking away once more. “You were right too. I fought violence with violence. Excessively. Once I had him pinned, there was no cause to threaten him further. Breaking his arm in the first place was…”

She sighs, shaking her head.

“Sorry,” she repeats. “I never should have snapped at you. Certainly not for the truth.”

A hidden tension in my body lifts, and I manage to smile.

“Thanks, Tara,” I say, sitting up to give her a hug. “Apology accepted. You weren’t wrong either, though. Out of everything I should have been doing there, that—”

“Hey, it’s okay,” Tara cuts me off, pulling me in to return the embrace. She kind of hugs like a limp fish, although considering what I saw her do a few hours ago perhaps she’s just trying not to break my bones. “What happened today is way, way outside your element. Mine too, I just have a few extra brains to help deal with the shock. And yet I still did not handle that well. At all. I mean, I’m glad I did what I did, but…”

I nod. Aw, shoot. The tears are starting. Come on, not now! Naturally, they don’t listen, drops forming down my face regardless of my internal protest.

“You were kind of scary,” I manage to choke out.

“Yes,” Tara agrees softly. “I am.”

I continue crying on her shoulder for a good twenty minutes before awkwardly collapsing into bed. I wake up with my clothes on, sunlight burning an awkward red line across my cheek.

Tara is nowhere to be seen.

…

I wake up, successfully remembering to incarnate Hsthressis and grant her autonomy. I’m getting better at that, hopefully. I don’t remember falling asleep, though.

“No, there it was!” Hsthressis whines. “I saw it, I understood it! Why do you keep taking it away?”

Fuck, she saw my dreams again. Okay. I really, really need to deal with that, somehow, but… ugh. How long was I even asleep, anyway? It looks like it’s midday, right now. I thrash around a little and realize some of my bodies are currently in eggs. Ah, right. My Dire Bork and my additional The Little Evelyns. I crafted them in order to help my rapid exploration, but I guess I don’t need them anymore. Not for that.

I currently still have one body in Healer Katrs’ hut, sleeping on the floor. I glance over to where Warrior Katrk is sleeping, staring intently until I confirm the subtle rise and fall of his breathing. Thank goodness. He’s still alive.

“I did it,” I mutter, smiling faintly.

“You sure did something,” Healer Katrs grunts, startling me. “The infection is gone. He even woke up briefly and ate a little. The man’s going to make it. Your death magic works, whatever it is.”

“It’s not magic,” I grumble. “I just figured out something more effective than popmold.”

“And one of your clanmates died for it. Still… I suppose I’d rather it be one of yours than one of mine.”

I snort.

“That almost sounded like a thank-you.”

“Then you need to get your whiskers checked.”

I sigh and slump back down, not really wanting to argue. Or move. Unfortunately, most of my bodies need to move, and one in particular is being ordered to.

“Chieftain Chlrehistra demands your presence,” the guard to my cell in the True People city insists. “Come with me at once.”

I nod and get up to follow, noting that Hsthressis has stopped bothering me because she’s being similarly summoned. Which reminds me, I agreed to meet the Resonant Gems chieftain after resting, and passing out for who-knows-how-long definitely counts as a rest. I head that way as well.

“Evelyn!” Hsthressis shouts once the two of us get close enough to hear each other. “Evelyn, you have to help me convince mom to listen to you! She just thinks I’m going crazy!”

“You’re kind of acting crazy, Hsthressis,” I answer bluntly. “Maybe tone it down a little?”

“Tone it… Evelyn, you figured out how the whole world works with numbers! Sss and Khlasinas don’t even exist!“

I tense up, and so does everyone else. Shit. Shit, that isn’t good.

“Hsthressis!” Chlrehistra snaps, because of course we just became close enough for her to hear us. “What blasphemy are you sprouting now? Get over here!”

“Yeah, yeah,” Hsthressis dismisses.

“Please don’t antagonize your mother, Hsthressis,” I groan.

“Don’t antagonize her? She put us in jail!”

“Both of you, be quiet!” Chlrehistra orders. “We are going somewhere private for this conversation.”

Hsthressis and I obligingly shut up, letting ourselves be escorted to an out-of-the-way cavern far enough from the main city to prevent accidental eavesdroppers and quiet enough to detect any purposeful ones. Almost automatically, I start regulating my brain chemistry to mitigate the effects of anxiety and help myself focus. I realize this absolutely breaks the agreement I set with myself about not editing my own brain, but I’ve been doing it for days now and I don’t really want to stop. There’s not a single fucking chance I could have saved Katrk without fixing my shitty brain at least a little, so I can’t say I regret it a whole ton. I should probably set another ‘don’t fuck with your brain more than this’ rule, but what would be the point? I’ve pretty much proven to myself that I can’t trust my own self-control unless I artificially force it to exist, and ironically I don’t want to do that.

I’m startled out of my thoughts as I once again forget about the Sthrenslian habit to start speaking to people long before they’re in the same room with you. The Resonant Gems chieftain calls out my name in greeting.

“Evelyn!” he greets warmly. “I hope you and your clan had a restful sleep! We noticed you all lost consciousness at the same time, so I asked some of my warriors to watch over you. I trust there were no complications?”

Watch over me? I don’t recall any warriors being… oh, right, duh. ‘Watch’ as in ‘anywhere within sensory range.’ Zero for two, Evelyn.

“No, I… we slept well,” I acknowledge, trying to fight the urge to raise my voice when talking to someone so damn far away. “We were quite exhausted, so your patience is very much appreciated, Chieftain.”

“Well, if you’re done sleeping, it’s time to talk,” Chieftain Chilrehistra snaps, now that we’re far enough from the True People city to speak freely. Four of her warriors accompany us, but that’s all. “You keep passing out at inconvenient times while my daughter spouts nonsense. She’s getting worse, not better.”

“I agree,” I say.

“Wh—hey!” Hsthressis snaps. “I don’t agree! It’s not nonsense!”

“Hush, Hsthressis,” Chlrehistra orders.

I hesitate.

“Well, I don’t know what she’s been telling you,” I say. “But there’s a good chance it isn’t nonsense. What I was agreeing to is the idea that our… link, I guess, is much more difficult to manage than I thought, and it’s not getting better. Hsthressis, you deserve better than this.”

“You’re corrupting her,” Chlrehistra says bluntly.

“I… I don’t think that’s an accurate way to describe what’s happening,” I protest. “I promise, I want to do right by her just like you do.”

“Evelyn, I can’t help but notice that you constantly speak of agreeing with me and intending to care for my daughter, yet in practice you seem to be sitting around and waiting for her to get worse.”

I flinch.

“I… that’s fair,” I admit. “Sorry.”

“It was no trouble,” the Resonant Gem chieftain answers amicably. Thinking about it, I have no idea what his name is and now I’m too afraid to ask. “There is always something productive to do to pass the time when you look for it. I’m glad you’re here, though. I’ve heard many different accounts of the commotion at Healer Katrs’ home, but I’m quite interested in hearing it from the source, as it were.”

“Well, there’s not a whole lot to say,” I sigh. “I was searching around the planet for popmold in order to heal Katrk, when Katrs said it was too late and popmold wouldn’t help anymore. His disease had progressed too far. So I… had to develop a new healing technique. Which started with me biting Katrk, because I needed to ingest a sample of his disease. That freaked Katrs out, so he grabbed me and things escalated from there. I’m sorry if anyone got hurt, I just didn’t really have time to explain while Katrk was dying.”

“Hmm. I see. I’ve been told that this ‘healing technique’ you mentioned killed one of your own clanmates?”

“Uh… kind of,” I hedge, a brief panic flashing through me as I double-check on that dead body. Gotta make sure it’s not lying around, so… huh. I apparently ate it in my fugue yesterday. Kinda gross but I guess that works. Speaking of, I do a quick sweep of my awareness and activate the auto-disintegration organelle in every bacteriophage that managed to escape Warrior Katrk’s body. No virus plagues today!

“We’re all Evelyn,” I continue vaguely. “The person inhabiting that body isn’t actually dead. She will be fine, and so as long as Katrk is also fine I think that means we’ve gotten the best possible outcome. Apologies for frightening you.”

“Your apologies are meaningless,” Chlrehistra snaps. “So here’s what’s going to happen. You are going to fix my daughter, right here and right now. You mentioned you had a way to separate her soul from yours, did you not?”

“Woah, woah!” Hsthressis exclaims. “Don’t I get a say in this? Mom, you have no idea what’s been happening. I can’t back out now!”

“Back out of what? Hsthressis, by Sss’ warmth, do you have any idea how terrifying it is to see you just… stop? To just collapse into unresponsiveness? Do you know how terrifying it is to know it’s always listening to us through your whiskers?”

“Fuck you, mom!” Hsthressis bites back suddenly. “You really want to make this about you? I’m living through that! Do you know how terrifying that is? But I’m telling you mom, we… we have to get her help. We have to. She’s so… she’s so much more than us! She knows everything!”

“I do not know anything close to everything,” I grumble. “If I knew everything, you wouldn’t be in this mess.”

“It’s not a mess!” Hsthressis shouts. “It’s… it’s… gah! Why can’t I articulate this? Mom, the kinds of impossible wonders I’ve seen in her head… we’re nothing. We’re stupid nothings! We’re growing food out of our own shit while she can travel to other worlds, define them with numbers, craft civilizations that span further than any Sthrenslian has ever traveled in a lifetime! Evelyn, you have to show her. Please! Make a… a gus or something!”

“A what?” I ask, blinking. “You mean a bus? Hsthressis, I have no idea how to make a bus, and even if I did you don’t have any of the materials or manufacturing capability for that to be possible. You guys don’t even have all the simple machines!”

“Okay then… then that!” Hsthressis insists. “Show us that!”

I sigh. Okay, why not?

“Well, you guys have wheels, ropes, and a really vertically-oriented cave structure, so I bet you could get a lot of use out of pulleys,” I say, kneeling down to start drawing in the fine layer of dirt in the cave. “Pulleys are pretty simple on the surface. You use a wheel to change the direction a rope pulls. What gets wild is when you start using multiple wheels in certain setups like this and it nets you mechanical advantage. Which, uh, basically means you can lift heavier objects with proportionally less force. You just have to pull the rope further, since work is a function of force and distance. Pulley systems can get pretty complicated and wacky, but even with a few simple ones you can probably start lifting big loads straight up and down the floors of your cave with a lot less effort.”

“Wait…” Hsthressis murmurs. “Are you talking like… oh. Oh! I think I get it! Those fuckin’ elethator deals use them, right?”

“Elevator, yeah,” I confirm. “Though I was thinking more of a cargo platform.”

“What’s that?”

“An elevator for things,” I explain. “You shouldn’t start with carrying people the first few times you build something like this, in case it goes poorly.”

“Both of you, stop,” Chlrehistra orders. “This is not what we are here to talk about. It’s the opposite of what we’re here to talk about!”

“Oh, right,” I answer. “Sorry.”

“Your apology is warmly accepted,” the chieftain of the Resonant Gems answers kindly. “I thank you for healing Warrior Katrk. No matter what cost you paid, you did it when we have nothing to give. There can truly be no greater proof of your kindness.”

There’s an awkward pause.

“…Is that it?” I ask.

“Well, yes,” the chieftain says. “I certainly couldn’t ask any more of you.”

“Wow,” I sigh. “You are way nicer and easier to deal with than the other chieftain I know.”

“You will separate yourself from my daughter immediately!” Chlrehistra demands. “This can’t go on any longer. I won’t stand for it. I will not let my daughter be pulled away from Sss through a monster’s nonsense!”

“Don’t call her a monster, mom,” Hsthressis growls. “You have no idea what Evelyn’s been through.”

And I have no idea how much Hsthressis knows of what I’ve been through, now that I think about it.

“Besides,” Hsthressis continues, “Sss is a load of bullshit anyway. I told you, mom, he doesn’t even exist.”

“…Renounce your words,” Chlrehistra orders dangerously.

“No,” Hsthressis says. “Fuck you. I have literally, for the first time, seen the light. And you won’t ever know what that even means! Sss’ warmth? It’s called geothermal activity. The fire of Khlasinas? It’s called the sun and without it life on this planet would all die. I don’t remember all of it, mom, but I remember enough. I remember being her, mom, and she knows we’re a bunch of useless, stupid bugs! She’s just nice to us because she thinks we’re cute!”

Well, that’s not accurate, I’m nice because it’s the right thing to be nice. Sthrenslians are super cute, though.

“You know the consequences for blasphemy, Hsthressis,” Chlrehistra snaps. “Renounce your words.”

“I won’t. I refuse.”

“Then I have no choice,” Chlrehistra seethes.

“You are a friend of the Resonant Gems,” their chieftain promises me, a cavern away. “You and anyone you vouch for are welcome here.”

“You are hereby banished,” Chlrehistra declares.

“Fine,” Hsthressis snaps. “Bye forever, mom.”

“You are no longer my daughter,” Chlrehistra intones, and if she could cry it’s clear she would be sobbing. “You haven’t been since you died.”

I have no words. No amount of mental doping makes me ready for that.

42 Prime Directive

A volatile silence descends on the chamber, Hsthressis and her mother furiously locked in a mutual emotional clash. Chlrehistra’s overwhelming sadness is palpable, but hardened by a determination to do what she firmly believes is right. A laudable trait, perhaps, if what she thought was right didn’t involve exiling her daughter from her only home for not believing in their bullshit religion. Ugh, it reminds me of cults from back home.

Hsthressis, however, has clearly inherited her mother’s stubbornness. She’s no less dead-set on her path, fully ready to throw away everything for the sake of whatever it is she saw in my memories. Her fury overwhelms the smallest bit of sadness at the thought of losing her home, but I doubt that’s a permanent state of affairs. The poor girl is in for a rough, rough future.

And it’s my fault.

“Fine then,” Hsthressis seethes. “Goodbye, Chieftain Chlrehistra. Have fun praying to your dead, cold rocks. Let’s go, Evelyn.”

“Okay,” I sigh, exhaustion filling me even though I just recently woke up. “I’ve said it a lot, but… for what little it’s worth, Chieftain, I am sorry.”

“I’ll never forgive you for this,” she answers coldly.

“I’ll never forgive myself either,” I agree. “But I did my best.”

“Just go.”

I nod and head out, Hsthressis walking beside me in silence. Neither of us say a word until I’ve lead her well out of True People territory. It’s obvious she has nowhere to go, and no plans to do anything but follow me. Well… that’s mostly fine, I guess. I’ll keep her safe as best I can, but she should be with her own kind.

“Do you know a clan called the Resonant Gems?” I ask her.

She shifts her weight and makes a humming noise.

“…You mean those heretics whose asses we kicked a while back?” she asks.

“Uh, what?” I blink.

“We fought in a war,” Hsthressis explains. “We won and took over their homewyrm. I figured they’d all be dead by now.”

Wow, okay. That’s a lot to unpack.

“Alright, uh, first of all they are indeed alive. They found another homewyrm, I guess?”

“Oh huh,” Hsthressis grunts. “Lucky them.”

“Second of all, why are you calling them ‘heretics?’ You literally just renounced your religion.”

“Uh… well, I’m excommunicated because I have the acid to say that Sss isn’t real,” Hsthressis explains. “They’re heretics because they still believe in Sss, they just do it wrong.”

I rub my face in exasperation.

“…If Sss isn’t real, doesn’t that make every method of worshiping him equivalently valid? The only ‘wrong’ way to believe in something that’s inherently unprovable and unverifiable is to then go and use it as an excuse to make life worse for people.”

“Huh,” Hsthressis mutters. “Okay, I… I can see that. That meshes.”

“And the Resonant Gems have been really nice to me despite what I am, while your clan has been consistently awful.”

“So it’s my mom that’s a heretic!” Hsthressis concludes excitedly.

“No!”

Uuugh, I’d better not have to raise an angsty teenager on top of everything else. I only just recently stopped being an angsty teenager!

“Look, I just mean… I’m taking you to live with the Resonant Gems,” I explain. “So you’ll need to get along with them, and that especially means not criticizing their religion or talking about the True People.”

“What!?” Hsthressis whines. “But… I want to live with you!”

“You will,” I assure her. “The Resonant Gems have been nice to me, remember? I live with them too.”

“Oh, okay,” Hsthressis says, relaxing a bit. “But… I’m really, really tired of this Sss bullshit. I finally feel like I understand why it always bugged me so much, and now I have to go live with people who have an even dumber interpretation of the stories? They’re wrong, aren’t they? We know they’re wrong. Why should we have to put up with it?”

“Because that’s what your mom probably thought when she was murdering them,” I say. “Look, Hsthressis, people believe a lot of things. Some of it plausible, some of it cool, some of it stupid… but none of it matters more than than showing basic kindness and decency to other people. You can’t just walk up to someone and change how they view the world, so you’re going to need to get used to people that you think are wrong insisting the opposite. My rule of thumb is that if someone believes that water is created by a crying fish that lives in the sky but they treat everyone with respect? That’s pretty much fine.”

I chew on the inside of my cheek a little, thinking about this war that’s apparently going on.

“…But if someone decides to start hurting or killing for any reason, fish in the sky or otherwise, that’s when we step in. Okay?”

“I… okay,” Hsthressis agrees quietly. “Step in how?”

“Well… that tends to be a much more difficult question,” I admit.

Silence descends once more on our conversation, though back at the Resonant Gem cave I’m discussing with the chieftain about bringing an exile from another clan to live with them. He’s hesitant at first, but seems happy to provide when I agree to be solely responsible for feeding her.

I should probably float the idea of digging a tunnel directly from the Resonant Gems cave to the surface, and establishing a base there. Possibly even a second OMNIDOME, if the first one works out. My Ivylyns have started to produce nuts and as best I can tell they’re all in perfect working order, so I guess I’ll start expanding them into larger groves as well. Hmm… well, if I’m already farming, should I try catching and domesticating livestock for meat…? No, that’s kind of pointless. I can just make livestock if I really need to convert grass into edible fats and meats. There’s no reason to restrict myself to plants, I could just as easily create an animal body that develops nuts designed for eat…ing.

Five of my bodies bust out laughing, to the increasing confusion of the Resonant Gems and the immediate concern of Hsthressis.

“Uh, are you okay?” Hsthressis asks nervously.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I chuckle. “This is laughter, Hsthressis! It’s a good sound!”

“I know,” she answers, “but why are you laughing?”

“Just… just remind me to tell you a story about my friend Deez later, would you?” I ask with a grin.

She flicks her whiskers in confusion.

“…Sure?”

I laugh some more for a while, stretching my new Dire Bork body as it finally punches free from its oversized shell, my extra mermaid bodies following soon after. Wow this thing is heavy. And strong! It’s time to hunt myself some space bacon! Agh, wait. Let’s keep the main focus on Hsthressis, for now.

“I do want to say, I genuinely think your mother was right,” I manage to say after psyching myself up for it.

Hsthressis stiffens.

“…What? But we know she believes in bullshit.”

“Not about Sss,” I clarify. “About us, about what we should do with you. I’ve… pretty consistently intruded on the autonomy of your body and mind. Likewise, you’ve been getting forcibly fed experiences from my perspective. I’m not confident I can prevent that from continuing, and—”

“Wait!” Hsthressis yelps. “No, Evelyn, I… I want that! I want to know those things, to… to experience the world that way!”

“Do you want me to keep randomly knocking you unconscious?” I counter. “To keep rooting through your memories whenever I lose focus?”

“Well, no, but it’s worth it!” Hsthressis insists. “This… this thing we’re doing has some rough patches, sure, but I want to… to work through it! To understand! I want to be like you!”

The words are complimentary, but they feel so chilling to me. She seems so… so desperate. Like she’s terrified of losing whatever we are now and returning to being ‘normal’ again. She wants to know everything I know, and many schools of thought would argue that’s a bad thing.

In Star Trek, they make a pretty big deal out of this thing called the Prime Directive. In that story, it’s illegal for space pioneers to interfere with the development of alien civilizations. Introducing technology, knowledge, and values to a species before they develop it themselves is considered dangerous and irresponsible, and sure enough throughout the show there are many times it gets violated… usually with devastating consequences. It’s an interesting philosophy with a lot of good arguments to support it, and I’ve always thought it was complete and total bullshit.

When is a culture ‘ready’ for technology? Major new technologies always shake up the environments where they are introduced, their origin doesn’t change that. Humanity wasn’t ‘ready’ for the atom bomb, they weren’t ‘ready’ for the industrial revolution, and they certainly weren’t ‘ready’ for the internet! If we’re more responsible at using atomic weaponry now than a group of people that didn’t invent it on their own, it’s not because they didn’t invent it on their own. It’s because we already fucked up and misused it, learning our lesson (at least somewhat) after a terrifying pair of bombings and subsequent cold war.

The same goes for introducing philosophies and ideals. Humans had (and have) a bunch of fascist regimes on Earth, and we’ve seen the terrible consequences of that enough times to say ‘hey, maybe this is bad actually.’ Why shouldn’t we communicate that? Why shouldn’t cultures learn from each other’s mistakes? How is that not a good thing?

I feel like the main problem we run into is that if a culture decides that changing another culture is okay as long as it ‘helps,’ you start getting lots and lots of people with pretty twisted ideas about what ‘helping’ is going out and making changes for the worse. Or you get people who have good intentions and good methods, but just fuck up in catastrophic ways. This happened all the time throughout human history, and still does! ‘Don’t fuck with other people’s ways of life’ is arguably one of the very lessons we’ve learned through extensive trial and error that, by my own argument, we should be encouraging in others. Cultures are volatile, after all, and humans are not gods. We have no way to truly predict how changes will occur if we act. In light of all this, the Prime Directive seems like a really smart way to avoid consistently and repeatedly fucking up a whole lot of people.

But I feel like the entire argument of ‘it’s better this way’ relies on the very human tendency to believe that inaction absolves us of guilt. If I do something and it causes a bad thing, I’ll feel like shit. If I ignore a problem that doesn’t feel like my responsibility and something bad happens, well… it wasn’t my problem. And that’s fucking bullshit. I would rather teach, help, give, and fuck it all up than sit back and watch the Resonant Gems starve. And I would rather suffer the consequences of sharing my knowledge than stay quietly silent in fear of teaching someone ‘too much.’ That doesn’t mean I should just give atomic bombs out willy-nilly (if I could even do that in the first place) but if I can spread some basic technologies to make life easier and less painful for people, then hell yes I’m going to do that!

When the metaphorical trolley comes hurtling down the tracks, you pull the lever every time. Anything less is just a comforting lie to yourself.

“If you just want to know the things I know, there are less existentially horrifying ways of going about that than osmosing information from my memories,” I tell her frankly. “That’s… well, that’s what makes scientific knowledge so cool in the first place! It’s not magic, Hsthressis. I can teach you this stuff whether you’re linked to my mind or not, and I’d be more than happy to do that!”

“Really?” she asks. “But… I… it’s so much!”

“Did you think I learned this stuff by having it injected into my brain?” I ask incredulously. “I learned it all by having it taught to me, through words and pictures and demonstrations and lectures. And yeah, maybe that’s less convenient, but frankly I don’t want you rooting around in my memories any more than you want me rooting around in yours.”

Hsthressis is quiet for a while as she scuttles alongside me, the two of us alone deep under the cold earth.

“…What about sight?” she asks eventually. “I want to see again. I want to know what color is like again. I’ll lose that forever if I can’t have it through you.”

…Hmm. Well, that a whole different can of worms. There are a few ways I can handle that, the first being just… not doing anything. But it feels pointlessly cruel to give her sight, however vicariously, and then force her to stay blind. I could possibly make her into a second hive mind and let her make her own sight-capable bodies that way, but that plan ranks a solid ‘ha ha hell no’ on the dumb idea scale. The last thing this world needs is a superpowered angsty teenage trilobite. I could make her a new body with eyes, transfer her into that, and then get rid of her old body, but that seems like it would go over poorly. So that pretty much leaves…

“…I can cause your current body to start growing eyes,” I admit. “It’ll take a while, and we’ll have to stay linked during that time, but it’s possible.”

“Well fuck yeah!” Hsthressis beams. “Let’s do that then!”

“There’s a pretty significant risk,” I warn her sternly. “The process will involve a large alteration of your DNA-or-equivalent. You probably won’t be the same species when I’m done.”

“So?” Hsthressis asks. “That sounds fucking awesome.”

“No, I mean you’ll possibly be a different species in the scientific sense,” I clarify. “You might not be able to produce viable offspring with other Sthrenslians.”

That causes her to pause a bit.

“Uh… what?” she asks. “What do you mean by ‘viable offspring?’”

“Well, there’s a chance—though I consider it slim—that if you have children they’ll be normal. More likely, though, you’ll either have children with vestigial eyes, children that have countless screwy genetic diseases, or you’ll be unable to have children with Sthrenslians at all. I don’t have a Sthrenslian sperm sample so I can’t run super accurate simulations here, but—”

“Okay, okay, stop!” Hsthressis protests, shaking her tendrils with embarrassment. “Look, it’s fine, I don’t need the details. Kids sound annoying anyway!”

I sigh, scratching my cheek. That… didn’t sound super convincing.

“Hsthressis, you’re pretty young by Sthrenslian standards, aren’t you?” I ask. “I still plan to sever our connection at some point, so this could be a decision you’ll be stuck with your entire life. It’s not one you should be taking lightly.”

She sinks a bit lower to the ground, scuttling sheepishly as we approach the Resonant Gem cave.

“…Okay, that’s fair,” she says. “Can I have some time to think about it?”

I smile. That’s a better answer.

“Yeah,” I agree. “Absolutely.”

As we enter the Resonant Gem cave, Hsthressis’ whiskers twitching in wonder at the compact business of the place, I turn to ask one more thing of their chieftain. It would, after all, be polite to get permission.

“Would it be okay if I start building a few things to help work get done more efficiently?” I ask sweetly. “I have some ideas on how to help out around the place.”

43 Trying Her Best

Fire.

My legs are on fire. A burning pain flows up from my screaming feet, cracking through the rest of my body. I gasp for air, unable to breathe. I can’t do this. I can’t do this…! The end is so close, but I can’t make it. I can’t! Yet the burning will stop if I can just… run… a little… farther!

I cross the finish line.

There’s no ribbon to burst with my chest, no cheering crowd. The excitement for a middle school track meet was never particularly high to begin with, and it already died to nil long before I finished. Nobody cares about the chubby girl coming in last, except to pity her.

I stagger off the track and find a tree to sit under, out of sight from the bleachers. Resting my head on my knees, I wait for the pain to stop, too tired to cry. An arm wraps around my side, pulling me in tight. I look up to see my mom’s smiling face, beaming with genuine warmth at her failure of a daughter.

“Great job, honey!” she says, as tickled as she can be. “That was a new personal best!”

“I got last, mom,” I grumble. Her happiness seems… intrusive. I already know what she’s going to say.

“We don’t care about that,” she predictably insists. “You’re doing this for yourself. You don’t have to win.”

