Day 10 - Insect Girl (Patreon)

Woman: Swift Creek Photos
Insect: Lais Pinhero 

Chloe was puttering around in the garden. It always need some work. Weeds needed pulled, plants needed staked, and later in the season there would to be harvest. It was a hot day and nowhere near harvest. The bugs were annoying. Those that weren’t pests to the plants, seemed to want to become pests to her. Flies and mosquitos, even with repellant, swarmed everywhere and they were becoming increasingly insistent as the heat increased. One wasp seemed to be making a special effort to be annoying. Chloe swatted at the creature again and again but it was fast and agile and impossible to hit in the heat. Just as she swatted at it for what seemed like the millionth time, Chloe felt the horrible cold wind begin. Another change was coming! What would it be this time?

The skin on her arms shimmered and darkened, becoming shiny just like the wasp she’d been swatting. Soon she found herself flat on her stomach, both arms and legs shrinking and becoming hard and black. The world swirled around her and everything seemed to grow. As she slowly shrank, for she’d been in this position before, she watched as her body hardened and changed shape. By the time she was on the ground, she was barely half her original size, with nothing but her