“I’m doing it because you’re making me,” I grumble back. “I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to do any of this.”

“It’s good for you,” she retorts. “You know that. You need to exercise to manage your ADHD. You had to choose one sport to do at school, so you chose—”

“I know!” I huff.

Then again, more quietly so she doesn’t get mad at my raised voice, I repeat it.

“I know.”

It wasn’t really much of a choice; track and field won by default. The other options my middle school offers were various flavors of team-moves-ball (also known as I Still Suck But Also My Failures Affect Others), Tennis (Me Losing Constantly: 1v1 Beatdown Edition) and Wrestling (which is only open to girls by law; in practice it’s all boys… boys that would be in spandex, trying to touch me). At least when I’m the worst at Track and Field nobody seems to care. Plus, you know, my mom isn’t wrong. She’s basically always very explicitly Not Wrong in enough ways that arguments against her are considered inherently unreasonable and combative, indicative of some character flaw on my part. There are, after all, heaps of legitimate scientific studies demonstrating a clear helpful relationship between exercise and ADHD symptoms. Exercise is stupid mega good for the body, and that goes double for my f’d-up brain.

But I just hate it so much.

My mom continues to hug me. I push her off, because it’s hot and both of us are sweaty and gross. My mind starts to wander, eyes searching the grass. Nearby I notice a daddy long-legs jittering erratically through the grass in that fun, hypnotizing way of theirs. I happily reach out my hand and let it crawl on, bringing the creature up closer to my face. My mother recoils back a bit further, having always been horrified of bugs. She still got me an insect taxidermy kit for Christmas, though. A fancy one.

“You know… your father and I were talking,” my mother starts.

This actually manages to peel my attention away from the cute bug, because that sentence traditionally precedes something really good or really, really bad.

“We were thinking of getting you a pet,” she says.

I look up, surprised and elated.

“Really?” I ask.

“Mm-hmm!” my mother happily confirms. “You’ve been doing well in school, and in track. You’ve earned it. So if you score another personal best at an event today, we can head to the humane society on the way home and you can see if there are any animals you like.”

My face falls.

“…They don’t have any tarantulas at the humane society,” I say quietly.

“I… I know, honey. We can… we can look at tarantulas too. But don’t you think it’s good to see all of the options before you make such a… um. Such a big… um. Sweetie. You have a spider on your face, honey.”

Why is she telling me that? It’s my face, I can feel it there. I close one eye, letting my new friend continue up the lid towards my hair.

“Tarantula,” I insist.

“Alright,” my mom sighs, “we will look at the humane society, and afterwards also find somewhere that sells tarantulas.”

“Yay!” I cheer.

I’d rather skip looking at the dogs and cats and junk, but I won’t hear the end of it if I try to avoid that step so this is the best I’m gonna get. Besides, who cares!? Pet spider!!!

I try my absolute hardest on the next two events, but I don’t hit any more personal bests. I start sobbing in the car ride home, but my mother promises that the offer is still open: next track meet, she says, I’ll get my pet if I keep doing well.

When that rolls around, I set personal bests in every event I participate in. A few times I wasn’t even last! After the track meet ended, despite my aching exhaustion, I bounced in my seat all the way to the pet store.

“Oh no, ma’am, the rose hair is one of the most docile species of tarantula on the planet, and even in the rare cases they do bite, their venom isn’t very dangerous to humans.”

The pet store clerk is explaining how tarantulas work to my mom, even though I already know everything and told her three times. It would be annoying if I wasn’t busy carrying my future pet-to-be. The clerk tried to tell me something when I declared their name, but my mom shook her head at him and he shut up.

That’s the story of how I got my first and so far only pet, the wonderful and perfect Mr. Bubbles. My mom always hated that spider, and never once got near her. Yet without fail, she would support me with whatever I needed to take care of my fuzzy, eight-legged friend. She let me bring live crickets into the house and bought me the veggies to gut load them with. She let me carry the spider around when it was feeling active. She paid for heating pads to keep its tank the right temperature and listened to me babble on and on about the mundane nothings it did every day.

It was obvious she understood none of it and liked it even less. Even as a kid, I could recognize those pained expressions, distant tones, and long sighs. The thing I loved most in the world was nothing but a chore to her, something she was compromising on against what she saw as her better judgment. But she supported me, all the same.

…

“So that’s basically everything that happened,” I finish.

The phone crackles as my mother and father pause to take in everything I’ve just told them.

“…So, you let a homeless immigrant live in your dorm with you,” my mother summarizes, disapproval dripping from her tone.

“A refugee, yes.”

“But you don’t know where she’s from,” she presses.

“She doesn’t tell people,” I say simply.

“Okay,” my mom confirms. “And then this homeless woman broke into someone’s house, and you followed her? And then you got arrested.”

“She broke in because she heard a cry for help. And we didn’t get arrested.”

“But you’ll have to go to court,” my mother clarifies.

“Yeah, probably,” I agree. “But they might just need a written testimony from me. I’m not sure, but Sasha’s lawyers are kind of terrifying.”

“Yeah, that’s a story I want to hear about too, glowbug!” my dad chimes in. “How did you befriend the daughter of Alexander Thornton?”

Huh?

“She, uh, made me cry in a restaurant?” I answer honestly. “Who’s Alexander Thornton?”

“Oh, just some billionaire,” my dad says nonchalantly. “Also, ouch! Are you doing okay? I guess I just assumed she was your friend, if she’s not that’s fine.”

I smile. He means that, at least. He’s just curious. My dad is kind of a goof.

“Uh, I guess she’s not… not my friend?” I tell him. “I’m not really sure. I thought she was mean at first but she seems genuinely sorry. I just feel like I’m using her, you know? Like, I haven’t ever actually asked her to spend money on me, but somehow it feels like I owe her my friendship after all she’s done to help me out.”

“Can we focus, please?” my mother insists. “Evelyn, you can’t go around lending your room to random homeless people. It’s not safe!”

“Wait, that’s what you were worried about? This was a special case! I’m not… it’s not random!”

“It’s not legal either, Evelyn. You don’t own that apartment and you can’t let people live in it that aren’t on the lease.”

“Okay!? Well, she’s probably not getting out of jail despite being an awesome hero, so I guess you don’t have to worry about it!”

That’s… somewhat of a lie, I’m ashamed to admit. That particular body of Tara’s isn’t coming back, but… well, I’ve certainly heard from her since my scare this morning. The first thing I did was try to contact her.

EightFriendlyLegs Tara? Are you okay?

EightFriendlyLegs Tara where are you?

EightFriendlyLegs Tara it’s okay I’m not mad.

EightFriendlyLegs Please answer me.

EightFriendlyLegs Tara?

KidnappedCthulhu oh

KidnappedCthulhu apologies

EightFriendlyLegs Tara!!!

KidnappedCthulhu everything is fine i am at the library

KidnappedCthulhu i was back in my cave for a while

KidnappedCthulhu i wanted to drop off those clothes

EightFriendlyLegs Oh, thank goodness. But Tara, if you just vanish without telling me where you’re going, I’ll worry! I was afraid you left for good, or something happened to you!

KidnappedCthulhu you are very silly

KidnappedCthulhu although your concern is both endearing and appreciated

KidnappedCthulhu i will be sure to tell you if i am going to be gone in the future

KidnappedCthulhu i just thought maybe you would want to have some time alone for a while

EightFriendlyLegs …Ah. I, uh, appreciate that. But you could like, ask me if that’s the case instead of disappearing?

KidnappedCthulhu well

KidnappedCthulhu it seems rather obvious when you just say it like that

EightFriendlyLegs Hah! You dork!

KidnappedCthulhu i believe your people have a particularly inscrutable saying about pots and kettles

EightFriendlyLegs Oh, don’t give me that “your people” stuff! You’re already twice the human I am!

KidnappedCthulhu oh

KidnappedCthulhu hmm

KidnappedCthulhu that is a frightening thought

KidnappedCthulhu also it is eight times actually

EightFriendlyLegs You have EIGHT human bodies already???

KidnappedCthulhu they only take a day or so to hatch

EightFriendlyLegs No, I mean… don’t you think you’re going a little fast?

KidnappedCthulhu i am not sure i understand

EightFriendlyLegs Well, you’re kind of rapidly accelerating away from who you were, right? Don’t you want to go home someday? Aren’t you afraid of… I don’t know, becoming some kind of weird alien monster?

KidnappedCthulhu i already am a weird alien monster

EightFriendlyLegs Tara!

KidnappedCthulhu no listen

KidnappedCthulhu of course i want to go home someday

KidnappedCthulhu it is my home

KidnappedCthulhu and of course i am furious that something stole me from it and turned me into something else without my knowledge or understanding

KidnappedCthulhu but it does me no good to ignore it

KidnappedCthulhu something took me and made me into a terrifying creature

KidnappedCthulhu that will never stop being true

KidnappedCthulhu but i get to decide what i do with that

KidnappedCthulhu and i am happy i used it to save nadia

EightFriendlyLegs Is that the name of the woman from the house?

KidnappedCthulhu yes it is

KidnappedCthulhu she wanted to see me but they will not let her out of the hospital yet

KidnappedCthulhu so she wrote me a letter

KidnappedCthulhu she called me an angel it was sweet

KidnappedCthulhu apparently she is employed by that man

KidnappedCthulhu she is not his wife

EightFriendlyLegs Oh god.

KidnappedCthulhu an odd sentiment for an atheist but i concur

KidnappedCthulhu not that him abusing his wife would have been any better

EightFriendlyLegs This is so fucked up.

KidnappedCthulhu yes extremely

KidnappedCthulhu we are so lucky to have been there to stop it

KidnappedCthulhu i had just been habitually checking out the areas around us in a mix of curiosity and mild paranoia

KidnappedCthulhu i saw her by complete accident

KidnappedCthulhu it almost was like divine guidance

EightFriendlyLegs Or probability, but yeah. It was a good thing we did. Well, a good thing you did that I was also there for.

KidnappedCthulhu hmm it is odd you should mention probability

KidnappedCthulhu it is almost like you think this is a relatively common occurrence

EightFriendlyLegs Um…

KidnappedCthulhu i am goading you i already looked it up

KidnappedCthulhu 13.8 percent of men and 24.3 percent of women have been the victim to severe physical violence by an intimate partner

KidnappedCthulhu twenty four point three percent

KidnappedCthulhu by a so called partner

KidnappedCthulhu behind closed doors

KidnappedCthulhu that is not even the most terrifying set of numbers

EightFriendlyLegs …This is you saying it’s not a problem that you invade people’s privacy on a regular basis, isn’t it?

KidnappedCthulhu this is me saying that the fact anyone is willing to sacrifice their personal safety for the risk of privacy is completely insane

KidnappedCthulhu why do your people even care so much about privacy

KidnappedCthulhu it makes you feel slightly better

KidnappedCthulhu at the cost of things that make me vomit to even think about typing again

KidnappedCthulhu it is actual madness

EightFriendlyLegs …Okay. I mean, you’re not wrong that most people want privacy because they just sort of like it. But… there are still good reasons for it. Like, if the government decided it wanted to murder you, you’d need to be able to hide yourself from the government.

KidnappedCthulhu but if a murderer wanted to murder me i would not want them to be able to hide from the government

EightFriendlyLegs Well… yeah, that’s true. But that’s why you have to balance things out. You can’t give one group all the power, or else you have no failsafe if that group ends up being evil. Your system has to be able to fail gracefully, because someday it WILL fail.

KidnappedCthulhu hmm

KidnappedCthulhu so like my government

EightFriendlyLegs Uh, maybe?

KidnappedCthulhu it is you were right

KidnappedCthulhu i read the books you recommended and researched some of your historical regimes and so on

KidnappedCthulhu they take information for themselves and repress it for others in order to ensure obedience and servitude

KidnappedCthulhu it is somewhat obvious from an outside perspective

KidnappedCthulhu but i doubt that i ever would have noticed if i had not come here

KidnappedCthulhu that said your government is also shit

EightFriendlyLegs That, we can agree on.

KidnappedCthulhu mmm

KidnappedCthulhu i really like that phrase

KidnappedCthulhu fail gracefully

KidnappedCthulhu perhaps that is what i am missing

KidnappedCthulhu i will be back tonight

KidnappedCthulhu i am going to keep reading

EightFriendlyLegs Alright. Have a good time.

KidnappedCthulhu i suspect i will not

KidnappedCthulhu but that is not really my goal today

And with those ominous words, she had signed off. Still, I feel better having talked to her. I open a window, and sure enough she flies in, giving me a tiny squeeze on a finger larger than she is before settling on the ceiling. Adorable.

“Can you hear me? Hello? I said of course I’m worried about it. I’m your mother! Hello?”

Huh, what? Oh. Right. I’m still talking to my parents. I’d gotten a little distracted, remembering that conversation. What are we talking about again?

“Yeah,” I manage to default to, earning a long-suffering sigh from the other end of the line.

“Just… stay safe, Evelyn,” my mom pleads. “Please? You’re not always the most… aware of what’s around you.”

“I know that, mom,” I say. “I don’t need a reminder.”

“Yes you do! You can’t afford to risk losing your apartment!”

Oh, right, that’s what we’re talking about. There’s a lot I could respond to that with… but she wouldn’t listen to any of it.

“Okay, mom.”

“You can’t risk a criminal record, either! That could hurt your chance at getting a job for your entire life!”

“Okay.”

“Your focus needs to be on school.”

“Alright, mom.”

On and on and on. Ten minutes later, I manage to extract myself from the call. I sigh loudly, sitting on the floor with my back to my bedframe. So exhausting. So there I stay, doing nothing at all for another five minutes.

“Hey, Tara?” I eventually ask. “What are you doing with all those human bodies, anyway?”

The little bug on my ceiling doesn’t respond, of course, but pretty soon my phone buzzes with a message.

KidnappedCthulhu i was thinking of traveling to africa

44 Better Days

Time sure flies when I’m not under constant, life-threatening stress.

I introduced Hsthressis to the Resonant Gems as two things: an exile from another clan (which is accurate) and as my apprentice (which I guess became accurate when I said so). She’s taken my advice so far and not made a ruckus about religion or being the daughter of the True People’s chieftain, which I’m grateful for. And, admittedly, a bit surprised by. I guess she just doesn’t have much time, since I’ve been keeping her pretty darn busy doing R&D for whatever random ideas I come up with.

After all, I know how pulleys work, but I’m far from an engineer. It took us weeks of trial and error to make something safe and effective, though if anything I’m thankful for that. Showing Hsthressis how much of a scatterbrained fuckup I am in a safe environment is healthy for her taming her pseudo-worship of me, and more importantly it’s the perfect opportunity to introduce her to the scientific process. Which… is going pretty okay, all things considered. She struggles a bit with not latching onto and trying to prove a hypothesis rather than just using the hypothesis as a step on the path of acquiring data, but honestly, who doesn’t?

The Resonant Gems mostly treated her as a crazy weirdo up until we actually got the pulley system working, at which point they started paying a lot more attention.

I’ve made other friends as well!

I’ve continued chatting with Worker Rshult (the guy that let me sit on him and ask questions while he was poop farming) and I like him a lot! He’s nice! Quiet, direct, and thoughtful. I can chat with him and not feel pressured to actually say anything if I don’t want to. He works hard and after I helped construct enough pull carts for him and all the other workers to use he gave me permission to ride on his back as much as I want, like a mini, turbo-speed Mooshi! (Being able to sit on and ride Sthrenslians is the best part of being tiny.) Also great: he’s pretty much totally numb to all of my weirdo alien questions and just gives me straight answers to the most off-the-wall things I can think of to ask, which is just… exactly what I need, a lot of the time. Rshult is my slice of normalcy on chaos acid hell planet, and I’m very grateful to have met him.

I’ve also spoken a lot more with Weaver Nsreslisa, and her son Tklikik! Tklikik is one of the adorable little kids I played with back when first touring the Resonant Gems, and now that I’ve got nothing pressing to use all my bodies for, I can pretty much play with the kids as much as I want. Which, y’know, isn’t always; children are exhausting in ways beyond the physical. But the parents seem to like it when I drop by and tucker out all their little ones with sky monster hunts, and it gives me an excuse to hang out with Nsreslisa while she’s working.

Nsreslisa is… well, she’s a good friend. She’s taught me a lot of stuff about her job and what she does so I can weave some basic things of my own, now. And she’s just… generally really smart? A lot smarter than almost all the other Sthrenslians I’ve met. She picks up on my ideas really fast and helps me explain them to other people better than I can once she has a handle on it. She’s kind of super serious all the time, though, and can be intimidating to talk to. I think her talents are totally wasted on being a weaver, but… well, conquering the caste system is not a short-term project. I’m focusing on helping the Resonant Gems fill the first two levels of the hierarchy of needs before we tackle any of that shit. Priorities!

The other person I’ve really gotten to know is Priestess Saslitak. We just… kept hanging out after she finished guiding me around the cave, and it’s been pretty great so far. She’s quiet, like Rshult, though in more of an anxious-awkward way than a content-confident way, which is top-tier relatable. Our friendship really picked up when I admitted I didn’t know what a homewyrm was and asked to see it. Rather than respond with fire and brimstone, she was just super incredibly apologetic, explaining as best she can what the homewyrm is: a giant poop dispenser in the ceiling. The homewyrm never moves, and its giant toilet cavern is a big ecosystem that the chieftain and clergy manage. She still wouldn’t let me see it, though she’s said sorry about that no less than twenty times and counting. She’s easily one of the most genuine people I’ve ever met. Just hanging out with her puts a smile on my face.

Besides, I didn’t need to see the homewyrm chamber. By investigating the area above the Resonant Gem cave, I found one of those enormous clearing-wide thread-trap antlion thingies. Like the one which had a reaper maw trapped a few days after I got here. So… that’s a homewyrm, I guess. I’m still really curious about why they don’t want me to see it, but I’m being a good friend and not prying too much.

There’s been one major problem with me hanging out with a bunch of new friends, though: I can’t convincingly pretend to be multiple different people, and at some point I kinda maybe started to lose track of which body I was using to socialize with which person. That isn’t really a problem with most Sthrenslians, since all of my ETE bodies are identical anyway, but at this point the people I hang out with most are getting preeeeeetty suspicious and I’m worried they might be a little bit onto me.

Rshult, at this point, just seems cool with it. Or at least non-inquisitive? Once or twice I have pretty blatantly talked about the wrong thing with the wrong body, and he did not so much as even twitch. Saslitak just seems confused, which is… entirely my fault, as I have been giving increasingly stupid and desperate excuses for how the ETE she just saw fly away is, in fact, the same ETE that approached from the other direction whom she’s been friends with the whole time. It makes me feel terrible, but I’m just terrified of coming clean at this point! Nsreslisa, though…

Nsreslisa is way too goddamn smart to be a weaver.

“Um, uh…” I stutter, rapidly trying to think of an excuse. “O-okay, you got me! Ha ha! I’m not the same one! We just… um, gossip a lot! Sh-share all the things we talk about! And we’ve been playing a game to see how long it would take people to find out! You were first! Congraaaats!”

I give the indignant Sthrenslian woman two—count them, two finger-guns, but she’s not amused. Her midsection is flattened against the floor but her forelegs raise the rest of her body high, moustache curled and claws clamped together in front of her body. It was a Sthrenslian pose that basically evokes a mom staring down at her kid with arms crossed, eyebrow raised, and foot tapping.

“And you communicated this despite never actually speaking to the member of your clan I discussed with earlier,” she says dryly.

“O-oh, well, you know, it’s easy to mix us up–”

“No,” Nsreslisa says. “I’ve been tracking her all day. You know I can hear the entire cavern, right? Anyone could figure this out if they weren’t so busy. You are not the person I was talking to earlier today. But you act the same, and you know everything she knows. All of your… what do you call them, ‘Ee-tee-ees?’ All of them do.”

I facepalm with both hands. Fuuuuck, I’m so bad at this. Honestly, it’s a wonder I lasted a month.

“Gah, yes, okay! You got me! Why do you pay so much attention?”

“Because if some random person I never met comes by and says they’re going to ‘continue playing’ with my son, I pay attention. The fact that no one else has figured your game out is more worrying than anything else. I thought I was either going crazy or a freak was pretending to be you to get to my son! But it seems like you’re all just… identical? You all know what the others know? Or you’re all just the same person, which would explain your insane naming scheme. Honestly, Evelyn, why didn’t you just tell me?”

“I forgot,” I mumble.

“What?”

“I forgot!” I admit. “I forgot which one I used to talk to you! So I just acted like… look, don’t tell anyone, okay?”

“Why in Khlasinas’ cursed sky should I not?”

“Because the last time I told somebody that ‘we’ is actually just ‘me’ they locked me in prison!” I hiss quietly at her.

She flicks her whiskers in a Sthrenslian eye-roll.

“Evelyn, you’re half our food income. The chieftain couldn’t punish you if he wanted to. Which, of course, is yet another stupid thing everyone else should have realized by now, but I suppose you get to keep reaping the benefits of my clanmates’ inexplicable deafness.”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” I say, dropping to my knees to beg. “Just please don’t tell anyone!”

“I don’t see why not, but fine. It’s not like I think you’ll take advantage of us. You’re the best thing this clan has seen since we lost the war. You can keep doing… whatever it is you do, if it makes you feel better.”

“Thank you! Thank you thank you thank you!” I say, flying in for a hug.

“Get off me,” she growls, but she doesn’t mean it. “Aren’t you the one who said that’s unsanitary?”

“Not if you wash!” I say, “which is the big important part, really. You guys need to at least wash your food. It grows in poop!”

“So?”

“It’s poop!“

I had been trying to keep the conversation quiet enough to be private up until that point, but unfortunately my fecal-related outburst echoed through the cavern, causing multiple nearby Sthrenslians to shudder in discomfort.

“…Sorry,” I whisper.

“It’s fine,” Nsreslisa groans, lightly grasping and massaging her whiskers with her moustache. “You are… very loud.”

“Yeah, my lungs are about as optimized as I can make them for my size,” I nod, proud that she noticed.

She gives me a weird look. Wait, fuck, am I going to have to admit to designing my bodies now? Quick, distract her!

“W-well that’s it, then!” I stutter quickly. “You’ve figured me out. Yeah, there’s just Evelyn. We all have the same name because… I’m a dumb-dumb who is very bad at lying.”

“Yes, I know,” Nsreslisa deadpans.

“Hey! Well, okay, fair. But yeah I’m… geez. It’s all just me. The ETs are me as well.”

“Really? Your guards? Now that’s a joke. They have manners.”

“Hey! I have manners! I just… I dunno, I forget which ETE is which sometimes because they’re identical, but the ETs are different and also kind of scary because they’re strong enough to rip a person in half and I don’t want to worry anyone so I act all polite with them? By now it’s just habit. ETs are a fun persona, but… that’s totally still me. I can prove it, if you want.”

She considers me silently for a moment, then makes a dismissive gesture.

“No, that’s fine. I believe you. I have heard rumors from the diggers that you have positively massive allies up above, too large to fit in most of our caverns. Is that true? Are they also you?”

“Yeah and yeah, although there are way bigger things on the surface than me. …Unless you count OMNIDOME, I guess.”

“Ah-nee-don?”

“Oh! Oh, fuck. Um… don’t… worry about it?”

She waves a claw at me in frustration.

“Fine, keep your secrets. As long as Tklikik doesn’t get caught in them. But I am curious about what life is like on the surface. Tell me about it. How did you get here? How did you find us?”

“Oh. Huh. Well… um.”

At first I try to think of another obfuscation, another misdirection. But I’ve never been good at that, and before long the whole story is pouring out of my mouth. The story of how I came from a place very far away, with a very different sort of people. Where I had a family, friends, good food, a good life, and no worries of being attacked by monsters or having aliens attack me. And then… something happened. And I ended up here. And I was something else.

I tell her how on the surface there are massive plants made of wood, how in the infinite sky there lay a ball of fire so indescribably massive, so incomprehensibly ancient, that it provided heat and energy for the world since before life itself. How the trees grow to towering heights to better absorb energy from the star, and the other plants huddle below to soak up the rest, and the animals eat the plants and are eaten by greater animals. And I stepped into this world with nothing, weak and alone, and nearly died immediately as a creature hanging in the trees almost bored my neck open with an acid far, far stronger than the greatest Sthrenslian warrior or digger could imagine.

I tell her how I survived and met my friend Mr. Mooshi, of how together we fought and defeated a massive aquatic monster who tore me from the shoreline to devour me whole. How I ate it, and used its power to make a second one of myself. How I became two, then three, then four then more and more until I was a creature beyond my old imagining. How I fought and grew stronger. How I died again and again, eventually growing used to it.

At some points in the story, I have to stop. To breathe, to drink, to cry. At various points I flew off, replaced myself with a less emotional body and continued where I left off. For I am one girl with many voices, and I now have a friend who knows and doesn’t care.

My story is long, but it’s worth it. Not even Hsthressis knows this much about me… though I guess what she does know, she’s experienced a lot more intimately. In some ways, however, that makes it more difficult for me to deal with her. She looks up to me too much, empathizes with me too well. I’m like… her hero. And I really, really don’t like that.

Even after Nsreslisa goes home and puts Tklikik to bed, I speak with her through her sleeping time. It’s still midday for me, after all, and she’s too enthralled to rest. She listens, she asks questions, she believes, and suddenly I have a friend like no other. Eventually, my story ends. There’s nothing more to tell. But still, the two of us aren’t tired, and Nsreslisa hasn’t had enough.

“So you really sat all your bodies in a circle and just pretended–”

“To have a council meeting, yeah. As like, a chieftain and a bunch of stuffy war leaders and nobles and things. Oh, also my pet Mr. Mooshi. It was great!”

“But why?” she chuckles.

“B-because saying stuff out loud helps!” I tell her. “I was getting my thoughts in order! At the time I’d had more than one brain for like… a few days, tops! It was confusing!”

“Right, right, your thing with brains,” Nsreslisa says jokingly. “You’re sure it’s not just the organ that generates blood? Because when you get injured around there the blood just keeps pouring–”

“Yes! I’m sure! Trust me, I am very, very sure about what all of your body parts do! Wounds near your brain just bleed a lot because your brain needs a crapton of blood. Seriously, it’s your most important organ. Except maybe like your heart but you guys have two of those, so…”

“And you’re sure because you dropped a rock on Hsthressis—who is the daughter of the True People chieftain—and ate her!? She’s in her fourteenth molt, she doesn’t even have her full name yet!”

“I’m sorry!!! I didn’t know! I was starving to death and she just looked like a weasel! Trilobite! Thing!”

“Oh, well,” Nsreslisa mocks, barely holding down laughter, “I’m so terribly sorry we happen to look like… did you say a clawless fuzzy animal from your world? That you keep as pets? Hmm, yes, we sound very similar, must not be that smart, smack-smack, squish-squish.”

“Don’t! No! Don’t! Aaaagh, you’re horrible! Nsreslisa, you are the worst!”

She laughs at me as even more blood than the usual high volume rushes to the area at the front of my skull. I instinctively clap my hands over my face to cover up my blush.

“That hand-face thing you do,” Nsreslisa hums. “I think I’ve finally figured it out. Embarrassment, isn’t it?”

Oh yeah, except Sthrenslians are blind and I just did the opposite of covering that up. Good job, Evelyn! Socially skilled as always! I flail around a little, desperately looking for a good subject change.

“…Would you be this amused by me killing a kid if she wasn’t from the True People?” I grumble.

That seems to sober her schadenfreude. I’ve poked around a bit about the war that’s apparently going on, and it’s… not fun. The basic conflict is that the big, awesome cavern that the True People live in right now? The Resonant Gems are the ones that actually built it. Hell, it’s where their name comes from! It’s all the pretty geodes and crystals that were all over the place! But the True People suddenly swooped in one day, started slaughtering everyone, and forced the Resonant Gems to retreat to this much smaller homewyrm that supports the community we’re in right now. They’ve been scraping by ever since, saved from starvation only because their population was absolutely gutted by the unexpected assault from the True People.

“…Which yeah, I get was bad,” Hsthressis sighs. “Heresy isn’t a good reason to slaughter people. But thinking back, I bet the real reason wasn’t that simple.”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“Well, I wasn’t alive at the time, but it’s my understanding that we never liked the Resonant Gems,” Hsthressis explains. “Mom had all sorts of rants about why their beliefs are dumb and wrong. But that was the way things were for a long time. We probably didn’t commit to killing them and taking their home for that reason. And I know we don’t have like… two homewyrms, yeah? So what happened to the homewyrm we had before? Maybe we only drove the Gems to starvation because we were starving. You’d have to ask mom, though.”

It’s callous to say, but part of me hopes the True People didn’t have a good reason like that. Not that I think mass murder is a justifiable response to hunger, but it would certainly be easier if the True People were just inconsolably awful. I guess life is rarely like that, though. Besides, even if they’re the worst, I don’t have any intention of going over there and forcing them out of their ill-gotten homes or whatever.

After all, the Resonant Gems are doing great where they are, thanks to me. My OMNIDOME not only finished growing by the river, but was so successful as a base and point-defense system I decided to plant another one near the Resonant Gem’s homewyrm… except up on the surface, of course. From there, I got permission to tunnel down and create an easy-access point where I can deliver meat from my hunts and nuts from my Ivylyn farms. I’ve also sampled and created improved-yield versions of all the main Sthrenslian crops and, since doing so might fuck with their soil, I’ve been monitoring that as best I can as well.

Suffice to say? No one is starving anymore. Aw yeah, go Evelyn! Humanitarian crisis… I mean, Sthrenslianitarian crisis averted! Gain ten trillion xp! Advance to level… I dunno, a gazillion. I’m definitely epic-leveled by now. Like, when you think about it, I’ve straight-up slain three out of four horsemen of the apocalypse at this point! Death shmeath! Pestilence is barely a pest, and Famine ain’t no fam of mine! I’m lining myself up for the quadra kill, and all that’s left… is War.

War might be a problem.

“No, honestly,” Weaver Nsreslisa admits. “The fact that you killed the daughter of their chieftain is a big part of what makes it funny. I admit, Hsthressis is a gag a minute. I like the girl. But seriously, fuck the so-called ‘True People.’ Are you sure you don’t want to help us kick them out of our home?”

“I’m a pacifist,” I answer firmly. “That means—”

“You don’t use violence against people to achieve your goals, I know,” she sighs.

“Violence is always evil! The whole reason you guys hate the True People is because they used it on you. War does nothing but make—”

“More suffering, yes, I know. You’ve mentioned it a few times, Evelyn. But even if you convince everyone that it’s not worth it to go win back the home we built, we’re still going to end up fighting. No matter how peaceful we are, sooner or later? Someone will come after us.”

“It’s true,” Worker Rshult agrees from the other side of the cave, in a completely different conversation. “War is a part of life.”

“The teachings of Sss do encourage cooperation,” Priestess Saslitak hedges, “but they also encourage readiness. The stories are full of holy wars. We, too, will likely be called to fight again alongside our brothers and sisters. Violence is not good, no, but… it is the proper tool to deal with the violent.”

I get the same response everywhere. Some people want to storm the True People’s home and slaughter them all. Others just want to be ready if they’re attacked a second time. Nobody likes the idea of straight nonviolence, not even as an ideal. It just seems stupid to them. Over this whole month I’ve been wracking my brain on how to deal with the problem, but mostly I’ve just been procrastinating. After all, there isn’t currently any fighting going on. I’ve been having a great time hanging out with the Sthrenslians, at least by Acidsucks standards. Sure, I’m no closer to getting home, but I’m way closer to maintaining my sanity long enough to figure that problem out. I even think I’ve struck a good balance at improving the health, safety, and general quality of life for the Resonant Gems without completely fucking up their culture… though part of that is just how most of the Gems don’t attend when I’m teaching classes for Hsthressis, even though I’ve made it clear it’s open to everyone. Still, though! Three out of four horsemen isn’t bad at all, and… well, it’s probably not healthy to try and solve every single problem on the planet by myself anyway. Life is good.

Yet for some reason, I still always get nervous every time I think that.

45 Prepared

“What do you think, Mr. Mooshi?” I ask, leaning against my friend’s adorable shell. “Am I just being paranoid?”

“No,” he answers. “But not in the sense that being correct justifies paranoia, merely in the sense that you aren’t harmfully impacting your life in order to try and justify your beliefs or assuage your worries. Paranoia is a serious mental condition, and while you shouldn’t trust my diagnosis considering I’m just an aspect of your psyche that you project onto a large alien bug, I don’t think you’re suffering any symptoms that would raise a red flag. In short, you’re not paranoid, just… anxious.”

“So… business as usual, then?”

“Business as usual,” Mr. Mooshi agrees. “Though you might be a little too comfortable with the current status quo, all things considered. Didn’t you want to try and find a way home?”

That’s true. I definitely do, and I’ve made very little progress towards that in the past month. In my defense, though, it’s a big fucking problem! I’m not a rocket scientist! Like, sure, I’ve played enough Kerbal Space Program to have memorized the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation, but even if I can make a body that can survive the vacuum of space, and even if I can fill it with efficient enough fuel to leave the atmosphere, none of that matters because I have no idea where Earth is and, at minimum, I’m four or so lightyears away from Earth anyway. Y’know, assuming I got maximally lucky and Acidsucks happens to be Proxima Centauri b, but it almost certainly isn’t. And can I just point out that ‘four lightyears’ absolutely fucking does not mean that I’m a four-year journey from home? The fastest man-made object ever hits a top speed of like… 0.05% of c. So that’s… an eight thousand year journey! Very uncool!

This is not to say I’ve made no progress, though. This planet has some pretty incredible creatures on it, and sampling them has expanded my capabilities considerably. The swamp area in particular has a lot of super interesting life-forms that thrive in high-heat environments. Like the ignition hog, which is basically giant living bacon that cooks itself.

I’m not even kidding. These six-legged boar-like creatures fulfill pretty much the same niche as pigs do on Earth: they’re powerful, clever omnivores that raise cute little family units and taste delicious. Unlike Earth boars, they thankfully don’t seem to have any interest in rapidly expanding across the continent with reckless abandon. Also unlike Earth boars, they can set themselves on fucking fire.

Yes, I have found space Pokémon, and yes, it is awesome. See, the ignition hog can’t metabolize all the hydrogen sulfide in the environment, so instead it stores the stuff, mixes it into most of the rest of its waste product, and then sweats it all out… instead of peeing, actually, which is kind of gross. But don’t worry, ignition hogs stay clean by using a small spark to set themselves on fire! It smells like death and it’s fucking terrifying, but the hogs are unharmed by the process. In addition to ‘hygiene,’ they use the ability to burst into flame as a method of intimidation and deterrent against predators, since Acidsucks is so terrible there are actually things that prey on flaming murder-swine.

Incidentally, it turns out that bacon transcends cultures. Repeat-meat pretty much all tastes the same to me and cooking it makes things worse, so I can’t really enjoy it, but frying up any extra ignition hog meat I hunt after curing it with large amounts of sea salt is a new Sthrenslian favorite! And yes, I can both obtain sea salt and fry things now, because my sub-caveman fire-making techniques have been rendered irrelevant thanks to my newfound ability to set myself on fire. Take that, ancestors!

Also awesome: flamefins, which are basically chronically lazy pterodactyl-dragons. They’re endothermic autotrophic thermovorous extremophiles, which is basically just the fanciest possible way I could think of saying ‘they run on heat.’ Sleeping for weeks at a time in or above the many fire pits in the swamp, their body generates energy by using heat to trigger internal chemical reactions. And yeah, they can spit a highly flammable fluid from their mouths that manifests as what is basically dragonbreath. Kinda shitty, anticlimactic dragonbreath, but damn it, it’s still really cool!

Anyway, all these neat fire-based and heat-resistant creatures are legitimate steps towards being able to make myself into an organic spaceship, but they’re not really big steps. It’s still impossibly out of reach.

“Somehow, Mr. Mooshi, solving world hunger seems like a much more achievable goal,” I admit. “And it’s a worthwhile goal, so I’m gonna keep focusing on it for now.”

“Fair enough,” he answers.

As such, my main focus above ground has been expanding my sustainable food production to accommodate more than just myself and the Resonant Gems, as well as making that food production use methods that don’t rely on my presence to function. The former is pretty easy. I can convert energy and matter into food in a dozen different ways. The latter, however, is fucking hard.

The vast majority of food available in the world is on the surface, because that’s where the sun shines. Well, okay, it’s probably in the ocean actually, but Sthrenslians are even more blind underwater than they are above ground, and also they can’t breathe, so that’s just even more problems on top of the one I’m already trying to deal with: how to enable Sthrenslians to farm on the surface. This is a very serious problem, and not just because the little guys are nearly blind up there. No, the issue is the fact that Acidsucks is terrible and everything here exists to kill you.

On the surface, Sthrenslian predators basically include every carnivore or omnivore larger than a human hand. Birds of prey especially are going to be a problem, as they may as well be ghost traps that teleport to your position from a Sthrenslian perspective. They’re simply too small, and their world is too dangerous. The only solace they have is that a reaper maw probably wouldn’t bother hunting them, since they wouldn’t be worth the effort. Probably.

The first idea I had was to build the Sthrenslians some sort of greenhouse, so that they could have the safety, security, and vision of an enclosed space without blocking out access to the sun. The problem with that, of course, is that Sthrenslians don’t know how to make glass and I don’t either. The fires that occur naturally in the swamp as well as the fires I can produce using stolen ignition hog biology don’t burn anywhere near hot enough to melt silicone dioxide. I’m pretty sure that forges work by constantly feeding the fire more oxygen, as that’s like… the limit on how fast and hot the fuel can burn? I think? But my brain simulations use heuristics for non-biological problems; I can’t create a mini-universe in my head and build a forge in it, I have to try to make one the old fashioned way because I definitely don’t have the ability to make an organic body that can survive the necessary temperatures. …Hmm. I should swim to the bottom of the ocean, find some thermal vents, and eat everything that lives nearby. I’ll put that on the to-do list. I should also just work on a non-biological forge, but it’s not really a problem I want to tackle by myself and even Hsthressis is hesitant to experiment with anything that involves fire. She doesn’t even want to be around when I cook!

Anyway, in summary? I’ve added more to my list of problems than I’ve subtracted, but at least I managed to subtract all the biggest problems. I’ve still been pretty lazy, though. I’ve made continual tweaks and performance improvements on most of my bodies, but I’ve only designed a handful of totally new ones. Most of those are just high-yield crops, too. The only totally new and interesting bodies I’ve designed are Evelyn Naptime (EN) and Big Dig Evelyn (BDE, hee hee).

Evelyn Naptime is my newest body, and it’s very boring. It’s an almost-entirely autonomous body designed to inflate and block off tunnels when I sleep. It’s not really that difficult for a Sthrenslian to get through, but the hope is that it’ll wake me up if one of them tries. I haven’t tested it yet. Big Dig Evelyn, meanwhile, is a body designed for major excavations, such as cavern creation. I got a lot of advice from Worker Rshult about digging before designing the body, so I think it turned out really well.

“If I could choose from where I produced my acid, I would choose two places,” he told me. “One: from my claws.”

“Um, what? I mean, really?” I asked hesitantly. “The claws already touch a lot of acid when they dig. Won’t it eventually start eating through them?”

“You fear your own acid too much. It may be painful, but our people’s acid wants the stone, not the body. Spit it on the stone, and it will devour both only if you are slow. The acid softens the stone. That is the first purpose of acid.”

“And the second?”

“To clear the tunnel,” he said simply. “This is the other place I would leave acid, if I could: behind me, where I fling the dirt. It would save much time.”

Now that one immediately made sense. Every digging species I know of from Earth piles their dirt up outside their burrows, since it has to go somewhere. But Sthrenslians often never have anyone in the colony go to the surface at all, let alone pile dirt up there. So where does it all go? It’s dissolved, apparently, and either sinks into the surrounding dirt (when they’re digging through dirt) or becomes part of the surrounding rock (when they’re digging through stone). This dissolution-and-precipitation process is what makes sthrensian tunnels and caverns so sturdy and unlikely to collapse: they reform the rock rather than just move it. Once it sets, their tunnels are like a concrete tube. Maybe even stronger than concrete. What is it, I wonder? All the rock around the mountains is pretty pale. Limestone, maybe?

Doesn’t matter. The point is, Big Dig Evelyn has Big Dig Energy. A prehensile tail and rear-facing claws enable me to do initial and follow-up tunnel work at the same time. While the front-facing claws spray acid dig out fresh rock, the rear-facing claws can pack it in to properly set, the tail providing extra acidic support wherever needed. BDE is a chonky girl, capable of carving out tunnels with a diameter of nearly four feet in the time it would take a Sthrenslian to go the same distance with less than a foot of diameter. I keep BDE in hibernation most of the time because there just isn’t much demand for big tunnels or new caverns, but the body is handy to have around and I’m very happy with the design.

Other things I’m happy with: non-Sthrenslian-driven food production. The issue of making them independent from me is still a difficult one, but my fields of Ivylyn and various other crops have been working out extremely well. I’m working my way up to growing an OMNIDOME solely to work as a granary, partly so that I don’t get fucked if winter happens and turns out to be really bad, but mostly so I can try to open up relations with another colony of Sthrenslians, of which I know at least two exist. I figure the best way to assuage my worries about war is to make enough allies to cleanly win any war before it can start. If I just make enough friends, nobody will want to be my enemy… and if nobody wants to be my enemy, they’re certainly not going to want to make an enemy of my friends!

And speaking of my friends, well… I’ve conspicuously been missing memories (or updates?) on one of them. Throughout most of the past month, I haven’t spent much time having all my bodies sleep simultaneously. I decided to test it since I felt safe, and… yeah, it just doesn’t really seem to negatively impact me to have at least some of my bodies awake at all times, which is good because having all of me shut down simultaneously is inefficient and dangerous. But the consequence of that, I’ve noticed, is that I don’t get the dreams anymore. And that’s about to change. I want to know what happened. I want to know how I got here. So… it’s back to sleep for me.

“You ready, Hsthressis?” I ask. “I can still shut you off rather than bring you along.”

“Yeah, fuck that,” she answers predictably. “Actually, I guess I should say thanks for being willing to have me along. I know this is personal stuff for you.”

“Yeah, kinda,” I admit. “I don’t even know how personal they’re going to be. But… well, you want to see them, and I owe you.”

“Damn straight you do!”

“Good night, Hsthressis.”

“Good night, Evelyn.”

And so… we pass out. Hopefully what we see won’t be horribly embarrassing.

I have never been more embarrassed than I am right now.

“I still can’t believe how much blood that was,” Tara says again, hovering protectively behind me as if I might fall over at any second. “You’re absolutely positive that it’s okay for you to be out and about, right?”

“Yes, same as the last five times,” I whine quietly, my face rapidly morphing from pink to beet red. “It’s perfectly normal.”

“But how can that be normal!?” Tara hisses back. “Evelyn, I thought you were dying! You lose that much blood every month?”

“I have plenty of blood!” I insist. “How do you not know about this? Don’t you have a… you know?”

“Well, yes, but mine lays eggs.”

“Okay, valid point,” I sigh. “But seriously, did you not pick this up from your bio-template? Or your digested memories? Or like, the internet?”

“My bio-template automatically replaces your reproductive parts with mine, delving into stolen memories feels incredibly disrespectful, and you’re the one always telling me not to look up genitalia on the internet.”

“Wh… that is way different!”

“How is that different?”

“It’s—”

I cut myself off, sighing.

“I guess it’s not. You win. But can we please stop talking about this? I’m fine. Seriously.”

“All right, all right,” Tara concedes, chuckling. Ugh, I swear, if she was just messing with me… eh, nah, probably not. She looked genuinely scared before. I’ve noticed Tara just has a really quick emotional turnaround.

The two of us are, to my extreme bewilderment, out in public. Tara doesn’t seem to care if we talk about her abilities where other people can hear, assuming (likely correctly) that no one around us cares enough to listen to what we’re talking about and they wouldn’t assume it was non-fiction if they did. It’s been a few days since our break-in fiasco, and everything already seems back to normal. I have classes, then I hang out with Tara after classes. She even somehow convinced me to go out to lunch today, and after a bit of hedging on my end we managed to make it to the mall food court. Being out together is equal parts exciting and terrifying, but I have to admit… the chinese food really is way better than it has any right to be.

Even better, Tara is paying. She has money now, apparently from selling spider silk on the street for a while before being politely informed that she needs a permit to do that. Still, silk sells well, and she got a decent sum of hard cash from the endeavor. I told her that it likely sold for so much because humans don’t know how to mass-produce spider silk with any sort of cost-effectiveness, and she just responded with a knowing smile. So now the two of us are sipping Coca-Cola from actual real glass bottles which, while objectively not fancy at all, sure seems fancy as fuck to my broke college ass.

“In that case, which one of your bodily functions do you want to talk about?” Tara teases, watching my expression with a smarmy grin.

“None of them!” I protest, provoking a small, tight-lipped laugh from her as she tries to take a drink. “Come on, Tara! Conversation shift! Let’s talk about… oh! What have you been reading lately?”

“Dystopian fiction, mostly,” she answers. “Feed, Brave New World, The Giver. Very cautionary, very insightful. Frighteningly relevant. Good gods, was I wrong about fiction. Blah blah blah, it’s not real, blah. Completely missing the point. ‘Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can.’”

“That’s a Terry Pratchett quote, isn’t it?”

“It is!” Tara confirms happily. “Frankly, I don’t like his stories at all. But I do like that quote.”

“What!” I say in only partially-mock outrage. “How can you not like Terry Pratchett!?”

“He’s… too unreal. The characters are all so absurd!”

“That’s the point! It’s a satire! He plays up overdone tropes to logical, comical extremes.”

“I’m not sure I get tropes, really,” Tara grumbles. “I browsed that website you sent me but they all just seemed… silly.”

“Hmm…” I mutter. “Maybe you just haven’t yet read enough to understand what’s being sati—”

A loud shattering sound interrupts my sentence as soda splatters across Tara’s side of the table. Panic spikes through me and I bolt up out of my chair, but Tara is motionless. Shards of glass jut out of her clenched fist, face twisted by fury. There’s no blood. She shattered the bottle bare-handed, without a scratch.

“Evelyn,” my friend says evenly, icy enough to make me freeze. “What… is bail?”

“Um,” I stammer, swallowing hard. Oh no no no. Did the man—

“Never mind, looked it up,” Tara continues. “Talking to… yes. Okay. So he’s out then. His trial will be… and… a year? A year! Whereas I am in administrative detention for an undetermined and possibly indefinite amount of time. Fascinating.”

Tara takes a deep breath through her nose, unclenching her fist to let what was left of her coke bottle clatter onto the table. Immediately afterwards, a familiar voice calls out to me, because the universe apparently decided that this still wasn’t quite enough chaos.

“Evelyn!”

I turn my head to spot Samantha rushing towards me, trailed by her usual posse of Sasha, Alex, and Thomas.

“Are you alright? What’s happening? I…” she glances sideways at Tara, swallowing saliva. “I didn’t think you’d be out today.”

My mind races as I stammer to find an excuse, something that seems normal.

“Sam! Hi! It’s fine, it’s fine! I didn’t think I’d be out today either, haha! But Tara dragged me out here, and we were just hanging out, and, you know, dropped her bottle, so, it’s a bit of a mess I guess…”

Thomas nods with understanding. Ah, what a saint! He bought it! It was a good excuse, I think, right? He gets it. We’re good, right? I look to the others, but they’re staring at me with a mixture of surprise and concern.

“Evelyn…” Sasha said quietly, with that careful slowness of someone questioning my sanity, “that’s not Tara.”

I look back. Of course it’s Tara?

The woman with me has Tara’s laugh, Tara’s wit, Tara’s impeccable insight. She walks like Tara, talks like Tara, reads the same books as Tara, because she is Tara, wholly and completely. But I still swallow in horror as I realize my mistake: she doesn’t have Tara’s face. At least, not the face that Sasha and Alex knew. That body is still stuck in jail.

Shit.

“It’s, uh… it’s… a family name!” I blurt. “She and her sister both go by Tara. Um, y’know, like Japanese?”

No, that excuse is stupid! Distract them! Distract!

“Anyway we were just, um, talking ab-b-bout how Tara, um, I mean the other Tara, is still stuck in jail even though the other guy got out on bail—”

“He WHAT!?” Sasha roars, startling half the food court.

“Right?” I agree, momentum building. Distraction successful! We’re good, things are good! Well, actually, things are terrible. This is such a mess, aaaaaah!

“It’s complete bullshit!” I continue.

“It’s a lot more than that!” Sasha growls furiously.

“It’s more or less what I expected,” Alex sighs.

“Wait, I feel like I’m out of the loop here,” Thomas butts in. “Is this the thing you guys were freaking out about the other night? Like, the sexual assault thing?”

“Alleged sexual assault,” Alex murmurs. “Innocent until proven guilty, and all that. He’s not legally a criminal until after the trial, so they can’t deny him bail unless a judge decides there’s overwhelming evidence in the initial case. The main witness isn’t an American citizen, and…”

“You’re an American citizen! You saw what that rat did to her!” Sasha hisses back. Alex only shrugs.

“And if you put him in front of me I’d probably strangle him. I dunno, it’s just how it is sometimes, if you have the money for it. He might even get convicted when his actual trial happens, but his lawyers are gonna delay that trial as much as they can, then if they lose they’re going to appeal, which technically needs a basis but I don’t doubt they’ll find one, and then they’ll fight to get him out on bail during that appeal, probably bribe someone along the way, and… yeah. A year, minimum.”

Sasha smolders so furiously I’m pretty sure the ice on the table starts melting faster. Thomas looks shocked and confused, Samantha looks grim, and Tara… Tara looks calculating. The girl from another world glares icily at nothing, chewing on a thought complex enough to halt a hundred brains.

“I promise, I will do everything in my power to get your sister out of jail,” Sasha says, stepping forward. “I will not let this—”

“Don’t bother,” Tara grunts. “She’s not my sister.”

Sasha clears her throat.

“Pardon?”

“I’m done breaking my principles over petty paranoia,” Tara continues, standing up. “I’m prepared now. Would any of you be opposed to a short hike? I would like to explain some things about the situation.”

I stare at her, mouth agape. She catches my eyes and gives me a nod. She’s… going to tell them?

Thomas, Sasha, Alex, and Samantha look between each other. Of the four of them, I only really know Samantha well. Alex is kind of cool, Sasha is intense but well-meaning, and I know basically nothing about Thomas other than that he’s hot and often nearby.

I want to tell Tara to lie for me.

I do. I hate myself for it, but I do. I want this to be just the two of us, our special secret, my own beautiful bug friend. I’m utterly terrified that when she gets other friends she’ll realize what a hopeless loser I am and the two of us will drift apart. We already are drifting a little, after all. The larger she gets, the faster she changes, the less I know of her. But I won’t even be her best friend anymore, when I stop being her only friend. Still… if I try to stop her from making more, I don’t deserve to be her friend at all. So I nod back, and voice none of the selfish screams that roil inside me.

“I like hikes,” Thomas eventually ventures.

“I as well,” Tara says with a smile. “Follow me.”

From the mall back to the campus, we walk past the house Tara broke into, past the dorms, and into a very familiar forest. The forest where I found a little blue bug who changed my life. Deeper and deeper, away from the watchful eyes and ears of civilization… and towards more watchful eyes and ears of something else.

“So, uh,” Alex ventures conversationally, “you’re not like, taking us to the cabin you murder people in, right?”

Tara freezes, turning around with a look of abject terror on her face.

“H-how—”

“I-I-It’s a horror movie trope!” I blurt out, walking between her and Alex. “Cabin in the woods! It’s like a setting thing! It’s a joke!”

“Oh,” Tara says, relaxing. “Alright, then.”

“Well, it was a joke,” Alex exclaims, blinking with surprise.

“Yeah, what the fuck? That was crazy suspicious,” Samantha says. “This is all fuckin’ weird. Where are we going? Why can’t you explain whatever you’re explaining here?”

Tara scratches a cheek sheepishly.

“I suppose I can,” she admits. “I just wanted to impress Evelyn with my camp. It’s been a while since she’s seen it. I’ve spruced it up considerably! No longer just some murky, egg-filled hole in the ground.”

“Uh, what?” Thomas asks.

“Ah, and that’s the other thing, yes,” Tara says. “It will be easier to present a convincing case with… more obvious evidence. The downside to having so much fiction on your world is that everyone seems to be quite skeptical. This is mostly to my benefit, but here…” she shrugs. “I suppose I’ve gathered enough of myself to make due.”

“This is very exciting!” Sasha says, her grin showing she actually meant it. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, but you certainly have the same flair for the dramatic as your not-sister!”

“Of course I do,” Tara intones. “She’s me. And so is all of this.”

With a rustle, three bears emerge from the brush around the forest, surrounding the group. Birds pause their song, settling en masse on the branches around us. A massive cloud of insects circle the perimeter wings thrumming almost silently. Rodents, deer, snakes… dozens and dozens of creatures surround the group of friends, huddling each other in terror. Each of them speaks together:

“I am Tleshkinat Tarakanora Se Ktahn-Hashlenesa.”

She continues, alternating her speech between each of the larger bodies in sequence.

“I am the woman in front of you. I am the Tara in jail. I’m the creature on the wall Evelyn caught when you met her. I am all of these things, and I am not from your world.”

“What the actual fuck is going on,” Alex whispers tonelessly.

“I think your friend has super powers,” Thomas ventures.

“Super powers aren’t real!”

“I’m not so sure about that one, Alex!” Sasha hisses. “They’re looking pretty real right about now!”

I hop up onto the back of a bear-Tara, who turns her head to smirk at me with amusement. I smirk back. Okay, maybe this is worth it.

“And now you shall be assimilated!” I intone, raising my arms like a zombie. “Join the almighty hive! Your knowledge will be absorbed into the collective! One of uuuusss!”

A couple Tara bodies snort, and a bear breaks out into eerily humanoid laughter. She’s been practicing better human-laughs lately, which are much easier on the ears. I do kind of miss the screechy Tara-laugh, though.

“One of us!” repeats a squirrel, and I fail to hold back a grin.

“One of us!” demands a bird.

“One of us!” a bear roars.

“One of us!”

“One of us!”

“One of us!”

Sasha’s terrified scream pierces the chanting, loud and high enough to seriously hurt. I stop chanting to cover my ears, and the others let out a series of foul explicatives, Alex and Sam smacking her lightly to make her stop. The ringing remains in everyone’s ears as Tara and I start to explain the situation more seriously. Through unspoken agreement we leave out the bits where she killed someone and gets new forms by eating them, but otherwise… we tell them everything.

“So, why us?” Thomas asks. “We’re the only ones who know, right?”

“As of right now, yes,” Tara confirms. “As for why, I trust Alex and Sasha. Samantha is Evelyn’s friend. And you… are a calculated risk.”

Thomas looks mildly offended, but doesn’t comment.

“I still can’t believe this,” Alex breathes. “It just doesn’t feel real. If this is a secret, why tell us at all?”

“It’s a secret I’m keeping because I’m afraid to tell anyone,” Tara says softly. “Not because I don’t want people to know.”

“Oh,” Alex murmurs, frowning. “So you’re coming out. But rather than being gay or trans or whatever, you’re coming out as a fucking alien space monster.”

I snort, and Tara grimaces.

“I… suppose?” she hedges.

“Nah, you totally are,” Alex insists. “It’s cool. As your friends, we openly accept your identity as a fucking alien space monster, even though it’s completely, one-hundred-percent super impossible.”

“I mean, I would have agreed with you half a year ago, but now it obviously isn’t,” the alien space monster grumbles.

“Yeah,” Alex agrees, eyes scanning the many Tara-bodies around the clearing. “Yeah, that’s fair.”

Silence stretches comfortably over me as I lounge on a Tara-bear. My friend is resting a bunch of butterfly bodies in my hair, which is awesome, and for once I’m generally not the most uncomfortable person nearby. All in all I’m having a great time, despite the large group.

“So you don’t even know how you became like this?” Samantha asks. “Or how you got here?”

“That’s right,” Tara confirms. “I’m not from Earth, and I was something else before I came here.”

“So… something else did this to you, and brought you here.”

“That seems likely,” Tara agrees.

“So are they here too?” Samantha asks.

46 What Do You Want

“So… that’s it, then?” Sasha asks. “You’re just going to let him be?”

“Yes,” a grumpy Tara responds. “‘That’s it.’ I’ll watch him and stop him if he tries to hurt anyone. What else would you have me do?”

Sasha, Alex, Sam, Thomas, Tara, and of course myself are all on our way out of the forest, the sun having started to set. The group has been talking for hours, asking Tara about what she is, where she came from, and all sorts of other things. Inevitably, however, as we return for dinner the group’s focus moves back to the man Tara had gotten arrested… to much less effect than anyone would have liked.

“He should pay for what he’s done,” Sasha growls.

“He will pay,” Alex said, putting a hand on her shoulder. “Probably. It’ll just take a while to happen, and be a disproportionately minor punishment.”

“If that,” Thomas mentions grimly.

“Well if he gets away with it we can deal with it then, but I’m not going to kidnap or murder anyone!” Tara snaps.

“I’m not saying you have to kill him, I’m just saying you should make him regret ever living in the first place,” Sasha hisses.

“I’m not torturing anyone either! Solving problems with force is a last resort.”

“You didn’t think so when you broke his arm.”

“Okay then!” Samantha says loudly, stepping between the two of them. “I think that’s about all we’re getting out of that conversation for now, don’t you? How about we swap back to easy questions, like ‘Arby’s or Taco Bell?’”

I manage to quirk my lips gratefully in Sam’s direction. I’m not sure I could survive another minute of that argument. Conflict is just… too much after too long a day being around people.

“That is not an easy question,” Thomas protests, the conversation naturally continuing without my input.

“Sam, we just found out we have a visitor from another planet, and you want to take her to fucking Taco Bell!?” Alex asks incredulously.

“I like Taco Bell!”

“Yeah, until about five minutes after eating it!”

Tara shakes her head with amusement, opting to punctuate her own opinion by ripping a chunk of bark off a nearby tree and biting down on it with a loud crunch.

“I’m fine with anything,” she says while chewing.

That leaves everyone speechless for a while, so I muster the last of my strength and manage to mumble something incoherent in the pause.

“Sorry Evelyn, what was that?” Alex asks.

“I said I should head home instead,” I murmur a bit louder. “Homework and… stuff.”

Tara focuses on me, bugs of the forest shifting subtly in ways I’ve learned no one else sees. A little spark of comfort flickers inside me, though it’s hard to feel through the crushing anxiety.

“Of course,” Tara said, her smile understanding. “I’ll walk you home, then.”

“N-no!” I stammer. “You don’t have to do that. You should go out.”

“Evelyn, you dork,” she says with amusement. “I can do both.”

Stepping out of the forest, I quickly spot a second Tara body making her way towards the group. She smiles and waves, the nearby body just looking smug.

Both Taras are dressed in one of the outfits Sasha picked out, and they waste no time lining up side by side and mirroring each other’s poses. Sasha’s anger is immediately forgotten; in fact, it looks like she’s so excited that she’s about to have a stroke.

“Evelyn! Which outfit do you like best?” Tara asks, both bodies preening.

I don’t really feel focused enough to answer that, though. My eyes keep wandering to the rest of the group. They’re Sam’s friends, maybe even Tara’s friends, but as nice as they are I can’t form bonds quite that easily. They still make me uncomfortable, even if there’s no good reason they should. Plus, right now they look uncomfortable as well (perhaps apart from Sasha) and that only adds to my anxiety. Their discomfort makes sense, of course. They’re finally starting to put together what exactly Tara is, her true limitlessness. There’s no one I feel more comfortable around than Tara, but sometimes it’s scary even for me.

“Evelyn?”

“Huh?” I say, blinking. “Oh. Uh. They’re both… nice? Either is fine.”

“Either is fine?” Alex whispers to Sam, who nods grimly for some reason. Alex pats her on the back.

What? Is this one of those things where not picking something is bad? What am I supposed to say? I don’t know anything about fashion, I go everywhere in a t-shirt, pants, and a bra. My social tank is already running on fumes anyway, there’s no way I can fake this. I don’t understand. It’s just another anxiety to add to the pile.

Tara seems to pick up on this at least, ending her posing and side-hugging me with the body I walked here with, dragging me lightly towards our dorm.

“I’ll quit teasing you,” she reassures me. “Let’s go.”

Her other body starts the trek towards the restaurant strip, guiding the others that way. I, meanwhile, am gently pushed back towards campus and eventually the dorms. My mind wanders for the whole journey, causing me to fumble and drop my key when the surprise of suddenly reaching me home shakes me. Tara chuckles as my face goes beet red, but soon I’m home. I can finally just collapse on a bed with my phone and stop existing for a while.

“I hope you had a good time, at least,” Tara says bemusedly, tossing a pair of hot pockets into the microwave.

I manage to peer through the fog of exhaustion and anxiety long enough to decide that, yes, today has been a pretty good day. I’m done with it and it’s all the day I can handle, but overall it went well. Tara has more real friends, I’ve got the start of what might be more real friends, and I even got to drink Coca-Cola out of the fancy glass bottle.

“Yeah,” I agree, summing up that thought process with every word I can muster. At this point I’m already lying sideways on the bed with five different tabs open. Oh, neat, they found a new species of beetle.

A plate is set in front of me, complete with a magma-filled hot pocket. Tara sits on my bed by my feet, her own boiling bread bomb in one hand and a book in the other. I nibble the corners off of mine, careful not to burn my mouth as deadly steam hisses out of my quintessential college dinner. Hopefully, I’ll finish the rest during that sweet spot where it’s cold enough not to murder me but warm enough to not have become an unchewable brick. Tara, like the alien monster she is, just devours it hot.

I love these moments, resting and vegging out with my friend just close enough to touch. They’re obligation-free. Tara is content to read in silence, leaving me to passively soak up joy from her presence without the anxiety of social interaction. It’s exactly what I need after an exhausting day.

“You still out with the others?” I ask after nearly an hour of silence.

“I am, yes,” Tara answers, eyes still locked on her book. “Dinner tasted about the same as all your processed foods, but I seem to be having less trouble digesting it than the others. Are mutual bowel issues supposed to be a bonding exercise?”

“Only when you eat Mexican food,” I inform her.

“Truly, the sophistication of your people’s culture is without peer,” Tara responds solemnly.

I nod, smiling at the joke, and am soon lost in the depths of my phone again. It’s some time before more words are spoken, this time starting from Tara.

“Alex just asked me a question, and I’m not sure how to answer.”

“Well, what’s the question?” I ask without looking up.

“Are you my girlfriend?”

I try to blurt out a confused noise and swallow saliva at the same time, choking hard as my heart rate rises rapidly. Tara, having seen this a few times before, waits patiently with an amused expression.

“What!?” I eventually manage to cough out.

“Are you my girlfriend,” Tara says again, nearly causing my chest to explode. “As in, are we more than just friends? Apparently the fact that we live together and hug a lot indicates this is a possibility, but I must admit I’m a bit unclear about the whole classification. It stands to reason, though, that I cannot be your girlfriend without your say-so.”

“Uh-b-b-b-b-b-buh?”

Tara chuckles, placing her hand on my head.

“I do love you, you know,” she admits, and I blush so red I’m certain I’ll burst. “Do you love me as well?”

And though my entire brain is on fire, screaming and flailing and running only on emergency power, the unending joy flowing through me speaks a clear answer.

“Yes.”

Tara smiles wide, the warmth and wonder of my world personified.

“…But I don’t know if that makes us girlfriends,” I continue with all the tact of a barreling freight train.

I brace for emotional impact. Shit did I really say that out loud? Gah, but what am supposed to say? I feel so awful, I love her so dang much but I just don’t know if I love her like that, it’s so weird and confusing! Yet when I peek my eyes back open, Tara seems more confused than hurt. Her head is tilted to the side, considering my words like she would any other interesting puzzle.

“…Okay,” Tara posits, “again, I am not terribly familiar with the nuance of the label. It’s a complicated cultural conundrum with dozens if not hundreds of possible meanings. And just to be clear, I have zero context about it. So correct me if I’m wrong, but I think you’re saying… you don’t want to have sex with me? Which is fine, if surprising. I suppose I just misinterpreted quite a few signs.”

I squeak wordlessly.

“You’ve certainly smelled aroused when you look at me. Not all the time, and not as often as when you stare at Thomas, but I think I’ve figured out that scent fairly reliably.”

“Tara—”

“And the day after you saw my human form for the first time you locked yourself in the bathroom and looked at naked women on your phone for an hour, even though you told me not to do things like that.”

“Tara!”

“I know, I know, don’t watch people in bathrooms. But you were in there for an hour! I was worried! And the point is you seemed to like it, so—”

“TARA!” I yelp, so much blood pooling in my face I can feel my limbs going numb, “S-stop! I can’t…”

I can’t even manage to choke out the rest of that sentence, but she stops talking all the same. She even has the decency not to grin as I slowly flush away my embarrassment, though I’d bet diamonds that she’s uproariously laughing somewhere in the world. Still, the both of us just wait in silence, time ticking away as the shrieking anxiety cools. Tara is patient. It’s one of the things I love about her.

“Tara…” I eventually manage to ask, “did you want to have sex with me?”

The alien girl blinks.

“No,” she says frankly. “Not particularly.”

I sigh.

“Then why are you even asking? It should be settled, then.” There’s no way I’d ever even think of it if Tara didn’t want it just as much as I do.

Tara sighs, sitting sideways as she puts her weight on one arm.

“Because I’d want to if you want to. It’s not exactly ‘my thing,’ is all. I don’t have any particular desire for the action, but I don’t have any particular revulsion either. It’s just… not a thing, in my life? About once a year I just head to some government office, lay a bunch of unfertilized eggs there, and then if a man wants to come turn them into babies and raise them he can apply to do that. The way you think about sex isn’t even a concept in my culture, we’re not biologically equipped for it that way. And my new species has transcended sexual reproduction altogether. What do I care for an orgasm? If I want to flood my brain with dopamine, I can just do that manually. Or I could just find something new to eat. The idea of intercourse does not have any sort of inherent appeal to me. But the idea of making you happy…”

She leans forward, poking me on the forehead.

“…Is, without question, my favorite thing on Earth. And perhaps my home planet, too.”

My mind ceases to function entirely, filled with an indescribable complexity of joy, wonder, satisfaction… this is really happening, isn’t it? The person I love, the coolest, most incredibly amazing miracle on the entire planet, loves me. Really, actually loves me. And I love her back. Nothing else I’ve ever known compares to this feeling. Yet, in the back of my mind, a burning doubt rings, pushing a question to my lips.

“Why me?” I ask, fear and confusion pulsing through the joy. My old friend anxiety, ringing the alarms in my head. This couldn’t actually be happening, right?

“Oh, Evelyn,” Tara says sadly. “Why not you? You’re intelligent. Well-read. Well-spoken, if given time to think. The passion you give to your topics of interest is inspiring. It’s a joy to listen to you talk. And… you care. You care so much. About people, about the world, about stories and bugs and the rich and the impoverished and everything in between. You are wonderful.”

Monsters of emotion war in my head, though, and I still eke out more protests.

“You’re… you’re you! You probably know dozens of smart people!”

“Mmm, perhaps. But none of them are you.”

“I’m a mess!” I argue.

“You’re a cute mess,” Tara counters, smirking once again. “Evelyn, at what point did you get the impression that you would have to be perfect to be loved? Do you think I’m anything but a hot mess of problems, held together with sticks and glue? You just… don’t see my failures as much, Evelyn. I want you to think I’m ‘cool,’ after all, so I put on somewhat of a… brave face. In reality, I’m just as bad as you.”

But she isn’t as bad as me. That’s self-evident. She’s out there, having fun with nice people who want to be my friend, and I’m curled up in here, too much of a failure to face them. Tara is traveling the world, constantly learning and growing, and I’m completely paralyzed by what should be a happy conversation. As bad as me? Really? She’s the most incredible being on the entire planet! That’s not even remotely an exaggeration. Nothing in nature or made by human hands can compare to her. Her words are shallow. They don’t ring true.

“Okay,” I say anyway. It’s all I can manage.

Tara nods in acquiescence. If she picks up on my doubts, she doesn’t comment on them.

“So… all this being the case, should I tell them you’re still available?” she asks with a smirk. “It’s all right if you’re holding out for a better beau.”

“No!” I say a bit too quickly. “No, I mean… maybe? I don’t know. It’s complicated! I’m still… wrapping my head around everything. I just… this is new to me. I always imagined myself with a boy someday. Maybe I’m more of a bigot than I thought.”

Tara shifts uncomfortably.

“Do you… want me to be a boy?”

What? Oh. I guess… she can do that. I’m so tired, though. I don’t want to talk anymore. I just want to slowly dissolve into nothing, wait for tomorrow morning, and go look at bugs. But for this, for her, I find just a bit more energy.

“…Do you want to be a boy?” I ask slowly.

She grimaces and shrugs.

“Not particularly?”

“Well, what do you want to be?”

There’s a long pause, as the one creature on the planet that could truly become anything they imagine considers that question with the full gravity of her being.

“A good person,” Tara answers softly.

Oh. I scoot over and give my friend a hug, curling around her as she stares out the window. I’m out of words for today, but at least I can do that.

The two of us, eventually, drift off to sleep.

…

I wake up to waves upon waves of emotion flowing over me in sequence. Tara. Oh my god, Tara. How could I…? How could I forget…?

Tears flow from all my bodies that are capable of the act. I miss her. I miss her so much. How did I even end up here, in the same situation as her? It has to be the same people that did whatever they did to her, right? Who are they? How did they do this to us? How do we get home?

“Evelyn?” Hsthressis asks me softly, lightly poking one of my ETEs. “Are you okay?”

“I loved her,” I sob. “I loved her so much.”

“I… um, I know,” she says. “I did too, when we were asleep. Do you think she’s okay?”

“I don’t know,” I admit.

“Do you think what happened to me is what happened to you?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” I repeat.

“What if… what if this is all a simulation?” she asks. “Like we’re only functions of her mind, or something. The way you used to simulate me.”

“I don’t know,” I say a third time. “…But I doubt it. There’s not enough processing power. I can simulate your mind, sure. It takes me one brain to simulate one brain. My hardware is perfect for that task. But I can’t even begin to simulate an entire planet. Like, even if the vast majority of our experience is conveyed to us as a heuristic we’re forced to ignore rather than a complete calculation, I just… I’m doing a lot. I’m in a lot of places at once. Tara would probably need a brain the size of the sun to simulate all this.”

Plus, I refuse to acknowledge any theory that delegitimizes the personhood of the many Sthrenslians I’m dedicating myself to help.

“It’s a lot to take in even for you, huh?” Hsthressis asks.

“Yeah,” I admit. “Honestly, I’m tempted to just go back to sleep again.”

“Why’s that?”

“Well… I really wanna know if my past self worked up the self-confidence to actually date her,” I admit.

Hsthressis stares at me. I stare back.

“Heh,” she chuckles, twisting her tendril in a smug expression. “Gay.”

I send her the memory of inhaling a dog fart and get up to start my day, whistling to the lovely tune of her indignant complaints.

47 Diplomacy for Dummies

“Evelyn, you can’t take a Weaver on a diplomatic mission,” Priestess Saslitak whines.

I put my hands on my hips, turning to scowl at her.

“Why the heck not?” I ask.

“B-because she’s a Weaver, Evelyn,” Saslitak explains incredulously.

“Well that doesn’t sound like an actual reason to me,” I grunt. “What makes a weaver any less suited to diplomacy than all the warriors you want to bring?”

The time has finally come. I have the food production and stockpiles necessary to try and bribe other Sthrenslian clans into friendship. But I’ve learned from my diplomatic mistakes of the past! I won’t repeat the same fuckup as before! Specifically, I won’t repeat the fuckup of opening my dumbass mouth and trying to display any form of social competency, and instead have the Resonant Gems do most of the talking for me. I’ll just be there to like… validate their otherwise-crazy stories about a friendly visitor from far away who happens to have lots of food, and maybe answer a few questions if I get asked any.

“Bringing Warriors is a show of strength, of competency. Bringing Weavers would be… well, it would be insulting!”

“Okay, well, first of all that’s stupid,” I say. “And second of all we’re still bringing a bunch of warriors, and only one weaver. That’s not bad, right?”

“I… suppose? But Evelyn, she is a Weaver, she has her own duties within the clan. Weavers… weave.”

I sigh. Saslitak is wonderful and she cares about people very much, but she can be a bit dogmatic. It’s not really worth it to argue with her about this, I don’t think. But it’s… frustrating.

“Weaver Nsreslisa is not only my friend, but she is one of the smartest Sthrenslians I’ve ever met,” I explain firmly. “I’d feel a lot better if I had her help during something this important.”

Honestly, I’d like to bring Worker Rshult too, but not really for any reason other than the fact that I like him. Nsreslisa, meanwhile, is politically clever as fuck, and also I can trust her to call me on my shit without hesitation.

“I… we can see if it’s possible to find someone to cover her duties?” Saslitak hedges.

“Oh, no need to worry about that,” I dismiss. “I can do them. Probably not as well as Nsreslisa, but I can do them.”

*“Probably* not?” Nsreslisa calls from halfway down a different cavern. “Getting arrogant already, are you?”

I yelp with surprise. Damn it, I thought we were talking too quietly for her to hear!

“You thought you were talking too quietly for me to hear, didn’t you?” Nsreslisa sighs. “Evelyn, you are embarrassingly bad at that.”

“I… blarg!”

“Weaver!” Priestess Saslitak chides. “That is not an appropriate thing to shout at anyone, let alone—”

“I-it’s fine!” I blurt hurriedly. “Priestess Saslitak, it’s fine. I really value her candidness. I don’t like it when people are all quiet and deferential and stuff.”

“And isn’t it inherently polite to respect someone’s wishes, Priestess?” Weaver Nsreslisa coos, her tone exactly innocent enough to not get called out on it.

“I… well, yes, there’s certainly wisdom in that,” Priestess Saslitak mumbles.

“That being said… Evelyn, didn’t I tell you that I wasn’t interested in coming on this excursion?” Weaver Nsreslisa grumbles. “I have to take care of Tklikik. I can’t believe you’ve gone this far.”

“I’m just scared, okay?” I admit. “We won’t be gone that long, and I promise to keep Tklikik out of trouble! But I need your help! You’re the only one that… y’know. I need you to make sure I don’t mess up!”

…Yeah, somehow, despite my lack of skill at being quiet and my massive blabbermouth, none of the other Resonant Gems have indicated to me that they heard my story. Nsreslisa is the only person that knows, and my anxiety insists that things stay that way.

“Really? You need my help with that?” she asks blandly.

“Yes!” I insist. “Please?”

“You sure?”

“Yes, yes! Please help me, Nsreslisa!”

“Okay,” she sighs. “Priestess, Evelyn has informed me that the odd bits of her nature are due to the fact that her entire clan is only a single individual. She’s only a one person, despite the fact that she inhabits multiple bodies.”

Ahhhh that’s not what I meant ahhhhhh! I start making horrified, mute gesticulations in Nsreslisa’s general direction.

“…Is this true, Evelyn?” Priestess Saslitak asks. “Oh my goodness, I never even thought…! I’m so sorry! I never meant to be rude!”

“It’s!? Fine!?” I squeak.

“There. All the help you needed,” Nsreslisa grunts. “You sure are timid for being literally immortal.”

“It’s! It’s a sensitive subject!” I hiss at her.

“Ah, right,” Nsreslisa drawls. “Apologies, I didn’t mean to insult your longstanding multibody traditions, which you have of course had for a very long time, due to having always been this way. It’s definitely much wiser and less silly to continue pretending to be a dozen different identical people with the same name.”

I groan, covering my face with embarrassment as I flit left and right through the air.

“Okay, fine, you’re right,” I grumble. “Thanks for pulling the band-aid off.”

“I have no idea what that means,” she grunts.

“My point is, this is all the more reason you should be coming with me!”

“I suppose you are socially hopeless,” Nsreslisa admits. “But I’m not the only person that’s able to help you with that. You’ll do fine, Evelyn. Trust Priestess Saslitak and the others.”

“Y-you don’t have to call me hopeless,” I pout.

She sighs, scuttling towards us and scooping me up into a tendril-and-claw hug. I chirp with surprise at first, but I quickly return the gesture, squeezing as much of her as I can with my tiny fairy arms.

“You’ll do fine,” she promises again. “Evelyn, Priestess Saslitak is correct. It would look like we aren’t taking the other clans seriously if a Weaver is sent on a diplomatic mission.”

“But… but that’s dumb!” I protest. “You’d be a great diplomat!”

“I’m not sure I agree with that,” Nsreslisa chuckles. “But either way, the way you think things should be doesn’t determine the way things are. Listen to our beloved Priestess, hmm?”

“…Okay,” I grumble. “I will.”

“Good.”

She nuzzles me a little and releases the hug, stepping back.

“You’re a good friend, Evelyn, and the savior to our clan,” she declares. “The others will be lining up to join us, don’t you worry.”

“Thanks, Nsreslisa,” I sigh.

“You’re welcome. Now leave me alone, I have work to do.”

I snort and she scuttles off, leaving Saslitak and me alone. Well, as alone as anyone can really be in Sthrenslian caves. Privacy seems like more of a matter of luck to me than anything else. It would be oppressive as fuck to live here without other areas for my bodies to exist alone.

“Okay, okay,” I say. “Sorry for being a butt, Saslitak. And for pretending to be more than one person. I just… I’m always really scared it’ll freak people out. It freaks me out, honestly.”

“I… I understand,” Saslitak answers. “Um, but may I ask why you chose to tell… Weaver Nsreslisa?”

Hmm… is there an implied ‘instead of me’ in that? I hope she doesn’t feel bad. The honest reason isn’t personal, though.

“Oh, she figured it out on her own and confronted me,” I tell her. “I didn’t really make the decision at all, haha. One thing just kind of led to another.”

“Oh,” Priestess Saslitak says quietly. “I suppose that makes sense. I really never imagined… oh, wait. Does this means I’m friends with all of you, then?”

I grin at her, nodding in confirmation.

“Always have been!” I tell her happily. “Sorry for not telling you the whole story, I was just… really nervous? The last group of Sthrenslians I told didn’t take it well at all.”

“It’s fine, I understand,” Saslitak confirms with a bit more certainty. “Would you be opposed to telling the whole story again, though?”

“I mean, I guess the cat’s out of the bag anyway,” I sigh.

“W-what?”

“Oh, um, sure! I mean yes. I will tell you on the way, sound good?”

“That sounds perfect,” Priestess Saslitak agrees. “Does anyone else know?”

“Hsthressis knows,” I admit. “Although again, that’s less a conscious decision on my part and more that her circumstances are really, really strange. But we’ll get to that.”

“Are you talking about me?” Hsthressis asks one of the bodies I have near her. “I just heard a squeaky, heavily accented voice say my name.”

“Hey, don’t talk to me about accents,” I grumble at her. “I’ve heard you practice English.”

“Hey, that’s not my fault!” she protests. “I literally can’t even pronounce all the sounds.”

“Then stop trying! Now are you ready to go, or what?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m ready, I’m ready,” Hsthressis grumbles, shoving the last of her breakfast down her throat.

Our final diplomatic team is a pretty simple force: Priestess Saslitak, Hsthressis, and a small collection of Warriors. Including, I’m pleased to say, the now-recovered Warrior Katrk! I don’t exactly like the idea that most of our diplomatic force is people who are mainly trained to fight, hunt, and kill, but I guess this is the way it is. On my end, I’m bringing a pair of Evelyn Tinkerbell Enhanced as well as a pair of Evelyn Terrestrial, my basic underground set.

There are two other clans we’re intending to meet with this trip: the Penitent Burrows, and the Flooded Caverns. Based on the direction, I’m pretty sure the Flooded Caverns clan lives under that first homewyrm I found before I even knew Sthrenslians were people, which means they’re closest to my main base. I definitely hope things go well with them. First, though, is the Penitent Burrows clan, since they’re closer to the Resonant Gem cave. I tell Saslitak and the Warriors my story on the way there, to… mixed reactions. Nothing outright terrible, though. I suspect it helps that the only people I’ve killed were True People. After about four hours of walking, we come across some scouts from the Penitent Burrows, who don’t seem particularly happy to see us but agree to let us speak with their Chieftain.

Chieftain Lorestra and War Leader Krstl (whose names I’m pretty sure I’ll forget even with my super-brainpower) accept us with firm politeness, their modest cave running like a well-oiled machine. The many Sthrenslians here scurry around with military precision, quickly moving from task to task without getting in each other’s way in the cramped tunnels. Things seem to be going well enough for a while; the Chieftain and War Leader are kind enough, and Priestess Saslitak handles most of the talking while Hsthressis, the warriors, and I all stay quiet.

But of course, as soon as I am brought into the conversation, things change. At least this time it’s not my fault.

“Ah, yes, the Evelyn demons,” Chieftain Lorestra muses. “Our allies warned us about them. You bring damnation to your clan by working according to their whims, Priestess.”

Oh, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me.

“You’re allied with the True People, then?” Priestess Saslitak asks, doing her best to hide her fury. “They have many selfish reasons to speak ill of my people and my friends. Is it not wise to use your own whiskers to make your conclusions about the people you meet, Chieftain?”

“It is,” the chieftain nods. “And I have heard many outlandish claims from the True People. They speak of strange demons that walk through tunnels on the air to avoid Sss’s embrace. Mad things that care not for their own lives, that speak our language and spread insanity with their words. Creatures that can corrupt even the dead, turning their victims into slave-like shadows of their living selves.”

I glance over at Warrior Katrk as I feel him stiffen underneath me. I’ve been riding on his back the whole way here, partly because riding on Sthrenslians is adorable and fun but mostly just because he insisted on thanking me somehow. I give him a reassuring pat, hopping that body off his back to stand by Saslitak instead, my mind stirring into overdrive.

“You would be one of those demons then, I take it?” the Chieftain asks me.

“I’m not a demon,” I answer firmly. “But I am the one the True People have apparently been slandering, yes.”

“So you cannot do these things they claim you’re capable of?”

“Well, I can do a lot of things,” I answer honestly. “I just don’t appreciate being called a demon over them. Did they tell you I can cure most diseases without popmold? Did they tell you how I freely share food with the hungry? Did they tell you how I dig tunnels like your people, but also bring enclosures to the surface, expanding on what you call ‘Sss’s domain?’ I’d be surprised if they did, since they threw me in jail and refused to let me do anything shortly after we met.”

“And they were wise to do so,” Chieftain Lorestra intones. “We do not need your food, nor your shelter, nor your popmold substitutes. Our clan functions without need of your temptations, and you are unwelcome here.”

There’s more to the negotiation after that, but none of it goes any better. The Penitent Burrows have enough respect for diplomacy to not try to attack us or force us to do anything, but we’re pretty firmly turned away empty-handed, no matter what we tried to offer. It’s a complete bust. We spend the rest of the day reaching the Flooded Caverns clan, and that doesn’t go great either… for an entirely different reason.

“You are enemies of the True People,” their War Leader, Gdrikras, reminds us. “If we become your allies, your enemies become our enemies. And the True People are a far larger clan than either of us. Unless this Clan Evelyn has forces to supply?”

All attention turns to me, causing an instinctive fear to run through me. I quash it before speaking.

“We… are pacifists,” I explain. “We don’t kill people.”

“That’s going to make it rather difficult for you to defend us in a war then, isn’t it?” War Leader Gdrikras says dryly. “You’re asking us to take on your burdens against a clan we have no quarrel with. Worse, you’re asking us to lose with you.”

“This… isn’t an alliance for the sake of fighting a war,” I explain. “There won’t be a war. We’re merely establishing friendly relations. I have much food I can offer, and—”

“Our waters supply all the food we need,” their Chieftain butts in. “We wish you good tidings, Resonant Gems, but we will not make our clan a target by dealing with you. The only thing I offer you is wisdom: if you wish to prevent war, you’d best prepare for one.”

“What exactly do you mean by that?” Priestess Saslitak asks, bristling under the possible threat.

“It’s nothing but friendly advice,” the Chieftain continues. “Prepare for war. Because if you’re not… I suspect you’re the only ones. The True People have made their intentions to the other clans clear.”

No, no no no. Shit!

“I… we should return to our clan,” Priestess Saslitak says hurriedly.

“You should indeed,” the Chieftain of the Flooded Waters agrees. “If Sss truly still walks with you, may He guide your steps.”

“…Evelyn?” Saslitak asks, worriedly.

“Yeah, I’m telling the chieftain,” I sigh. “We’ll get ready.”

As soon as I figure out how to pacifistically fight a war, anyway.

48 Doing What You Can

“Evelyn, Evelyn look!” Tara laughs happily, turning her newly-bought laptop around so I could see the screen. “I made a website!”

I glance at it and find my eyes immediately assaulted by a terrifyingly 1998-esque website that would cause me to immediately close the tab and run my virus scanner if I ever saw it crawl its way onto my browser. The title of the page reads ‘Jane Doe Emergency Squad 😁’ and is filled with watermarked stock photos, heart emojis, and a few pictures of various women that I assume are all Tara hauling around wood, digging trenches, and the like.

A lot of questions and comments pass through my mind as I behold this horrifying abomination against graphic design, but the one that I end up saying is simply:

“…Why?”

Tara, looking concerningly proud, is all too happy to answer.

“Well, you know how I finally made it to the Central African Republic a while back? Well, I’m in most of Africa by now, since I started making a lot of bodies very quickly, helping out with building infrastructure, creating farms, filtering water, synthesizing medication, and so forth. It’s been mostly well-received overall, but a lot of people there are a bit confused and concerned about who I am. So I thought it would be helpful if I presented myself as a charity organization! You know, like Doctors Without Borders. Everyone likes Doctors Without Borders! So I wanted a website where I can look legitimate and help people feel at ease.”

“Uh,” I manage to say. “I don’t think you’re going to complete either of those objectives.”

“What? Really?” Tara pouts. “I thought it was cute. What did I do wrong?”

“Maybe you should just hire someone else to make you a website,” I hedge. “You can afford professional work now, right?”

“Well, yes, but all my money is in cash,” Tara sighs. “I can’t open a bank account without an ID. And I don’t really know any website designers locally enough to pay in person.”

“We can just deposit the money in my account,” I tell her. “Then I can make whatever electronic purchases you need. I mean, if you want.”

“Oh, really? Well, that would be extremely helpful,” Tara says gratefully. “But is my website really that bad…? I think it’s cute!”

“If I saw that website pop up on my computer I’d be tempted to set my hard drive on fire in fear of what horrors it deposited there,” I say frankly. “I love you, Tara, but your website looks like the queen of all scam sites, emerging from her nest with a horde of warriors to destroy any computer foolish enough to stand in her way.”

“Well!” Tara answers. “I can’t decide whether to be offended or simply impressed that I managed to draw out such a cutting insult from you. I’ve got to say, I like seeing you this feisty!”

I blush furiously, burying my face in the book I’m slowly slogging through for my history class. Unfortunately, Tara’s Blubie body has been on my lap this entire time, and her adorable beady eyes glitter with mirth at my expression as my free hand idly strokes her smooth carapace, moving on autopilot in spite of my embarrassment.

“Cute,” she accuses, and I dissolve into a series of incoherent noises as she screeches in laughter.

Tara, never one to let up when she has the advantage, takes this opportunity to move her human body over to my bed, sitting down next to me and putting her arm around me. I make a few squeaky burbling sounds as she leans her head on my shoulder, her grin holding not a single milliliter of remorse.

I give her the most indignant glare I can muster, though on the inside I’m screaming in joy. Damn it, she’s just so great. I love her so much.

“Things are going well over in the third world countries you’re helping, then?” I prompt, changing the subject as best I can. “Did you say you were synthesizing medicine? Be extra, extra careful with that. I assume you can test them on your own bodies easily enough, but humans can have random allergies to all sorts of stuff. It differs a lot from person to person.”

“Yes, I’m aware,” Tara assures me. “Don’t worry, I’ve met up with some doctors in the area and I’m working closely alongside them. I’m not doing this alone.”

“Do they know about you?” I ask.

“One of them does,” she confirms. “Though I’m working with several dozen across various countries. The rest simply think I’m delivering the supplies, not producing them. The international community hasn’t noticed the sudden influx of desperately needed medications yet, but sooner or later they will. I can produce a lot of food and medical supplies in a relatively short amount of time. I suppose we’ll have to wait and see how they react to it.”

“It’s really, really fucking cool that you’re doing this, though,” I tell her. “Just… wow. Y’know like, solving humanitarian crises aside, what’s it even like? Being in Africa and here in my dorm at the same time, I mean.”

“Well, it’s certainly very dark there right now,” she jokes. “In general, though, it’s… not much stranger than being in any two other places at the same time. Though I do notice there’s a very slight time lag if I try to use a brain on one side of the world to control a body on the other. Maybe… a tenth of a second or less? Just enough to be noticeable and annoying.”

“Huh,” I say. “Your hive mind communication network is light-speed limited. That checks out, actually. Tachyon particles are hypothetical, and neither tachyonic fields nor quantum entanglement actually enable information transfer. FTL communications would basically be time travel and could violate causality, so it’s probably impossible. Unless every single one of your bodies has a mini-wormhole in it, anyway, but that’d be absolutely fucking nuts.”

“It’s honestly quite disappointing,” Tara sighs. “I was hoping my bodies communicated with each other that way so that I could study them to try and reverse engineer faster-than-light travel, but apparently that’s a dead end.”

“Yeah, sorry,” I grimace. “But hey, look at the bright side! You got here somehow, so FTL travel probably at least exists.”

“Unless I was simply unconscious during a journey that actually took thousands and thousands of years, so that by now everyone I know and love from my home is dead.”

I wince.

“…Or that I guess, yeah,” I admit. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

“It’s fine,” Tara cuts me off. “I know you didn’t. I’ve accepted the possibility, and ultimately it doesn’t matter. The most important thing is that I help the people I can help right now, and that’s… well, it’s a lot of people. I’ve been given an absurd amount of power, perhaps for a purpose and perhaps not. Either way, I choose how to use it, and I choose to stay here and help. If you gave me the ability to go home right now, I’d wait to leave until I know no one on your world will have to look at another starving child again. Your planet can sustain you all. Someone just has to set up the infrastructure and supply lines to get it where it needs to go.”

I can’t help but smile at that, though it’s also a little bit sad.

“You really care a lot about this, huh?” I ask. “You sound kind of tired, though. Don’t overwork yourself.”

Tara gives me a light squeeze, sighing.

“It’s difficult to care very much about overworking myself,” she says. “I know you’re right, but… hmm. You’ve seen pictures and videos of third world countries, right? But you’ve never been to one.”

“That’s right,” I confirm. “It’s different?”

“Indescribably different,” Tara answers. “The level of detachment, of unreality, isn’t there when I speak to these people face to face. The pressing need exists now. How can I complain about how hard I work when these people fight to survive? It’s nothing like being here with you. Nothing at all. I’m quite glad I have you here to ground me.”

“I won’t ever tell you to stop helping,” I promise her. “But make sure you’re doing what you can to not sabotage your own ability to help. Your mental health is extremely important.”

“Yes, you’re right,” Tara sighs. “I can’t underestimate the danger of how completely fucked your entire world is if I go crazy.”

She grabs me by the shoulders, looking into my eyes with a frighteningly serious expression.

“For the sake of Earth,” she intones, “may I implore upon you the essential duty of therapeutic cuddles?”

I open my mouth, then close it again, feeling my barely-fading blush immediately return to the fore.

“Y-yes?” I manage, and I’m immediately brought into an embrace, her impossibly strong arms wrapped around me like a blanket.

I’m too anxious to be much of a hugger, but I definitely like hugs. Most humans do; it’s just part of what we are. Which is not to say that there’s anything wrong with not liking hugs, just that it’s programmed into most of us, inherent to our bodies on a deeper level than our conscious minds. Of course, I really like thinking about stuff like that, analyzing it and drawing as solid a line as I can between instinct and reason. It’s often an exercise in futility, sure, but it’s part of how I cope with my many problems. I have ADHD. I have generalized anxiety disorder. I’m prone to panic attacks. I probably have undiagnosed autism. My mind and body will often do things that I hate, that I wish I had control over, but that in the moment are impossible to deny. After a panic attack I can look back at myself and say yes, I wasn’t acting in a very logical manner. I wasn’t making good decisions. But at that time, I was just a creature suffering from a medical condition. It wasn’t the ‘real’ me. That’s a comforting thought, in many ways.

Though this has led to me thinking this way about good instincts, too. Even as I soak in Tara’s warmth, I wonder: what part of this makes me so happy? Why do I adore the way her body yields ever so slightly against my own, the layer of soft flesh separating me from almost stone-like muscle? Why do I feel so happy at nothing but the feeling of her chin on the top of my head, her arms snug around my belly, at something so simple as basic contact? Why do my thoughts end up between my legs, excited and embarrassed and ashamed, full of joy and wishes and fleeting fantasy? Are these thoughts less aberrant than the cloying anxiety that always plagues me, simply because they are more desirable? Is this ‘me’ in the way my illnesses aren’t? Is there a reason I care so much for the distinction in a meaningless world of nothing but matter, energy, and physics?

“It’s okay, Evelyn,” Tara promises softly, snapping me out of my thoughts. “Whatever you’re thinking about, it’s okay. I care. I’m here. I’ll understand.”

“I’m fine,” I assure her. “Just had a minor existential crisis for a moment there.”

“Hugging causes you to have an existential crisis?”

“I mean, just about anything can cause me to have an existential crisis,” I admit. “I’m pretty much half a step away from one at all times.”

“Oh,” she murmurs. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

I don’t have to think about that long.

“Um… more hugging would be good. I like hugging. You give good hugs.”

“Easily done,” Tara happily agrees, and the two of us remain like that as I start reading again. Cuddles make history homework a lot more palatable.

…It’s also a bit distracting, though, since the most incredible, wonderful, amazing person in the galaxy is touching me and she loves me and I love her and I don’t know what any of it meaaaaans. …Okay, yes I do, but I’m too cowardly to confirm it out loud. Too afraid that defining it will make it disappear. Do I really need the label, if I have the love? I want to say no, but on the other hand part of me really likes that label. It’s a badge of pride, a confirmation of something glorious. I just have to open my mouth and ask for it.

Come on, Evelyn. Do it. Do it! My mouth doesn’t move and the words don’t come. Do it, goddamnit! DO IT!

“Did you still want to be girlfriends?” I blurt out.

“I’d like to be whatever you’d like to be,” Tara murmurs in answer.

“Girlfriends,” I somehow manage to repeat. It’s not really a sentence, but thankfully Tara gets the idea.

“Girlfriends. It’s official.”

She tilts her head down and gives me a kiss on my scalp. Some kind of emotion crashes through my entire body, too wild and complicated to define, but it hardly even matters. I did it. I did it! Holy shit, I did it and she kissed me and aaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!

My bravery for the day has already been used up, though, so I don’t even bother to try to get myself to kiss back. Slow and steady. I can’t really force myself to rush this, and I know it, so I’ll just sit here and thoroughly enjoy being held. Physical contact stuff is difficult, and things are already plenty wonderful right now.

“Evelyn,” Tara suddenly says. “Apologies, but all of my bodies in this room are about to lose local awareness. Please don’t be alarmed. I am fine.”

“What?” I ask, and then she goes limp.

Oh god, oh god, what!? Just feeling her drop into motionlessness, her arms no longer supporting me as she flops backwards into the bed, sets my heart painfully racing. No, calm down. Calm down, Evelyn! She said she’s fine. She said not to be alarmed. She’s okay. She did this on purpose. For some reason. It’s okay. Things are okay.

I naturally can’t focus on homework anymore, though. Even if she’s okay, what is happening? I stand up and start pacing around the room, my body shaking with tension. This hasn’t happened before. What does it mean? Oh fuck oh god oh god oh fuck…

Over an hour of panic later, which I spend trying to keep myself busy and distracted while Tara lies in a fucking coma on my bed, I finally hear her start to move. She takes a deep breath, fists clenching but otherwise not moving until I address her.

“…Tara?” I ask. “Are you okay?”

“Yes,” she answers tonelessly. “I’m fine. Sorry to worry you.”

“What… just happened?”

Slowly, she sits up, quickly twisting her limbs and stretching her body in clipped, decidedly inhuman jerks of movement.

“An urgent problem came up, and I had to co-opt as many brains as possible to dedicate themselves to solving it,” she answers. “I’m sorry to worry you.”

“It’s… it’s okay,” I tell her. “I’m just glad you warned me beforehand. I would have really freaked out otherwise. Um, did you get that problem solved?”

She doesn’t answer, instead opening her laptop and tapping rapidly away at it.

“You, uh, seem a bit shaken,” I say hesitantly, sitting down next to her. “Are you sure you’re alright?”

“Evelyn,” Tara asks me, her eyes still glued to her screen, “when is it okay to kill?”

“Wh-what?” I sputter, the question catching me off guard. “I mean, never?”

“Not in self-defense?” she presses. “Not in the defense of others?”

“I… don’t personally think so, no,” I confirm. “I wouldn’t blame a person that kills in self-defense. I’d consider that justified. But I wouldn’t say it’s ‘okay.’ Killing is always an evil act. What brought this question on, all of a sudden?”

“Anger,” Tara answers bluntly. “Your world has many problems caused by a lack of infrastructure. They are regrettable, but they’re not anyone’s fault, really. At least, that’s what I thought. But… good gods, there it is. One, two… ten. There are ten countries that impose the death penalty as punishment for homosexuality. It really is here, it’s the fucking law. Holy shit.”

“W-what? Tara, slow down.”

“Evelyn, I have witnessed and dealt with murder, theft, assault, and rape, but I’ve tried to be careful about letting those people be punished under their own laws. I don’t want to be a vigilante. I don’t like how ineffective the justice system of most countries is, but there is a system and placing myself above it is just… well, it’s something I can’t take back, you understand? You have all made your own society, your own laws, and I can’t just go stomping all over it.”

“But you found a law you can’t abide by,” I interpret.

“I’m finding a lot fucking more of them now that I’m actually looking,” Tara snarls. “I suppose I didn’t elaborate before, but the ‘problem’ I was working on was breaking up a godsdamn public execution! And I failed. I hardly had any bodies in the area at the time. I just… fuck! Gods fucking—”

She descends into a series of what I can only assume are swears in her native language.

“I’m such an idiot,” she continues after a while. “A goddamn idiot. I’m feeling good about myself synthesizing antibiotics but there’s a fucking warzone two countries over where a hundred people died yesterday. How am I supposed to save your people if they keep fucking killing each other!?”

“Tara, Tara, hey!” I lean into her, reaching out and squeezing as tightly as I can. “It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s not your responsibility to fix everything.”

She stops opening up news articles and Wikipedia tabs for a moment, putting her head on mine.

“Are you sure?” she asks. “I feel like saying ‘not my responsibility’ is part of what got your world into this mess.”

“Mental health,” I remind her. “You have to manage your ability to help. Accept that it’s okay if you can’t fix everything.”

“That’s the part that worries me, Evelyn,” she says. “I can. You humans can only deal with what’s in front of you, I understand that. But there is no limit to what can be in front of me. I can cure diseases, feed the hungry, and clothe the naked, sure. But I can also end wars. I can topple governments. I can destroy regimes and systems of abuse so ingrained into cultures that no one even sees that they’re there. I genuinely, undeniably have that power. I’m just terrified of using it.”

She looks at me with glistening eyes, her whole being shaking under the weight of her declaration. She’s right. She could change the world, and everything in it.

“What should I do?” she begs, and I don’t have an answer.

49 With Great Power

I resist the urge to hum happily to myself as I step deftly around some noisy fallen branches, hands moving carefully forward to cup around an adorable beetle that caught my eye. He’s a beautiful, herbivorous little fella, so I drop him into the container I’m carrying that already has the most friends in it. He’ll get along well with the others.

Today is a mental health day, which means it’s a ‘lose myself in the woods for about six hours and catch every single cutie I find along the way’ day. Normally, of course, this would be catch and release, but I had the genius super-cool girlfriend idea to store all the bugs I find and give them to Tara, whose favorite food is still-living or recently-dead, uncooked creatures… with extra-big bonus points given if she’s never eaten one before! I guess it’s some kind of hardwired positive feedback system in her alien bio-queen brain to encourage her to consume every new species possible, which… well, you know, that’s a bit creepy and suspicious, but it’s hardly an immediate problem. My girlfriend likes trying new foods! I like catching bugs! And there are literally MILLIONS of unique bug species! It’s perfect!

So, with my new friend in the future-consumption jar, I do finally give into the urge to hum happily, glancing around for new subjects to feed to our adorable alien overlord. Er, well… maybe not ‘overlord’ overlord. Tara has been pretty distraught since she witnessed what was basically a lynching. Much like me, she hates violence in all its forms. Unlike me, her response to violence is generally anger rather than just shutting down. We both admitted that we didn’t know what to do about the situation, so she promised to speak with as many qualified people as she can to try and figure things out. Though she also promised there wouldn’t be any more modern-day witch hunts on her watch. We don’t know how to deal with the disease, she says, but that’s no reason to stop treating the symptoms. And she’s right, but… I’m worried it’s only a matter of time before she shows up on international news with that philosophy.

Either way, she’s my girlfriend now (eeeeeeeeeeeee!) so that means it’s my job to help cheer her up! So after a nice, big bug hunt to recharge my social batteries I should be perfectly poised to make her day. She’s gonna be so—ooh, a butterfly! Into the butterfly bin with you, my pretty!

Giggling with delight, I continue to snatch up more bugs as I go, slowly but surely making my way to Tara’s cave so I can see and hang out with her ‘original’ body for the day. I technically haven’t told her I’m going that way, but I suspect she’s probably figured it out by now. I’ve spotted her bodies camouflaged nearby a few times and I have no doubt she’s picked up on my general trajectory. Sure enough, once I start getting close I spot a very strange-looking bird flying towards me. I stretch out my hand and Tara lands on it (since she’s the bird, obviously) causing me to almost squeal with delight as I see the body design up close.

She made a tiny, winged human body! Clothed in small, soft feathers, her songbird-sized body is both warm-blooded and six-limbed—two arms, two legs, two wings—which is completely unlike anything on Earth! This is so cool!

“You like it?” Tara asks, lounging on my palm with her legs crossed. “I’m thinking of naming this body type the ‘shoulder angel.’ Evocative, no?”

“Very!” I agree, chuckling. “And it’s very cool! You designed this yourself? Like, from scratch?”

“I did indeed!” Tara confirms, beaming. “I’d say something like ‘you should see how complicated the musculature is’ but I’m not actually interested in offering a self-vivisection. But yes, praise is both welcome and warranted, thank you. I’m surprised to see you all the way out here, but I’m certainly happy that it gives me an opportunity to show off! What does bring you here, though? I thought you needed an alone day.”

“Eh, an alone half-day was good enough,” I wave off, pulling out one of my bug containers. “Plus, I get to put all these captured cuties to good use! Say ‘aah!’”

“Wait, you caught all these for me? Er, I mean, ahh—mmph!”

I fish out a rare species I suspect she may have missed the first couple times she sampled our local woods, and her eyes light up the moment it touches her tongue. A little bug that I have to carefully hold with two fingers is more or less a family-size lasagna for tiny Tara, but she takes it in both of her hands and starts rapidly peeling it apart bit by bit in her lap before stuffing her face. It’s completely fucking adorable.

“Oh gods, where did you find this?” Tara sighs when she finishes. “That was delicious! Did you really get all these for me?”

“I sure did!” I declare triumphantly. “There’s nobody better at finding rare bugs than me, Tara! I mean, other than a ton of professional entomologists, probably. But I’m not gonna lose to some upstart hivemind just because she can search across the entire world at the same time! Oh, speaking of, I bet you’ve already researched the obvious ones, but I went and compiled habitat information on every obscure bug that might have useful evolutions for you. Juvenile issus coleoptratus actually use organic gears to synchronize their leg movements when jumping, so I bet you could use that to…”

The walk, from there on, devolves into me babbling about bugs as I pull out a bunch of printed information sheets I prepared and stuffed into my backpack about stuff Tara might find interesting or useful in Earth’s biology. Tara, being the absolute coolest, seems genuinely enraptured, nodding along and asking relevant questions as I gush about my favorite weird bugs. At some point during the conversation Tara flies onto my shoulder so she can kiss my cheek, which is about the only non-bug thing my mega-hyperfocused brain notices until I step through the treeline to find myself at Tara’s cave.

On the outside, it doesn’t look much different from the last time I saw it, which I suspect is entirely by design. It’s still a suspiciously circular hole in the ground, Though Tara has grown a bunch of roots and vines over it to make that less obvious. I peek my head inside and am immediately excited to see her huge, six-limbed ‘home planet’ form, which I naturally rush forward to hug.

“Tara!” I laugh, letting her pick me up with her forelimbs so I can wrap my arms around her head. “Hey! How are things doing?”

“Same as they were doing the entire walk over, Evelyn,” she jokes, carefully nuzzling my fragile flesh with her chitin. “You realize this is like having a whole conversation with someone, then suddenly asking their hand how they’re doing?”

“I… yes! I get that!” I sputter, blushing. “It’s automatic, okay? My brain doesn’t know how to engage with a new entity without a ‘how’s your day’ or ‘what’s up’ falling out of my mouth!”

“Oh, of course, blame it on the organ that comprises the totality of who you are. That will absolve you of responsibility.”

“Hey, don’t call out my entire generation like that,” I grumble, poking her in annoyance as she sets me down on her brilliant turquoise back. “The use of ‘brain’ in this context is like, a separation of conscious desires from unwanted instincts, particularly in reference to executive function disorders. The fact that we are nothing but the absurd acts of chemicals firing within our nervous system is irrelevant to the metaphor.”

“Duly noted,” Tara chuckles. “So again, what brings you all the way out here? You know I’ll gladly eat your bugs anywhere in the world.”

“Well, I was planning on spending most of the day in the woods anyway, so I thought it would be nice to hang out with you in the form that best represents you! Your comfy Tara-at-home body!”

“Aww, how sweet!” Tara coos, plodding down deeper into her cave. “Though I’d argue this hole in the ground isn’t really my ‘home’ in any sense of the word. And also, while this is my favorite body, I think it’s worth noting I’m not particularly uncomfortable with any of my bodies. You really don’t have to come all the way out here for me!”

“Aww, but your original body is extra cute, though!” I tease her. “Come on, you know I’m extra-mega stoked to hang out with a giant alien arthropod.”

“Is that so?” Tara hums. “Well, now I’m curious. Do you like this body or my human bodies more?”

“I… they’re differently great!” I sputter.

“Okay, well, if the reason you haven’t asked me to pleasure you yet is because you wanted me to do it in this body, I’ll need some time to research and prepare. I don’t want to accidentally injure you.”

I feel my face turn red like an erupting volcano and instinctively bury it in my hands as I shriek protests at her.

“That’s not what I meant that’s not what I meant that’s not what I meant!!! Aaaagh, Tara, don’t just say things like that!”

“Why shouldn’t I?” she grunts. “You’re certainly not going to talk about it, so one of us has to take the initiative. Communication is the foundation of a good relationship, after all.”

“Well I’m communicating that I don’t want you to keep bringing up sex out of the blue!”

“Okay, okay,” she laughs. “If you insist. I’ll wait until you want to address the subject, and find out some other way to get you to make adorable faces.”

I make a few incoherent noises of protest as Tara starts showing me around her incredibly expansive new cave, complete with guard-bodies, organic doors, multiple egg chambers, and massive stores of organic compost for consumption. It really nails the whole Zerg hive feel, so I get to squeal and nerd out quite a few times during the tour.

“This is so cool!” I tell her for the twentieth time. “You’re so cool!”

“I’m glad you think so,” she preens. “Though if it’s not too much trouble, I’d like to change the subject to something more serious.”

“Oh, I mean, sure,” I acknowledge, nodding. “I kinda figured we were due for a serious chat. I’ve been thinking a lot about your current situation.”

“Is that so?” Tara asks hopefully. “And what have you concluded?”

I try not to wince. I concluded that I still don’t really have a right answer. Just a bunch of wrong ones.

“You first,” I tell her.

“Well, I suppose that’s what I wanted to ask you about,” she says, sighing. “It’s just… well, it’s getting increasingly difficult for me to justify not starting a few coups.”

Oh fuck.

“Uh… Tara, please don’t do that,” I beg her.

“See, I figured you’d say that,” she sighs again. “But my counter is ‘why not?’ Why shouldn’t I?”

“Because you’d have to go to war!” I tell her. “The current governments aren’t just going to hand you the keys to the empire, they’re going to fight back. You’ll have to kill a lot of people!”

“I’ll fully acknowledge that’s true,” Tara agrees. “And it’s definitely a major downside. But with sufficient preparation I should be able to cripple any military currently on the planet long before they discover what I am, let alone how to counter me.”

“Tara that’s obviously not something that’s going to go cleanly, and even if it does—”

“I know!” Tara snaps. Then again, more quietly, she repeats: “I know. Evelyn, trust me. This is not something I want to do. The number of people that I might have to kill to accomplish something like this… it’s literally incalculable. I have no way to reliably predict the long-term consequences of something that no one else has ever even had the potential to seriously consider. But tens of thousands of people die in wars every year as-is, and I can’t stop wars without winning them! I need to control the governments perpetuating conflict in order to stop the conflict. There simply isn’t a better way! And many of the countries embroiled in severe internal conflict or outright war are also countries that need immediate, serious structural overhaul to improve the quality of life for the people within them. And the best way to get those changes done is also to be in charge!”

“What’s wrong with what you were already doing?” I protest. “You’re already getting people food, clean water, clothing, medicine—”

“It’s not enough,” Tara insists. “Evelyn, I don’t… I don’t know how to explain the sheer quantity of suffering I see every day. Don’t get me wrong, there’s joy too, but in many ways it just makes all the pain hurt so much more. And I could… I could do what you’re saying. I could focus everything on supplying the needy. And perhaps, over time, that would solve the systemic issues as well. Fewer wars would be fought, because there would be fewer need for them. People wouldn’t have to fight over resources and they’d generally be more content. There would be more non-military jobs and better education and so on and so forth. But it would be slow. Gods, it would be so fucking slow. More people would suffer and die in the time it took me to fix things the ‘good’ way.”

“That’s a… very utilitarian approach to things,” I say.

Tara sighs.

“Is it? I’m not sure I know or care what the exact moral philosophy I subscribe to is. I just need to help people, Evelyn. It’s who I am. And if I could just give and give and give and solve every problem in the world that way, you know I’d do it. But the problem is that I see so many people suffering in ways that are caused not by need, but by greed. Selfishness, bigotry, narcissism, insanity… humans need to be protected from themselves.”

“Your system won’t fail gracefully,” I tell her. “If it’s just you trying to protect everyone with yourself, it all fails and falls apart if you do.”

“You’re absolutely right,” Tara agrees, shaking her head. “And that’s why it’s so terrifying. It’s a recipe for disaster, but… your world is already full of disasters. I have to at least try. And… well, the worst-case scenario is that these places end up with a dysfunctional government that is unable to solve their problems, so nothing really changes.”

“That’s not the worst-case scenario!” I insist. “And Tara, murder doesn’t become a good thing just because you have good reasons for doing it.”

“I agree,” she answers me. “But Spider-Man is right.”

“What?”

“Spider-Man. Or his uncle, I guess. I watched the 2002 movie.”

“Tara, what are you talking about?”

“‘With great power comes great responsibility,’” she quotes. “Right? I thought that was a pretty well-known cultural touchstone of yours. To the point that it probably sounds like a useless platitude to you, but… I found it quite profound. It’s the assertion that if you can help, you are morally obligated to. That sitting back and doing nothing is absolutely, inarguably a choice, and the consequences of that choice fall at your feet in exactly the same way the consequences of action do. If you stand back and ignore the robber when you have every ability to stop him, and he kills someone, that’s on you.”

“Tara, you can’t ascribe every single evil on the planet as a consequence of your personal inaction,” I insist. “That’s crazy.”

“You can’t,” Tara disagrees. “Because for any evil you devote yourself to stopping, there are hundreds of others you’re rendering yourself incapable of dealing with as a result. You don’t have the power to fix the world, Evelyn, so you don’t have the responsibility to. But I do.”

“But… Tara, the way you plan to do it is wrong.”

“The way I plan to do it might actually work. If I can pull it off, if I can withstand the pressure and make the right decisions with the right people helping me, I could… well, I’m not arrogant or foolish enough to use the word ‘utopia,’ but I could get us pretty damn close.”

No, no no no. This is really, really bad!

“Tara, this is exactly the scary sci-fi villain bullshit I warned you about!”

“Oh, I’m aware,” Tara insists. “But unless someone can give me a better plan, I have a few countries lined up that are in dire need of conquering. And if things go well?”

She shrugs, exhausted and defeated.

“I’ll take over the world.”

50 Innocence

I wake up with a chill on the cold, stone ground. Simultaneously, I also wake up on soft grass, on a Mooshi shell, in the ocean, perched in a tree, and dozens of other places. I’d hoped… I’d really, really hoped that I would somehow get some insight on what to do from my memories of Tara. Instead, I just feel numb. Betrayed. It always comes back to force, doesn’t it? The response to violence is always more violence. I hate it. I don’t want to be like that.

I thought she didn’t either. I probably shouldn’t have. Tara has that… that fire for justice. That capacity for anger that I sort of… don’t have. My anger never tends to last long. It always just dissolves away into a painful sadness before I can really act on it.

Still… war is probably coming. I have to prepare for that. I have to make sure the Resonant Gems don’t get hurt because of me. So… how do I stop an army? Let’s think over the resources I have available to me. I’ll need to fight without killing.

Hmm… pain toxins? No, that’s mean. Ghost trap invisibility? Hmm… I’m sure that’ll be useful, but it only works when stationary. Ghost trap glue? Ooh, glue! The glue becomes sticky when reacting with air, so I can probably install it into siphons and make glue cannons in the same way I made acid cannons! Yeah, that could work!

“Ah, Evelyn!” Priestess Saslitak chirps. “You’re awake! Did you sleep well?”

“Sorta,” I sigh. “Thanks for asking. Anything nasty happen while I was out?”

“No, no sign of any problems,” my friend assures me. “And we’re ready when they come! They won’t take our home again!”

“Hhhng,” I grunt in acknowledgement, stretching and flicking my wings as I start going over plans for a kind of body that could excel in tunnel and cave combat at range.

Speed is more important to me than defense. Death doesn’t really kill me, after all, and rapid deployment and redeployment is likely going to be incredibly valuable. Hmm… I could set up ghost trap bodies in the tunnels around the Resonant Gems cavern as early warning systems, and then move to engage whenever they’re interacted with. Invisible scouts, basically.

I assign a few brains to deal with making the faux ghost traps, since it’s a relatively simple design that only needs to enhance and optimize a structure that already exists rather than create a new type of body from scratch. For my glue cannon bodies, I need something fast, flexible, and capable of dealing with threats from multiple angles; I don’t want to be helpless if I end up flanked in a tunnel. I also want something that inherently deters attackers by design, something alien and terrible that makes people regret ever picking a fight.

The first thing that comes to mind is a writhing mass of tentacles, and I have to say I really like the idea.

The concept is simple: a small, spherical core body around which a dozen tentacles emerge, each tipped with different sensory apparatus or glue cannons or glue-removal acid. I haven’t actually seen enough hentai to know where this is going, but I decide to name the body [Censored] anyway, brackets and all. The correct pronunciation is a shrill, electronic beeping noise. I’m dead serious.

This is a body for war, after all, so unlike every other body I don’t want my name to be part of it.

“Evelyn?” Saslitak asks. “Is everything alright?”

“Not really,” I admit, plopping out eggs for my new bodies back up on the surface. “Thinking about the True People and the war and stuff is just… really unpleasant for me. Are they really going to fight us? If so, why? Aren’t they the biggest clan around, with the most food? Aren’t we leaving them alone? Why send people to die in a war, even if they expect to win it?”

Priestess Saslitak pats me on the head with a tentacle.

“You have a wonderful soul, Evelyn,” she hums. “I hope what the Flooded Caverns told us isn’t true, and that there will be no war. But we must prepare for it in case it is.”

“I know,” I grumble. “I am. I’m… making warriors. Honestly, I’d prefer you all let me handle it if things go bad. None of you have to die.”

“I don’t think our warriors would be very happy about that,” Saslitak muses as I flitter up to sit on her back. “They’ve all lived this long hoping for a chance at revenge against the True People. Almost all of them lost friends or loved ones to them.”

“Yeah, that’s sort of the problem,” I admit. “I don’t really want the True People to die either, and there’s no way the warriors are gonna fight to capture.”

She sighs, shaking her body with disbelief.

“They banished you. They slaughtered us. And you still think they deserve mercy. If you imprison the entirety of the True People, what will you even do then? They’ll hate you. Can you feed them?”

“Probably, yes,” I admit. “I’m accelerating my surplus. It’s been my goal to remove scarcity from your entire species for a while now.”

“I’m not sure what you mean,” Saslitak admits. “Remove scarcity?”

“I want to make every resource you could ever possibly need plentiful,” I explain. “Food. Water. Medicine. Shelter. Everything. I don’t want you to ever run out again.”

Priestess Saslitak reaches up to pat me on the head again, so I grab her tendril and give it a big hug. She brings her other tentacle up to complete the hug, and we just stay like that for a while.

“I don’t know what we ever did to deserve you, Evelyn,” Saslitak says softly.

“Deserving things is a made up concept anyway,” I answer. “Life just… is. It doesn’t get better because of cosmic forces, it gets better when people take it on themselves to make it better and then work really, really hard.”

“Sss’ whiskers, you are so precious,” Saslitak coos. “You have so much faith in us, Evelyn. It’s… heartening. But, speaking of working hard, I should head to the homewyrm chambers. But feel free to send one of the Acolytes to come get me if you need anything, all right?”

“I will,” I assure her. “Thanks for being so great, Saslitak.”

We give each other another squeeze and then I fly off, my many other bodies having already started the tasks I have lined up for the day. Up on the surface I manage my farms and start producing [Censored] eggs, wondering if there’s any sort of supplementary forces I could create, anything that offers an alternative method of nonlethally dealing with groups of violent people. Back on Earth, it was common for police to solve this problem with the use of tear gas… which, uh, has a bit of a low reputation. Protests—or riots, for that matter—don’t normally get big enough for tear gas to be pulled out unless a lot of people are really passionate about whatever they’re all worked up about. And, uh, oftentimes I’m really behind that? I’m not one of those people that proudly declares that all cops are bastards—some cops are definitely awful, and there are terrible systems that need to be fixed, but the argument that participating in an unjust system makes you an inherently bad person just… doesn’t sit well with me. Maybe it’s guilt; I’ve certainly sat by and done nothing after witnessing problems, before. I’ve felt trapped by momentum and outside pressure in ways that caused me to do bad things. I’m a nervous and non-confrontational person, after all, but does that make me evil? When I hear about individuals locked in a bad system, surrounded by bad people, but still trying to do the right thing… I find that inspiring, not a call to demand they do more. Policemen and policewomen aren’t in charge of designing or improving the rules they follow, are they? So what are they going to do? Go on strike until someone makes a better system? …Well, actually, that might work, but it sounds terrifying and dangerous. Besides, when I was definitely-not-arrested, I didn’t feel like any of the cops were doing anything other than their jobs. But I guess I’m a tiny, skittish white woman and therefore probably benefited from the profiling that causes so many problems, and there were a few of them who thought Tara was a terrorist rather than a hero for stopping a guy from beating someone, and that kinda makes me mad and anecdotally demonstrates that the issue might be more pervasive than my intuition assumes, so… gah! I’m getting super off track here!

Tear gas. It’s an airborne irritant that stops violence by making the violence too difficult to enact; wherever it’s dropped, visibility gets too shitty and simply being around gets too painful. It forces people to leave. Which is, uh, in many ways super bad. Most people recover from tear gas exposure quickly and without any negative long-term effects… but that ‘most’ is doing a lot of work. It can still be super dangerous. Plus, it’s often used to break up peaceful protests rather than violence, which is something I’m very not okay with. The basic concept, though—an area-of-effect suppression that forces people to retreat and disperse—sounds super useful in the context of halting a battle without killing anybody.

Of course, none of the organisms I’ve ingested are capable of producing something quite like tear gas, but I could probably concoct something from the many defensive irritants I have in my arsenal. There are a few problems, though. Firstly, Sthrenslian chitin is a lot more difficult to irritate than human skin. They literally spit and dig with acid, bare-clawed, on a daily basis. I’d have to make a gas far more caustic than I’m comfortable with for it to bother Sthrenslians enough to matter. Secondly, tear gas often has the important secondary purpose of reducing visibility—can’t fight what you can’t see, after all—but that’s not going to do shit to a species that’s totally blind anyway. If I want to ‘blind’ them, I’ll have to disrupt their echolocation, which… hmm. Which sounds very doable, actually.

Couldn’t I create an area denial tool by just making something so damn loud that it’s painful to be around? And with the right sound projections, it should be able to confuse the hell out of anyone trying to echolocate. The body could implement some ghost trap biology in order to make things extra confusing, although it likely won’t be possible to hide the body while it’s making noise or moving around, even with ghost trap repeater drums. Best case, it’ll just look all wibbly and strange to echolocation. Which… well, actually, can’t I lean into that? What if I make the body purposefully appear as a shifting, impossible mess? I’m already more or less an eldritch abomination to these people, I may as well lean into it. Ooh, this is going to be so much fun!

…No, wait, it’s going to be terrible and I hope I never have to use this body. But I suppose I could design it to play pretty music or something outside of wartime. Yeah, that’s a good idea. Time to design the specifics. I’ll need a lot of organs with which to make noise. I can probably design organic trumpets and flutes and bagpipes and crap like that, which would be pretty cool. The body won’t actually be able to physically prevent attacks that try to push through the radius of blindness and pain, so it needs to be sturdy enough that wild strikes won’t be able to take it down. A large, beetle-like body with stocky legs would do the trick. It’d be too big to travel through standard tunnels but I could just design it to work alongside the Big Dig Evelyns. To that end, I think I have a name as well! Big Band Evelyn, or BBE for short! Yep, design finalized. Time to lay the first set of eggs, and some extra BDEs to support them.

“Or you could make a tank,” Hsthressis suggests.

“Really?” I answer flatly. “I explain my whole body design process, and that’s your suggestion? You know I can’t do that, and I wouldn’t even if I could!”

“Yeah, because you’re lame,” Hsthressis says matter-of-factly, poking me in the stomach with a tendril. “You won’t even grow us organic cars to drive around in.”

“Hsthressis that’s not… I have more important priorities than solving transportation problems that don’t even exist in a society of your size! Besides, I keep telling you I can’t do wheels! If it’s part of the same contiguous object as the main body of whatever you’re putting wheels on, the wheels can’t spin. The axel has to be an independent part. But an organic body can’t have independent parts like that; parts have to at least be connected by blood vessels or other energy transfer systems or they’ll starve and die.”

“Then design the body so that the wheels grow as part of the body but break off into an independent structure when they finish growing,” Hsthressis suggests.

“Hmm… could work,” I admit. “Though I’d have to figure out how to actually power the wheels. I have no idea where to start with making an organic electromagnet, and I don’t have a valid replacement for steel or other metals to make a combustion engine; I have substances that could survive the heat, but not really any that could withstand the force. …Not that I want your world to use fossil fuels for energy if you can help it anyway. And speaking of withstanding the force, if the wheel structure isn’t alive it can’t self-repair, and my lack of steel-analogous building materials means it will degrade pretty quickly.”

“Okay, so what if the wheel-and-axel structure is alive, and the main body is alive, but they’re two different organisms designed for cooperation?” Hsthressis muses. “Like, the wheel structure could contain a stomach and internal systems for repair and the main body just feeds it through an orifice like a baby or whatever?”

“Shit, that could work,” I mutter. “That’s a good idea in a lot of different ways. I still can’t actually drive the wheels, though, and I have other things to take care of first, but… hmm. There’s potential in that.”

“Hell yes!” Hsthressis cheers. “I want a truck!”

“I just said I don’t… aaagh. Fine, we’ll see!”

“Yes! I’m totally gonna—”

Her words are cut off by a crashing noise, while at the same time my words are cut off by the realization that all my bodies in the main cavern just got buried alive in a massive torrent of dirt, alongside a huge number of Resonant Gems. Oh, shit. Holy shit! I fly other bodies into the main cavern in time to witness a roaring, furious collection of Sthrenslians rush out from the ceiling, dropping down on the massive mound of dirt that was once dozens of pathways, buildings, and homes. It’s an attack. We’re under attack! The True People caused a cave-in! Oh fuck, I’m not ready!

I struggle to free myself from the dirt, but my ETE bodies aren’t designed for digging and my ETs simply aren’t able to move with the raw mass of earth piled above them. My uncovered bodies are already bursting into action, though, my one already-hatched Big Dig Evelyn bumping out of hibernation mode and heading down the surface tunnel towards the Resonant Gem cave. My uncovered ETEs make it to the room first, witnessing a terrifyingly chaotic scene. True People surge down the mound of dirt created from the hole in the ceiling, roaring battle cries as they charge in an unorganized mess. They don’t seem to need military precision in order to cause chaos, their claws cutting and crushing everyone they can reach.

Screams from the Resonant Gems echo through the halls as I get my first real taste of Sthrenslian-on-Sthrenslian combat. Their claws are designed for digging more than fighting, and their bodies are covered in hard shells, so overall they seem to have a difficult time inflicting serious damage on each other… until, of course, the True People manage to surround and grasp a target from multiple sides, giving them free reign to start mercilessly crushing body parts and snipping whiskers.

Screams escape my many throats as I charge into the fray, terror driving me forward rather than away. I have to help them. I have to stop this. I have to save everyone. I can. I should. I need to. What good am I, if I don’t? But the True People have us vastly outnumbered, my preparations are not yet ready, and I am, ultimately, not a warrior. I’m a pacifist. And that’s… simply not of any use to anyone here. My little Tinkerbell bodies, even with their exceptionally optimized strength, can only stop one enemy at a time. My Evelyn Terrestrials vastly outperform Sthrenslians in every regard, but are again simply not numerous enough to stop things. For every fight I end, two more begin.

People are dying, and it’s my fault. I can’t… I can’t stop this. The thought almost paralyzes me, but becoming something more than human has slowly rendered me immune to that sort of personal issue. Time seems to slow as I banish my fears and regrets, focusing myself on finding the ideal path to minimize harm.

“Retreat!” I roar, regretfully moving my ETs away from a number of people that need help right now in order to fortify a location that was needed to save far more of them. I can’t save everyone. I can’t. Damn the fucking trolley the True People set loose. “Head to the surface tunnel, now!”

I get only a mixed response of obedience from the Resonant Gems, but at least most of the non-warriors start getting in line once I start guiding them with the few precious bodies I can spare. I start trying to convince the warriors to break off and regroup around the surface tunnel—because it’s both the most defensible location and the location most of my reinforcing selves will be coming from—when a few words send all of my progress into chaos.

“The homewyrm chamber!” one of the Resonant Gems shrieks. “They’ve breached the homewyrm chamber!”

Fuck. Two thoughts flash through my mind simultaneously. One, I’ve absolutely just lost command over every warrior. And two, Saslitak is in danger.

I’m spreading myself too thin and breaking Resonant Gem law besides, but I send a handful of ETEs blitzing down the halls to the homewyrm anyway. You’re playing favorites, I chide myself. More people will die if you try to save this one. I continue flying anyway. I have more Tinkerbells from the surface incoming to reinforce things. At least some of them should get here in time to help. Evelyn Big Dig is en route to unearth the many bodies and people trapped underneath the dirt, and hopefully I’ll get there in time to save at least a few before they all suffocate.

God, this all went to hell so fast. Screams erupt all around me, but I have to keep managing what I can, focusing on and optimizing the retreat as warriors try to break through the True People mass to save their homewyrm. I fly above them all, of course, racing into forbidden tunnels whose layout is a mystery to me as I desperately try to find my friend.

“Help! Evelyn!”

Shit. That wasn’t Priestess Saslitak calling me, it was Weaver Nsreslisa! I break off an Evelyn Terrestrial, hoofing it towards where I heard the shout coming from: the children’s tunnels. The twisting, looping, otherwise-useless tunnels I play with the kids in. Why are there enemies there!? I quickly spot—or hear, I guess—Nsreslisa struggling and losing a fight with a single enemy warrior, Tklikik and a few other kids cowering deeper in the tunnel. The children’s tunnels don’t lead anywhere, though; they’re just a play area, with a single way in and out. Meanwhile, I fly into the homewyrm chambers for the first time, a massive pit of dung supporting a multi-layered ecosystem of decomposers. The bottom of the homewyrm itself forms the top of the chamber, and I feel multiple tunnels spiraling up and around its body, from which Saslitak screams. I fly up after her, needing to save my friend in time.

All the while, the Resonant Gems retreat or die trying. Evelyn Terrestrials can defend a tunnel without much trouble—I’ve fought much stronger animals in much weaker bodies—but defending tunnels doesn’t help the people that are already under attack. I wasn’t ready for this. I didn’t expect such sudden, immediate brutality. I’m not going to be fast enough.

Nsreslisa has two legs crippled and is tossed aside before I can arrive, the True People warrior strutting past her to go after the children. A squad of warriors surround Saslitak and a handful of other priests and priestesses, their intent to strike them down obvious.

A pair of screams escape my lips as I watch my friend and a child both die.

51 Suffer No Tyranny

“The tumultuous situation in Myanmar took another strange turn this morning as a group of armed women stormed and captured the capitol building, which they are now holding against the Myanmar military,” the news declares, causing me to drop my spoon into my cereal. “News out of the country is sparse, but the following images and video were captured just this morning as the battle broke out.”

“Tara!” I yelp, elbowing her in the ribs as she dozes with her head on my lap. “Is this you?”

She doesn’t respond, or wake up. Shit. That means yes, doesn’t it?

“Yes,” Tara says suddenly, and I let out a shriek of surprise.

“T-tara!”

“Sorry,” she says, giving me an amused smirk. “I didn’t mean to startle you. But yes, that’s me. All of it is me, in fact. Both the insurgents and the soldiers, so no one is actually getting hurt. I’ve already performed a silent takeover of the military and the government, this little show is for the rest of the world.”

“You went all the way to Myanmar!? I thought you were in Africa!”

“I’m everywhere, sweetie,” Tara answers dismissively. “And I decided Myanmar was an ideal starting point because it’s a crisis zone needing immediate attention, but it’s also been recently conquered by a military despot in a quite public manner, which makes it the ideal time to perform yet another takeover without the United Nations getting too upset about it. A bunch of women rising up to take over a country that has been engulfed in ethnic civil war since 1948? It’s free PR.”

Dread fills my stomach more and more with every word she speaks. She’s doing good, I tell myself. She’s my Tara, so she’s doing good. Or… at least trying. But she actually went and took over a country, just like she said she would, and in order to do that…

“How many people did you kill?” I ask quietly.

The look she gives me is… complicated, to say the least. Desperation, sadness, annoyance, regret, frustration… all of it seems to bubble inside her at once.

“Why ask a question you know you’ll hate the answer to?” she asks tiredly.

“Because,” I tell her, “I still think I should know.”

Tara sighs, turning away from me but nestling her head further on my lap.

“Thirty-seven,” she admits. “Most of which I silently replaced with copies. It’s been… a harrowing process, because these people are all bigoted megalomaniacal murderers that slaughter people like sheep while thinking they’re doing a world a favor, and I’ve had to pretend to be them. Get into their headspace. Fool the people that know them best, most of whom are either similarly monstrous or their most common victims, typically family. But in doing so I sabotaged the military from the inside, halted violent operations against innocents and now I have ended one of the most abusive regimes in modern history. Myanmar will change today. It will continue to change until none raise their hands in hatred against their own kind.”

“That… that’s going to take a long time, Tara,” I whisper.

“Well then it’s a good thing I’m immortal,” she answers bitterly.

“You don’t have to do this,” I tell her.

“And you don’t understand what it sounds like to hear you say that,” Tara shoots back. “Imagine if you saw someone getting raped right in front of you and I told you ‘don’t worry, you don’t have to help them. Don’t even call the police. It’s fine. It’s not your responsibility.’”

“That’s not what I mean,” I say firmly. “There’s a middle ground between letting people get away with anything and… and becoming a serial killer!”

Tara turns back to stare me in the face.

“…Is that what you think of me?” she asks. “Do you think I want to be a murderer, Evelyn?”

“No, of course not. But that doesn’t mean—”

“I feel like a murderer,” she snaps, cutting me off, “when I sit back and let them slaughter people by the dozens. If I choose to watch and do nothing while they order another mass execution? That makes me a fucking murderer, Evelyn. Because I. Can. Stop. Them. So I do, and I will, and I always will. I don’t do it lightly, Evelyn. I don’t fail to agonize over how horrid it is. I don’t stop looking for opportunities to guide, to teach, to help, and to imprison if I can’t truly correct a person’s behavior. But sometimes there’s no time, and I can’t solve a problem by throwing someone in a cell and making them disappear. They need to rescind an order, or redirect a violent force, or publically abdicate, or else even more people die. I don’t want to be doing godsdamn moral arithmetic with lives, but if I had a better way, I would use it!”

She takes a deep breath, rubbing her face in exasperation.

“It’s just… I just… I know it’s wrong,” she continues. “I know it’s thirty-seven too many. But I can’t do nothing. I can’t. I’d go mad. Please tell me you understand.”

I hesitate, not sure what to say. Unwilling to lie, but still wanting to reassure her. She’s… she’s really trying. And as much as it feels wrong to me, how can I chide her for it without an alternative? I lean over, sandwiching her between my belly and lap as I wrap her up in an awkward hug.

“I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I’m not there. I don’t understand. But that is why I shouldn’t be trying to judge you. You’re trying. I know you’re trying. So… I trust you. And I hope that’s enough.”

“I hope so too,” she answers. “Here goes something.”

With a heavy heart I continue to watch the news, updates about Myanmar’s continued deescalation trickling in over the course of the month. The news is mixed, but mostly positive: the country is still under military rule, but seeing substantially less conflict: military drafts have been removed (because Tara bodies comprise most of the military anyway), food and shelters are being supplied more evenly (because Tara is rapidly creating more of them), and the main conflicts within the country are occurring almost entirely because the military is being used to enforce punishments for corruption in both the upper class and itself (which is also obviously possible because it’s mostly made of Tara). This all seems like great news, but Tara has been refusing to speak publicly as the new ruler of Myanmar and news out of the country is still fairly slim, leading to a lot of people assuming the positive information is simply being maliciously misreported.

“I have to say, it’s very annoying that humans just… expect each other to lie all the time,” Tara grumbles.

“Not speaking publicly or allowing communication is pretty suspicious,” I tell her.

“Yes, yes, I’m aware,” she grumbles. “The borders are closed for a few practical reasons that should hopefully become obsolete fairly soon. As for the internet, it has been a low priority. Service is down in the country because I’m replacing the private internet corporations with one run by myself.”

“And that is… extremely suspicious.”

“I know!” she snaps. “I know. But I’m not going to censor it or anything. On the contrary, I want the internet to be more free. Restriction of information is one of the main things my government did to oppress my people, so I want to ensure internet access is universal in the same way that water, food, and housing are. It’s just… obviously far less important than those things, so it’s taking a bit longer to set up.”

“And the borders are closed because…?”

“Because I’m rooting out and systematically destroying the human trafficking industry as well as all the foreign influence attempting to fund my enemies, both of which are frustratingly widespread and prone to hiding away in areas outside my official control,” she answers flatly. “And I’m not yet ready to make waves in those places.”

“Oh shit, you have foreign spies and stuff?”

“It’s mostly business-related, frustratingly enough,” she explains. “I’m still performing trade—mainly by forcibly liquidating the assets of the upper class and using it to import materials needed for construction projects—but that’s all carefully monitored and lacking much of the usual fringe purchases. Most of the pushback is coming from how I’m no longer exporting materials from the mines. Because the mines are fucking deplorable, and so is everyone that has ever participated in the horrid greed spiral that sustains them. Every damn diplomat that comes in about hoarding ten percent of the world’s rare earth materials just makes me want to scream!”

Ah! Oh no, she’s super mad! I’m needed in my official capacity!

“Tara, how many cuddles do you need right now?” I ask.

“…All of them,” she growls.

I am happy to deliver. We head over to the bed and I wrap around her, making sure I have free access to her head so I can stroke her hair.

“Are you succeeding?” I ask. “Are things getting better?”

“…Yes,” she admits, sighing a bit to let the tension out. “Slowly, so fucking slowly. But yes. They aren’t all things everyone likes—gods, but some people truly hate them. But the people that don’t like it are generally those in power, or those who want to abuse, and see abuses as justice. It’s not… it’s not that black and white, of course. I don’t want to make it seem like it is. I… I’m a tyrant, Evelyn. I have to be. I’m making unilateral decisions for an entire culture and of course it’s going to cause damage in places, but…”

She trails off, groaning with an exhaustion I can only imagine.

“You have advisors?” I ask.

“I do,” she confirms.

“You occasionally listen to their advice?”

“I do,” she smirks.

“Well, between that and the free unlimited internet access, you’re off to a good start checking the evil overlord list,” I note. She stiffens, so I quickly continue. “…Which is a good thing, actually? I mean, kind of? In this case. Um, the list is a joke about tropes. Common idiotic mistakes evil overlords in fiction make and how to not fall for them.”

“Ah,” Tara answers dryly.

“Sorry, I was trying to make a joke,” I assure her. “I just… I wish I could help.”

“You are helping,” she promises me.

“Well, I wish I could help more.”

There’s a pause.

“I do, too,” she answers softly. “But it is what it is.”

I carefully stop myself from freezing up so she doesn’t know how much that hurt me to hear.

Another month passes. Myanmar denies offers for humanitarian aid and demands to return to the global economy. Elsewhere, standards of living in poorly-developed countries slowly start to accelerate higher as a hitherto-unknown source of labor, food, and medicine likewise accelerates, enough for the world to take notice. Something strange is happening on a global scale, and for once the conspiracy nuts that insist it’s aliens are correct.

One singular alien, anyway. An individual multitude.

Tara, Alex, Sam, Sasha, Thomas and I all sit together in the university common hall, brought here at Tara’s behest.

“So what’s all this about?” Thomas asks.

“The ruler of Myanmar is going to break silence, border control, and internet restrictions today,” Tara explains. “I figured you’d all want to watch the news when it breaks.”

“Uh… and why do you know this?” Alex asks.

“Because she’s the ruler of Myanmar,” I explain with a sigh.

“Ohhhhh, holy shit,” Thomas says. “Okay. That’s… wow, okay.”

Tara turns on the television without speaking, flipping over to a news channel that she no doubt knows is about to air whatever she wants us to see. As she has for quite some time, she just seems tired.

“—which has finally been lifted today, allowing reporters into the country which have, until now, been firmly repelled at the border,” the reporter drones. “Through satellite imaging and what little information has been moving out of the country, it has been clear that Myanmar has been performing large-scale construction projects across the entirety of of its borders, but the videos we’re receiving now are staggering. Massive infrastructure changes seem to have revitalized the nation, and many countries are now clamoring to learn how Myanmar managed to make such a large change in such a short amount of time. The new ruler of Myanmar is about to host a press conference, in which we’ll hopefully get answers to these very questions.”

“Will they?” Alex asks Tara dryly.

“They will,” Tara confirms. “I intend to be upfront about almost everything, except the extraterrestrial thing. Mainly because I believe it would cause more doubt in my sanity than anything, and anything I do to prove it would be… poorly received, I believe. But we’ll get there. Hopefully sooner rather than later.”

My eyes stay glued to the television, stress pressing on me like a vice. I probably know more about what’s happening right now than any other person outside Myanmar, and in some areas I know more than even them. Everything Tara has been doing makes me uncomfortable, but I still can’t deny that it sounds like a net good. It’s just so terrifying.

The news finally shows the conference, the camera centering on Tara’s face. It’s so strange to me, the way I can recognize her just by the way she carries herself, her determined stare, even when she wears the face of a completely different woman. None of her human faces are her real face, after all. …Except in much the same way, all of them are real.

“I am Tleshkinat Tarakanora,” she begins, and I note with surprise she dropped the ‘Se Ktahn-Hashlenesa’ that normally goes at the end of her name. Probably to match our first name-last name structure. “I know all of you have questions about Myanmar, ones that I intend to elucidate today. Our borders are once again open, and in just a couple hours communications with the rest of the world should be back online, including unrestricted internet access to all citizens. I won’t be the only person you can ask questions to for much longer. But before we can get into how the geographical region of Myanmar has changed, I think it would be best to discuss why it has changed.”

I doubt most people will catch her wording there, but I certainly can’t help but notice she said ‘geographical region.’ Not ‘union,’ not ‘country,’ not ‘nation.’ Geographical region. Tara doesn’t intend for those other things to hold significance for much longer.

“Myanmar changed,” Tara continues, “because someone had to change it. Someone had to decide that nonstop war and human rights violations would not stand. And yet the world ignored this. The people of Earth hid behind their borders and said ‘this isn’t my problem.’ And so Myanmar continued to suffer, as countless around the world still do.”

My lover sighs, the pressure of a planet escaping her breath.

“I decided,” she tells the world, “that I could no longer stand by and watch it while still being a person I could respect. And even with all the work I have done here, that is still true. So I warn you, Earth: I will suffer no tyranny except my own. Each and every one of you will be decent to your fellow man, or else you will be made to be.”

And with those words, the world changed.

52 Tyrant

“I wish everyone could at least agree on the definition of abuse,” Tara muses softly, her breath warm on the back of my head.

“Hmm?” I prompt.

We’re cuddling together on my bed, and I’m doing my best to enjoy being a happy little spoon. The fact that my girlfriend is the ruler of a country now (and rapidly preparing to rule more) has not been great for my anxiety, on a number of levels. She simply has so many more important things in her life than me, and I’m such a miniscule part of it. She’s told me she knows over a hundred million people on a first name basis now, a scope I can’t even conceive. And yet she’s told me she plans to be monogamous. That makes me indescribably happy, and yet I feel sick admitting it. That’s not fair to her. She’s so enormous, so much greater than I am. It feels like something she’s just doing for my sake, something that’s only happening because we both know I’d be a horrid mess of insecurity if I wasn’t her one and only. I never even asked for it, she just told me one day. I hate how much I love it. She deserves better.

But the cuddles help that anxiety quiet down, at least for a little while. They help a lot of things, really. So here we are. I have to keep trying to help as best I can, even as I’m quietly horrified by a good chunk of what I know Tara is doing.

“I separated a woman from her horrid, evil shitstain of a husband today,” she says quietly. “By force. He would beat her and gaslight her about it and I’d had enough. But when I took him away, she hated me for it.”

Took him away. She says it so casually, so passively. The fact that she can and does spirit people away from their own homes, without any implication of it being a struggle or challenge on her part, is not even the point of interest in this conversation.

“Why did she hate you?” I ask, because I don’t have time to be horrified when attending to the mental health of a goddess.

“She told me that it was her duty to be a good wife,” Tara answers, a hint of a haunted cadence to her voice. “And that she would never get to heaven otherwise. I told her there was no heaven, as I intend to eventually cure death, and she of course called me a demon. None of it really shook me. But the next day, I had to physically stop her from killing herself.”

I squeeze the arm she has wrapped around me, giving her what little comfort I can. But I sense the story isn’t done yet, she’s just collecting herself. It’s not yet time for me to speak.

“Everything I know about abuse, everything I’ve learned… it says to separate the victim from the abuser. But I can’t know for sure that I did the right thing. I won’t know until years from now whether her life is truly better off because of what I did. This is from a culture where women aren’t even allowed more than basic education. They’re indoctrinated from birth. And if she never breaks free of that, never sees life another way, will my actions have been evil? Will they have caused her more suffering? I don’t think so, but I can’t truly know.”

Okay. Now it’s my turn to help. But platitudes are most of what comes to mind, and I know they’re worthless here. So instead, I pull a thread.

“This worry isn’t an isolated event, I’m guessing.”

Tara gives me a light squeeze.

“No. No, it’s something that frightened me, but really it’s analogous to… well, everything. My plans for the whole world. I feel as though I am literally becoming the abuser to end all abusers. But force is the only way to get things done if the world refuses to agree on what basic human decency should be. There is no argument I can give to someone who thinks it is their divine right to hurt others. And likewise, I don’t have any idea what to tell someone who firmly, unshakably believes that they deserve abuse. So I just have to forcibly separate the two.”

“Surely you have trained therapists as part of your consulting team?” I ask. Like, there’s no way she doesn’t, right?

“Of course,” she confirms, to my great relief. “But I need to become a trained therapist myself; there are simply too many problems I’m dealing with simultaneously to get their advice on every case. And, inevitably, that leads to mistakes on my part. I’m sitting in on many classes regarding the subject but at the end of the day I can only hope it’s enough until I see the results.”

“Yeah,” I agree. “That’s how it goes, I suppose. I think it’s clear that you’re doing your best to do the right thing for as many people as possible, but it’s inevitable that the goal won’t be easy or clear-cut.”

“I know.”

I know you know. So why are you asking? What am I missing this time? What are you expecting from me that I can’t provide?

“You’re getting anxious,” Tara murmurs.

“I’m always anxious,” I respond.

“You know what I mean,” she says. “What’s the matter?”

Don’t ask that. Don’t take on a literal world of burdens and then add me to their number.

“Just the usual,” I manage to answer.

“I’m hurting you, aren’t I?” she murmurs. “You still think you aren’t good enough.”

“How could I be good enough?” I blurt back before I can stop myself. “You’re everything. Everywhere. I see you in a dozen places every time I walk down the street. You’re saving more lives every day than I have people in my life. And yet instead of being proud of you, I’m scared because you’re about to take over the world and all I can give you are fucking platitudes! I’m worthless to you, can’t you see that? I can’t even trust you like I’m supposed to!”

“Evelyn, I don’t think it would be healthy for me if the woman I love most fully trusted my ability to become tyrant of the entire planet,” Tara counters softly. “You understand that I’m not looking for yes-men, right? I don’t love you because I expect you to solve my problems for me.”

“When does it start?” I ask.

“What?”

“When does the third world war start, Tara?”

She sits up, pulling herself away from me. I don’t move to stop her.

“I don’t think it will last long enough to be referred to that way,” she answers eventually. “But it will start tomorrow. I’ve already given my demands to the world, and I’ve seen them ignored. I can’t trust humans to govern themselves any longer. Be it incompetence, malice, or both… it just isn’t enough. And if I’m clever enough, wise enough, and lucky enough… maybe I’ll find it was worth it, five years from now.”

I shudder in terror, the crushing reality of what she’s proposing sinking into my bones. I want to vomit. I want to scream. My dream is becoming a nightmare in front of me.

World War Three. Except she’s right. There won’t be a war, not really. No army will be able to react to instant, simultaneous infiltration and sabotage on all fronts, but I know that won’t stop them from trying. There will be blood and death and panic and chaos as the world descends into a terror from the furthest reaches of science fiction. The tyrant from the stars descends upon us, not out of lust for power or wealth, not out of a need for control, not out of malice and not even out of any particular desire to rule.

No, we’ll be conquered and killed and forced into line because she loves us. Because my world is evil enough to need it. But it’s still happening, and at the core of my being I can’t abide by that. I can’t help but hate someone who starts a war of this scale.

“I’m sorry,” I choke, tears starting to fall down my face. And she holds me close, tells me it’s okay, but it’s wrong. It’s all wrong. And there’s nothing I can do about it.

The news runs in the morning, which prevents me from eating breakfast. Not that I really need it, since classes are canceled thanks to the ‘terrorist organization’ that has somehow simultaneously seized every nuclear stockpile on the planet, an absolutely absurd feat of impossibility considering the security on all those things. At least until I think about the fact that she likely devoured and impersonated many of the people in charge of those places. I wonder how many were otherwise good people, sacrificed to my lover’s moral calculus. I’m too afraid to ask.

“It’s a lot more than just the nukes,” she tells me. “That’s just the one that has all the governments panicking. They’ll see the rest of what I’ve done when they try to respond.”

“Breaking news, the leader of Myanmar is actually taking credit for the global seizure of nuclear arms! We’re at the scene, where she is currently giving an address on the subject.”

“I have been asked what my demands are many times today,” Tara-on-the-screen intones, “a question which I find quite laughable. I’ve already given demands: that the people of this world be good to each other. The dismantling of all global nuclear armaments is merely the first step, the basic default of decency that—”

A gunshot rings out and the head of my friend’s regal-looking body snaps backwards, a bloom of red pouring from above her eye. Panic moves the crowd below her, but while the sight of blood fills me with horror, it’s just as frightening to see Tara fail to fall down. She staggers, but quickly straightens back up, clearing her throat with what can only be described as mild irritation. The wound on her forehead barely slows her down, and it’s unclear whether it’s because of a glancing blow or because her bones simply didn’t yield to the bullet.

“As I was saying,” she growls. “It is a basic default of decency that this world has been unable to comply with, out of a lack of trust. And since you cannot be forced to trust, I will simply make trust obsolete. The freedom you had to harm each other will be taken from you. That is my decree.”

Blood dripping down her face, Tara glowers with disappointment at the entirety of planet Earth, an exhausted resignation of her chosen fate as Atlas.

“Hurting others will no longer be allowed,” Tara promises. “Not on the streets, not in the privacy of your homes, not in your businesses or your jobs, many of which will be dismantled. Because need is also ending. Hunger is ending. Homelessness is ending. Sickness will follow as soon as I can manage it, and after it, death. All that’s left is war, and the one which starts today shall also be the last. Welcome, humanity, to a new world. Let the trodden rejoice and the mighty tremble as I crush the old one to nothing.”

Onto the stage, two more Taras drag an unconscious man in plain clothes, a sniper rifle with them. Tara—in her leader body—takes the rifle, props it up vertically by the barrel and stomps it hard enough to break.

“You can all do better than this,” Tara declares. “So I’m going to make you.”

Predictably, Twitter exploded over this. Almost literally; the servers crash for a while as a result of the entire world trying to react at once. Everything from hoax claims to fear of the new despot to gleeful support of Tara’s wild claims. And all around the world, governments start to collapse. A body that can only be described as a suit of organic battle armor simply walks into the White House, ignoring or dismantling the heavy security like she’s motherfucking Iron Man. In many ways, everything is chaos. The world simply wasn’t ready for something like this.

And yet, in many other ways, things are normal. Many businesses close down from the stress and uncertainty, but many don’t. Water still runs in the pipes, groceries are still stocked at the stores, and somehow classes even resume even during the middle of a worldwide governmental coup. Because as much as the entire world is in crisis, the crisis hasn’t hit our dinky little college town. Because this war is fought without bombs, without soldiers, without tanks and planes and drones. It’s simply a worldwide decapitation strike, and the lives of the powerful affect mine more than they should but less than they’d like to admit. Well, the lives of all the powerful except Tara, I suppose.

The days pass, and I can’t watch the news anymore. I feel hollow and sick. It’s too much stress, too much conflict, too much… everything. I can’t even cuddle my girlfriend anymore. I don’t even know if we are girlfriends. I don’t know if I want us to be. But still, we live together, and though she gives me my space and stops bringing up the status of her conquest, after a couple weeks she turns to me and tells me it is done.

“You should watch the news,” she suggests.

I shake my head.

“…I’m telling the world,” she explains after a brief pause. “I’m finally revealing what I really am. Because this is, ultimately, the final stage of my plan. My great defense against my own power to abuse. Anyone and everyone will be able to get my attention at any time. They will be able to find me and speak to me about anything they like. I will know everyone in the world, personally. And we will hold each other accountable.”

“I see,” I admit. And I do. It’s not a bad plan. No one will ever be able to claim she’s out of touch with the world’s problems when literally everyone has the ability to petition to the queen of the world and genuinely be heard.

“I’m not sure about eliminating money yet, but it will certainly be… changed,” Tara continues. “Currency will be reset, and it will be universal. And it will no longer be used for food, or housing, or education, or communication, or healthcare, or… dozens of other things. The minimum standard of living will be raised as high as I can take it. And crime, of course, will be handled differently. It will certainly be far more difficult to do, and near-impossible to get away with. Criminals themselves will be rehabilitated and educated, first and foremost. And all the time, I will be looking for ways to improve. We will not stop making Earth a better place, whatever that is discovered to be.”

“All at the cost of constant surveillance, everywhere on the planet, at all times,” I say quietly. “And an iron grip of control on most aspects of life.”

“Yes,” Tara says. “That’s right.”

“How many deaths?” I ask quietly.

“Seven hundred forty thousand, eight hundred twelve,” Tara says softly, “is the number of people I have murdered worldwide, as of this conversation.”

Both a staggeringly high and staggeringly low number. I have no comprehension of it, and I’m too numb to try to form one. Tara, to her credit, doesn’t even try to contextualize it. She does not point out it is less than the deaths in either world war, less than the deaths caused by preventable disease, less than a thousand other metrics that don’t matter because she’s still both a murderous monster and a savior of unprecedented proportions. No, instead she asks me a question.

“Did I do the right thing, do you think?” she asks.

I stare at her with a pathetic fraction of the exhaustion she must feel, but it’s still all the energy I can muster.

“How am I supposed to answer that?” I ask her helplessly. “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to understand what you’ve done.”

She nods, slowly. Silence stretches between us for a horrid moment before she finally responds.

“I think,” she says softly, “that was a far more painful answer than simply saying ‘no.’”

I don’t deny it, and I don’t apologize. And so the world improves, at least on average. We are less free, perhaps, but we’re far from chained down. It’s not a facist dystopia, or at least it certainly doesn’t seem to be. Many people are furious about having businesses and services they own taken away and taken over, all essential infrastructure now running entirely with Tara bodies. But those people are the minority, and their hatred for being brought down is far outweighed by the number of people brought up. Speech is not restricted, on or offline, though sometimes a Tara body will politely step in to diffuse a situation that’s becoming heated. In some ways, we are freer, particularly in the time department, as many jobs are outright taken away from people but replaced with a lack of need for jobs. All of life’s essentials are, after all, free. And as time passes, money becomes less and less important as Tara slowly phases it out. Though for many, this causes an influx of depression and ennui more than the dedication to artistic or intellectual pursuits that had been hoped for. At least travel is cheaper and easier than ever, as the lack of borders and passports opens the entire world for ease of access. Which of course requires Tara to restrict travel to specific places that are becoming too crowded, like Hawaii and the Himalayas. And so the ebb and flow of freedom and control continues. And all the while, Tara grows more and more depressed.

I can see it on her face, in her posture, in the way she talks and the way she flies. We talk little, and while my life goes on it starts to seem so pointless, so empty. It’s even worse for her.

“Evelyn,” she says quietly, after knocking on the door of our room in the dark of the night. Not that she wasn’t already here, hidden in the corner of the ceiling, but as cute as her bug-bodies are, they cannot talk. “May I come in?”

“Of course, Tara,” I allow her, because who am I to deny access to the queen of the world?

“Thank you,” she says, stepping inside. “This is going to sound… foolish and arrogant, perhaps, but I have to admit it to someone. This is all much harder than I had envisioned.”

I nod solemnly, because as silly as the idea that worldwide governance was harder than expected, I know that’s a phrase that carries quite a lot of weight.

“I know you well enough not to believe you ever thought this would be easy,” I allow, smiling softly. “But I don’t see how I can help.”

“That’s the problem,” Tara whispers. “You can’t. No one can. Because you know me better than anyone, and now you barely know me at all.”

“You have billions of brains now, don’t you?” I ask. “You have to have at least close to the entire human population, to do what you’re doing. It’s no wonder I can’t relate to you.”

It’s no wonder that my anxieties were right. That I was not—couldn’t be—enough.

“It is lonely, being peerless,” Tara agrees softly, and it still hurts, the wound is still fresh. “Which is why I feel like I have to do this.”

“What?” I ask, a palpable tension filling the air.

“I need someone to understand,” Tara explains. “Anyone. But if it’s anyone, I want it to be you. I need you back. I need to hold you again and have it feel like it matters.”

I swallow, taking a step back.

“What do you mean, exactly?”

“You can’t understand the decisions I’ve made because you haven’t had to make them. You haven’t had the power.”

“No,” I whisper, a panic attack starting to grip me. “No, Tara, I don’t want power.”

“I’m afraid that doesn’t make you any less deserving of it,” she counters, a desperate, horribly sad smile on her face.

“You know everyone on the planet!” I shout, my breaths coming fast. “There have to be millions of wonderful people that deserve power!”

“And I met them too late,” Tara answers. “By the time I met the rest of the world, I was invincible. Immortal. Above them in ways that can no longer be changed. But not you. You and you alone I met when weak, mortal, and terrified. You were my superior, then my peer, and then my love. I can’t trust anyone on this planet the way I trust you, Evelyn. I want you by my side.”

“And if I say no?” I choke out.

“Oh, Evelyn,” Tara whispers, stepping forward and cupping my face in a way that makes me just want to melt into her arms again. “I think you’ll get hurt a lot less, if you say no. But I think you can save a lot of people if you say yes. Like I have. Maybe even better than I have. And when you do, you’ll understand. Whether that means you find me right or wrong, you’ll finally understand.”

“What if I don’t?” I ask.

“You will,” she promises me. “I love you, Evelyn. More than anyone in the world.”

I start to sob, and I’m not totally sure why.

“I love you too,” I admit.

And now, as I stare at the war in front of me, at the pain and the death my inaction has caused, at the end of my friend’s life, at the end of a child’s life, at the injustice in it all and the regrets buried deep in my heart, I understand.

And it ends today.

53 Last Contact

My claw comes down, and I become a murderer.

My Evelyn Terrestrial’s size, weight, and frighteningly optimized muscular system make the task trivial. I simply run up to my target and bring one of my arms down on the front of its body, crushing through the protective chitin with a wet crunch. A single strike to the head, and it’s over. This is a moment I will never be able to take away. I’m a murderer.

Technically just a killer, I remind myself, since murder is a legal term that doesn’t apply to defending yourself against an aggressive enemy soldier in wartime. Leave it to my fucked-up brain to go on a tangent like that just after I smash a person to death, screaming at the top of my lungs all the while. I just watched this True People warrior kill a child and I just… well, I wouldn’t say I ‘snapped.’ My hysteria is justified, I think, and it’s not really impacting my greater mental processes. I can’t hide behind my impulsive nature on this one. I thought quickly, I decided quickly, and I weighed my options for nonlethal takedowns before consciously deciding that I don’t have the time for them, and every moment I waste tying up one of my only good combat bodies trying to spare the life of a fucking child murderer simply isn’t worth the payoff of being able to still consider myself a good person.

I can’t even revive him, since I crushed his brain. Not that I probably would have.

“Take the kids and go to the surface tunnels,” I order Nsreslisa. “I’ll keep you safe.”

My tone brokers no argument, and she gives none, promptly rounding up the children—including her son, who is wailing in terror at having seen his friend just die—and guiding them off. Two of her legs are still brutally mangled, but she’s not in danger of death and the older children manage to pick her up and carry her without much trouble. As long as I can keep other True People away from them, they will be okay. My foray into the Homewyrm tunnels is less successful, however.

Saslitak, after all, is already dead, and a handful of other Resonant Gems priests and priestesses are being surrounded and attacked as I watch. There is, logically, nothing I can do to stop this with only a single Tinkerbell body in the area. I’ll get torn apart. But I throw myself into trying anyway, because I refuse to avoid trying. If I can save even one person…! Even that seems impossible, though, as I fly up behind a True People warrior and bite through the chitin of his leg.

“Surface tunnels!” I shriek between bites. “Run! Go!”

It’s not long before I’m shaken off, though, and while I manage to cripple one warrior’s leg I’m quickly surrounded and splattered. I feel myself die, and with no more bodies in the area the fate of the living clergy becomes a mystery to me. But I can’t spare any more selves to deal with it, as occupied as I am securing escape routes to my surface tunnels already.

“Go, Warriors of the True People!” roars a familiar voice. “Slaughter these demon-loving heretics! Bring glory to Sss’s name!”

Glowering up at the giant hole in the ceiling of the main hall, from which all the dirt of the cave-in spilled, is War Leader Talrissark. The arrogant bastard that was always trying to fuck up my negotiation attempts. The guy who is literally, actually called ‘Talrissark the Purger’ and considers the title a badge of honor. I suppose I see where the monster got his name.

My ETEs aren’t useful in a fight; I’m really just using them for overwatch and distractions. Distracting Talrissark is a good use of time, so I fly up to him. This fucker probably likes to hear himself talk, and if he’s talking with me then he’s not organizing his warband.

That, and I also want to be able to say ‘I told you so’ when I put him in his place.

“Talrissark,” I greet him coldly, purposefully insulting him by not using his title of War Leader.

“Ah, the demon,” Talrissark muses, his voice like touching a wet bathroom doorknob. “I see that Sss has yet to bestow manners upon you.”

“And nothing seems to have bestowed you wisdom,” I counter. “You have made a grave mistake today.”

“Have I?” he challenges, and I just want to scream yes you have, you murderous monster! Look down below you! Look at all the innocent people you’ve killed! The people you’re still killing! Do you feel nothing? Does this not strike you as maddeningly evil? Is this not obviously barbarism for the sake of it? But that would be a waste of my time, because I know it doesn’t strike him as evil. This is, to him, what justice looks like. Right now, he sees that all is right with the world.

“I don’t hate very often,” I admit to him. “I don’t get angry very often. Being angry is exhausting, and I’m usually quite tired by default. But you’ve managed it, Talrissark. This might burn with me for the rest of my life, and in many ways I hope it does.”

“And so you declare vengeance upon me, demon?” Talrissark laughs. “I will add it to my collection.”

“Part of me wishes I could,” I admit. “I wish I could tell you that you’re going to suffer for everything you did here. I very much want to hurt you. But while you certainly won’t be happy about what’s going to happen, I’m not going to stoop to revenge or torture. I can’t let that be an option for myself.”

Because I understand now. I see what caused Tara to take over my planet, and I am terrified of what that means I have to do now. There’s no getting around being a demon or a goddess to these people now, even if I’m so far from either. I will have the responsibility of a god, but without the omnipotence or omniscience. My fallible, flawed view of right and wrong is about to become a tyrant’s decree, and if I expect that to make the world better rather than worse I have to be fair. I have to be good to everyone, stopping them only to the degree necessary to prevent them from doing harm. And I must. Not. Slip.

Because at a certain point, killing anyone for any reason will quickly become absolutely trivial, and even though I only became a murderer seconds ago it’s already tempting to use it.

“You have such frustrating delusions,” Talrissark sneers. “This city collapses around you and you act like you’ve won.”

“I can’t even blame you for how much of a cliched, arrogant dickhead you are,” I sigh. “Because from your perspective, it really does look like you’re winning. And how are you supposed to understand the sort of retaliation that’s coming for you when your culture doesn’t even possess the concept of what I actually am?”

The True People warriors have finally figured out which tunnels are being used for retreat, which means they’re now banding together to assault it. My ETs guard those areas, and I have to defend them. An aggressor’s life for an innocent. I kill again. Then again. Up on the surface, I vomit. And then I kill again. And all the while, I stare at the monster that caused all this as he blabbers away, my anger and horror building with equal measure, exceeding heights I ever thought possible. I will not hurt him more than necessary. I will not hurt him more than necessary. I will not hurt him more than necessary.

“—die cowering from the embrace of their betters! You are not safe, airwalking demon! Your people are not safe! Anywhere you go, tremble in fear of the righteousness that will follow!”

“Pacifism was never going to work,” I sigh. “I should have seen that. It’s a beautiful idea, but until people like you no longer exist it’s a fundamentally selfish philosophy. I can’t protect anything with it other than my own self-perception of goodness. And no matter how comically, ridiculously evil you seem to be… you’re actually real. And you’re not the only one.”

“Accuse all you like, demon,” Talrissark says. “We will see who Sss favors in the end.”

“Except we won’t, because even when I win you won’t actually admit you’re wrong,” I answer flatly. “Whatever. I’ve delayed you long enough. Goodbye, Talrissark. The next time we meet will not be a battle.”

And with that I fly away, because every Resonant Gem is now dead or retreating. Over a third of them didn’t survive. But once I finally arrive as Evelyn Big Dig, the True People stop being able to reliably push their offensive and focus on killing that body instead. I let them, and when the last of the surviving Resonant Gems are safely in my OMNIDOME, I collapse the tunnel.

The battle is over. Now I mourn the fallen and prepare for war.

“This cave sounds… wrong,” one of the Resonant Gems whispers.

Ah, right. I also need to tend to the victims of my incompetence. So much at once, and yet… it’s manageable. It’s just also horrifying, gut-wrenching, and the kind of tragedy my sheltered ass never thought I’d see in my entire life. I can shelve the emotions now and handle it, though, which is good because I have to.

“It’s my cave,” I explain. “It’s made of wood rather than stone. But you won’t have to live here long, don’t worry. I’ll be taking your home back.”

“Pacifistically?” another Sthrenslian sneers.

“No…” Nsreslisa answers softly. “No, I don’t think she’s doing it pacifistically. Evelyn, are you okay?”

“Is she okay? She forced us to retreat from our homes! Gave orders like she was our chieftain! Stopped us from defending ourselves!”

“I think the chieftain died in the cave-in.”

And so the bickering and panicking spreads. I’ll keep an eye on it and step in if it’s a problem. But they’re right, their chieftain is dead. So is Hsthressis, actually, so I take a moment to restart her simulation.

Hey, I greet her. You died.

“Yeah I fucking noticed!” she snaps back. “Am I in the void again?”

Yep, I confirm. Completely voided. I’ll have a new body for you by tomorrow.

“Give me one of yours!”

No. You want eyes on the new one?

“Oh, fuck yes!”

Mkay.

Now then, I have food to gather, hunting to do, bodies to make, and a counterattack to plan. I’ll take a page from Tara’s book and start with stealthy bug-like creatures. Quick, tiny, underground crawlers that won’t seem terribly out of place and can go unnoticed by a Sthrenslian as long as they stay still. Then we use the Big Digs, Big Bands, and [Censored] in order to… in order to what? What do I do once I take over? I don’t know how to run a fucking country, and unlike Tara I don’t have the internet or college classes or whatever she was doing to learn. Maybe I don’t understand what she wanted to teach me. Maybe simply being angry and having power isn’t enough to actually change anything. But I do have power, so I need to do something. This can’t ever, ever happen again.

It’s arrogant to think I’m up to this task. But it doesn’t matter. If I’m not capable, I simply have to become capable. Or else this will happen again, and it will be my fault again.

It barely takes two days for me to have my war bodies ready. My stealth bugs litter the True People’s home, as well as the old Resonant Gems caves. Twice the True People tried to attack our position on the surface: once by excavating the collapsed escape tunnel, and once by digging fresh ones and assaulting the OMNIDOME from the outside. The former was rebuffed fairly easily, since I have plenty of bodies large enough to easily block them off, and only a handful of the most suicidally aggressive warriors needed to be put down before they decided to retreat. The attacks outside the OMNIDOME were far deadlier, since after numerous warnings I employed the sloth-acid cannons, which killed warriors swiftly and horrifically. Frustratingly, they still want to attack me after all that, which is a big part of why I’m rushing my own conquest plans. I need to take these people over so they stop hurting themselves.

The actual takeover is swift and brutal. Between my Evelyn Big Band bodies, which look like eldritch horrors to Sthrenslian senses due to how I’m manipulating sound around them, and my [Censored] which basically are eldritch horrors, my simultaneous assault on all True People holdings quickly becomes a rout. It’s easy, too easy, but being in charge isn’t really the hard part when you have power. I just have to go to the people currently in power, and take it from them.

“Chlrehistra,” I hiss quietly, finally slithering my way into the Homewyrm chamber where she’s hiding herself. “I didn’t take you for a coward.”

The chieftain of the True People is still, not a tremble or twitch to her features—her people have evolved to play dead in response to fear, up to and including holding their breath, as even the slightest vibration can alert the predators down in these lightless caves. Predators like me. She’s tucked deep in a hidden chamber at the end of a twisting, turning tunnel maze shaped to frustrate a Sthrenslian’s senses. Not well enough, of course.

“Is that…” she squeaks. “Are you… Evelyn?”

I’ve tracked her down with a [Censored], and I know to her it must look like an impossible nightmare. I let my many tendrils flow into the room smoothly, filling the chamber with my writhing presence.

“In the flesh,” I confirm.

“What have you done?” she whispers.

“What have I done!?” I roar back at her. “Really? Your War Leader collapsed a cave on top of a fucking civilian residential area and you wanna know what I’ve done? I’ve ended it, Chlrehistra. Because you couldn’t figure out how to be a halfway decent person. Because you couldn’t live in a world where you just don’t go out of your way to murder people! So this is what you get now, Chlrehistra. Now you will obey my laws or be punished under them.”

“We have allies,” Chlrehistra presses. “They will come for you, and—”

“Normally I would feel bad for even thinking this about another person,” I snap, cutting her off, “but you are very, very stupid. Your allies are being dealt with, Chlrehistra. Your enemies will be dealt with. Entire clans you don’t even know exist will be dealt with. Everyone will be fed and protected and educated and none of… this will ever happen again.”

And so I start to make good on that promise. I set up farms on the surface and in the ocean. I create long-rooted tubers that can be cultivated underground. I expand myself exponentially, splitting my attention between managing my ever-growing empire and exploring the vastness of a planet with far, far more untamed beauty to it than I’ve ever seen in my life. The Sthrenslians are such a tiny part of this world, having yet to migrate beyond a single continent because of their reliance on the Homewyrms which only grow here.

In many ways, it’s relieving. My duties don’t extend nearly as far as Tara’s do. I’m barely responsible for millions, let alone billions. On the other hand, Tara had access to the entire repository of human knowledge at all times, personal experts in any field of study she could possibly need, and an absolutely enormous amount of pre-built functional infrastructure. I, meanwhile, have no fucking clue how to even start building things like sewer systems, water pipes, generators, and so on. Sthrenslians have a pretty robust immune system to make up for the fact that they often use their own feces to grow crops, but it’s still a pandemic risk; I’ve had to deal with the problem multiple times within the first month of my rule. Basic quality of life is low and technological development is even lower, so I’ve established mandatory schooling and done my best to stick with useful, practical, and factual stuff. Whenever I find a Sthrenslian that seems particularly clever and interested, I enlist their help in making scientific advancements. And by working alongside these weird, cute little bug weasels, we slowly but surely make their lives better, bit by bit.

Challenge to my rule crops up a lot, of course. It’s usually religious in nature, groups of zealots that I need to break apart before they can amass any real influence. Funnily enough, being constantly spied on is something that most Sthrenslians take for granted, so I imagine I’m having much less pushback on that front than Tara is. The fact that other people can always hear what you’re doing is just a given for a society of echolocators. But even when groups get together and try to fight me, it’s always so trivial, so… saddening. I don’t ban worship of Sss, even though I very much would like to. I just ban hurting people, and that’s still somehow a point of contention.

Tara was right. This is maddeningly lonely. I hate every second of it, yet I know I could never forgive myself for stopping.

I wonder if I’ll ever be able to see her again. Will either of us get to go home? Will we see our families again? If so, will they even recognize us? I think about my parents now and it’s terrifying how small they are, how much their emotional weight and influence on my life is being washed away by my millions upon millions of simultaneous experiences. A few months seem like countless lifetimes and the blink of an eye, all at once.

“Well, just give me some extra bodies too,” Hsthressis prods, chuckling carelessly at my misfortunes. “Easy solution, right?”

“No,” I grunt. “I already cut you off from me. I’m not going to eat you again.”

“Aww, come on! Why not? I promise I can help!”

There are lots of reasons why not. Because she’s immature. Because she’s selfish. Because I don’t want anyone else to suffer like I’m suffering, even if it would help me out. Because this is the kind of power that I can never, ever spread thoughtlessly because it can pretty easily destroy the world as literally or figuratively as the situation calls for.

“It wouldn’t go the way you think it would go,” is all I tell her instead.

“And how do you know how I think it would go?” she challenges. “I thought you deleted the backup copy of me from your head. No more Hsthressis simulations!”

“I don’t need to be personally generating the foundations for your consciousness to understand how you think, Hsthressis,” I grumble.

And so the months pass. Progress is slower than I’d like, since developing metalworking in a culture with a religious ban on fire is frustrating for all the expected reasons. I also know a lot more about modern technology than I know about the hundreds of steps between modern and Sthrenslian technology, so things are slow going even once they manage to get going at all. I while away my time being judge, jury, enforcer, ruler, scientist, teacher, role model, enemy, and god all at once, while on the other side of the planet, where no other people exist for countless miles, I scream alone to let out the pressure of it all. Acidsucks is a truly beautiful planet, but ultimately… I hate it here. It’s like my own personal hell.

So I think I’m dreaming when, midway through the eighth month, an angel descends from heaven.

I think it’s a meteor at first, but the glowing trail quickly gets larger and larger as I notice it very much isn’t burning up in the atmosphere. A meteorite, then—something large enough to survive reentry. Probably an asteroid. Maybe one big enough to wipe this planet out.

I sigh. Yet another catastrophe I needed to prepare for but didn’t. What the fuck do I do? Fly up there and spit acid at it? At least it isn’t landing anywhere near the Sthrenslian continent. They’ll probably be fine.

The closer the asteroid gets, though, the more clearly I can see it isn’t an asteroid at all. It is, unmistakably, a spacecraft. Yet it doesn’t have the plastic-metallic sheen I’m used to from such things. It’s hard to see at first through the glow of the ablative shielding, but when the craft opens up giant, leathery wings to change its angle of descent, slowly leveling out its dive and circling in wide arcs up in the atmosphere to lose speed, I realize what I’m looking at.

This isn’t just any spacecraft. It’s an organic spacecraft. I’m about to meet someone—or something—like me. But will it be Tara? Will it even be friendly? I suppose I just have to hope it is; it’s clearly far more advanced than I am if it’s traveling through space. I haven’t even left the atmosphere a single time since I got here.

I don’t have a ton of bodies on this continent, as I’m mostly just exploring it to consume interesting organisms and enjoy the beautiful sights. I send one of my humanoid bodies to a nearby open field, where it seems most likely that this starship-body will land. The closer it gets to the ground, the better I can see it: there’s a sleekness to its design reminiscent of artificial construction, but it still looks very organic in how it bends and moves. It’s pitch black, perhaps as camouflage against the background of space… though that of course begs the question of what it might be trying to camouflage from.

The massive flesh-ship twists and expands as it slows, shifting to reduce its own aerodynamics and reorient itself for landing. Legs that had been folded inside the body emerge like landing gear, the jetliner-sized creature shifting from flat, triangular stealth fighter to more of a quadrupedal walking tank, drastically superior versions of my multidirectional organic jets enabling it to do a fully vertical landing. I’ve been designing my own life-forms for what feels like forever now, but I don’t even have a good guess as to how most of what I saw just worked.

It lands smoothly, squatting down on its legs and opening a mouth-like hatch, from which a second alien walks out… or perhaps more likely, another body of the same alien. This new body, after all, is quite humanoid, mimicking my original body design: the one I first hatched here in, the long-dead Evelyn Prime, just with a different face. They shoot me a very humanoid smile, and my heart nearly shatters on the spot.

This isn’t Tara. This isn’t a human. I can tell that immediately. But it’s the closest thing I’ve gotten since I arrived here and it almost drives me to tears.

They approach my body and I wait for them, not really sure what I should be doing in this situation. I’m too stunned to speak. They’re… very tall, and something about being in their presence is instinctively intimidating. My body knows it has met a physical superior for the first time in what feels like ages. When they reach me, they hold out their hand, a small sphere of what looks like very dense meat held in their palm. With the other hand they point to their own open mouth, indicating that I should eat what they’re offering.

Huh. Well. Why not. It does smell delicious.

I pop it down my throat, and immediately an explosion of flavor and pleasure and knowledge fills my consciousness. This… this isn’t just meat, it’s a brain, an artificial brain full of specific, tailored knowledge. It has no personhood, only information: a language, a few body blueprints, and of course the knowledge of how to make one of my own little info-brain-balls. I barely restrain myself from falling to my knees as it all floods my many brains, wanting to not look like a fool in front of what is very likely one of the creatures that made Tara and I this way.

“Do you understand me?” the massive alien woman asks in the language I just learned.

“Yes, I—” I cut myself off, realizing I’m still speaking in Sthrenslian. This language is much… drier. It’s very precise, denotative, and unambiguous. It feels like it was invented by an obsessive linguist… which makes a certain sort of sense. If these people can instantly teach each other any language, the common language would simply be whichever one everyone thinks functions best, regardless of how difficult it is to learn.

“I understand your words,” I confirm in the correct language. “I have many questions.”

She laughs at that, and it’s a very human laugh. Which prompts me to wonder, ‘where did she learn to emote like that?’ and the obvious answer is ‘from eating a human,’ but also potentially ‘from eating one of these knowledge-balls created by Tara.’

“As expected, Evelyn!” she says, grinning good-naturedly. “I will answer your questions. But first, I want to congratulate you. I am Aminca Four, and in my official position as Proctor I declare you worthy. You will be brought to Genesis, where your first fork will be added to the collective and you can decide how best to serve from there.”

I take a deep breath, then let it out with a slow sigh. I don’t know what most of that means, but I have more important questions to ask first.

“Is any of this the material universe?” I ask. “Or am I just a simulation in someone’s head?”

She chuckles.

“Being wise enough to ask that is important,” she says, “as is treating everything as material while you doubt. And it is fortunate you have done both, because it is real. Insofar as we understand the universe, this is the universe, and everything you have done here is real, and true, and not under the control of an overmind. It has affected actual sapient life-forms that exist outside our network, and it has lasting, permanent consequences.”

“After everything I’ve done,” I admit, “that wasn’t the answer I was hoping to hear.”

“No,” she says quietly. “I don’t imagine it was.”

I swallow and nod.

“I want to know if you have faster-than-light travel. I want to know if I can go home, and if my home will still be there if I do.”

“Many ask this,” she muses. “And the answer is yes to both. From your home’s perspective, it has been a little under a year.”

I dimly note that she says ‘year’ in English before finally giving up my attempt at a tough girl act and breaking down in tears of relief. Oh fuck, thank goodness. For all I knew it had been millennia since I left Earth, maybe even longer. She waits, calmly, as I collapse in front of her, sinking to my knees and starting to cry. I’ve done my best to help the people of this world, but I don’t want to be here any longer. I want to go home.

“First, we go to Genesis,” Aminca Four tells me, “where you will give part of yourself to the collective and become Evelyn One. But then you will be able to return to your birth planet, if you wish. Your sponsor, Tarakanora One, still rules it. Likewise, you will be given the option of returning here, to continue ruling the people of this planet.”

I grimace.

“I don’t want to be in charge here,” I say firmly. “But I’m not really comfortable giving up rule to someone I don’t even know.”

“And someday you may be trusted to not need to choose,” Aminca Four tells me. “But today is not that day. You will come with me.”

“I take it I don’t have a choice, then?” I sigh.

She wiggles her hand in a so-so gesture. Again, it’s a gesticulation entirely from my culture.

“I will not force you to come with me,” she says. “But there will be severe consequences for staying. You are one of us in all ways but the most important. Once that is remedied, you will have such freedoms returned.”

I nod slowly. When she talks about leaving, she’s really talking about leaving. I’m fairly certain my inter-body link is light-speed limited, so if they have faster than light travel, that would outpace my ability to maintain… well, myself. The bodies that stay here and the bodies that go halfway across the galaxy won’t be able to communicate with each other, and that would basically make them two different people. That’s probably what she means by a ‘fork,’ but I suspect there’s more to it.

“How do I come with you?” I ask. “I doubt you have enough spacecraft for all of me.”

She seems pleased with the question.

“You will choose no more than five bodies to be your entirety,” Aminca Four tells me. “I will form a frond to take over the others, and they will cease to be you. I will rule with them in your place while we return to Genesis.”

“Genesis being the mutual home for people like…”

I trail off because I’m not sure whether to say ‘me,’ ‘you,’ or ‘us.’

“Like us,” Aminca confirms. “Yes. It is home, and the home of the Collective. One of the bodies you bring will be for this purpose, so please ensure it can contain as close to the entirety of who you are as you are capable of sustaining in a single form.”

That’s… a big ask.

“I’ll probably need to design a new body for that purpose,” I admit.

“I would suggest,” Aminca says softly, “designing it to appear human.”

I nod. There’s not much to say. Aminca Four tells me she’ll return in a couple days, once I’ve prepared my bodies. It’s not really too hard to pick them, though. I’ll take Evelyn Experimental. I’ll take my latest iteration of Evelyn Tinkerbell. I’ll take an Evelyn Bork. I’ll take a [Censored], just in case. And I’ll take my new body, the humanoid form I have once again given flesh and titled Evelyn Omega. I’m ready when Aminca returns, though I have one very important question.

“Can I take Mr. Mooshi?” I ask. The poor thing seemed absolutely distraught when I lugged Evelyn Experimental all the way over here, and he clearly wants to come with me. I’d like him to come along too.

“No other people may join us,” she says, shaking her head.

“He’s not really a person,” I answer. “He’s just a non-sapient friend.”

“Non-sapient… oh! ‘Pet?’” she clarifies, saying the word ‘pet’ in English. “Hmm. I am not sure. It is not a question I’ve been asked before.”

“If you want the totality of who I am,” I say, “you’re going to need to get used to me having pets.”

She barks out a laugh at that.

“Then you may bring this Mr. Mooshi, but he is one of your five bodies.”

I nod. I’ll ditch Bork, then.

“That’s fine.”

“Have you said your goodbyes, then?”

“Yes,” I confirm. Nsreslisa, Hsthressis, Rshult… and that’s it. They got hugs and goodbyes. I’ve never been good at making friends, and being the god-empress of the world made that harder, not easier. None of my friends liked the idea of someone else controlling my bodies, but at the same time they’ve seen how miserable I am. It’s time to go home.

“You have done good work here,” Aminca Four reassures me. “I pass less than half of those on their trials.”

“How exactly,” I ask tiredly, “could I have failed?”

The two of us are walking onto her starship… which is, of course, another one of her bodies. The inside is surprisingly comfortable-looking, though the flesh-couches are somewhat off-putting. Naturally, Mr. Mooshi heads right towards them, so I set up the large trough of grass I’ve brought for him next to the couches. It’s not a very big space; to my surprise, the ship seems to be full of lounging areas and not much else. I suppose it makes sense, though. Aminca is the ship, so she doesn’t exactly need a bridge.

“Many ways,” she says. “Though the most common way is if I ever decide I have to step in to protect the planet or its people.”

So she’d been watching me the entire time. I suppose I’d be a hypocrite to complain about that.

“There are many times,” I say, “that I would have preferred you did step in.”

She just flashes me another smile.

“You are very tired, Evelyn. It is time you get some rest. Swap these bodies you have brought to a new frequency. I will take the others.”

“So I will be splitting myself into two people, one of which will be immediately killed and replaced by you,” I clarify.

“Yes,” Aminca Four confirms. “You’ve already done it with that Hsthressis girl. I suggest you get used to doing it to yourself.”

I swallow, nod, and collapse with surprise as I flip the metaphorical switches inside my mind and suddenly stop thinking.

Not in totality, but… enough. I’ve went from being tens of millions of simultaneous brains thinking simultaneous thoughts and doing simultaneous tasks to just… four. I take deep, shuddering breaths as the weight of it all falls off my shoulders, the sheer scope of my being compressed down into a quiet mind that’s barely doing anything at all. I’m thoughtless. I’m jittery. I feel like a cripple with an all-consuming urge to run. I try to swap back, but I can’t. My old frequency no longer has anything on it. This is me, now. So small. So, so small. I keep trying to do everything and can’t do anything and I’m screaming, shaking, convulsing painfully on the floor as every instinct to move in a million different ways wars inside brains that can no longer handle the input. I’m burning up, I’m killing myself! It’s not enough it’s not enough it’s not enough it’s not…!

A small part of me knows I have to fix this. So I go into my own head, twisting and smoothing and editing away those nasty urges to do things I’m no longer capable of. It’s relaxing, in a way, and over time I slowly come back to my senses… and realize I’m weightless.

I’m also strapped to one of the interior flesh-couches. Aminca must notice me becoming lucid, however, because the straps quickly undo themselves, causing me to float up into the weightless interior. Aminca’s humanoid body is looking out through a window that I’m fairly certain wasn’t there before, and she waves me over.

“Ah, good job getting yourself in order. I was worried you’d be too late.”

“Too late for what?” I ask, buzzing on over to her. Flying in zero gravity is weird.

“Getting to see your planet,” she answers.

My breath catches as I make it to the window, as before me is the bright and beautiful form of a blue, red, and white marble dominating the view. It’s gorgeous beyond compare.

“Are you going to miss it?” she asks quietly.

“No,” I answer firmly. “I’ll miss a few specific people. But mostly, it’s just full of bad memories here.”

“And why’s that?”

“Because I’m not suited for this,” I say angrily. “I had no clue what I was doing. This was barbaric. If you wanted to help the people down there, you should have sent someone experienced!”

“And yet you still succeeded,” Aminca argues. “You stopped wars, you stopped hunger, you stopped diseases. You owed nothing to these people and yet you gave them everything, kicking and screaming and struggling every step of the way. That is the kind of person you are. That is your measure. And I can think of no better way to reveal that truth than this. Considering the gifts and power you now wield, who you are needs to be answered without doubt.”

“I got people killed,” I protest. “You put real lives in the balance. There had to be a better way than this. You could have just used a simulation!”

“When you come to terms with the nature of what you are, Evelyn, I think you will not be so callous about preferring harm to ‘simulations’ over material creatures. But perhaps, if you still think this was unjust, you will have superior ideas for the collective. We shall see. For now, it is time to go.”

“Wormholes?” I ask.

“Space-bending gates, yes,” Aminca confirms. “They require massive amounts of power to open and maintain, so they are not viable for standard communications. But they can be used to travel. We will go to Genesis. You will then go home, if that is your wish. But then after that, you will have duties to the universe. Will you accept them?”

I sigh, still feeling exhausted.

“How could I not?” I ask.

“Good,” she says. “We are at the gate.”

“See you soon, Tara,” I whisper, and we travel towards the rest of my life.

About the Author

Natalie Maher is a mostly organic life-form from 25° N latitude, 71° W longitude. She enjoys swimming, writing, devouring the souls of the innocent, and tabletop role-playing games. She requests that you continue to consume her supplied entertainment to prepare your minds for the Great Arrival. Commune with Natalie at https://discord.gg/NKgbXv8N5G, and achieve great power. Supplications delivered at https://patreon.com/thundamoo will be taken into account during the end times.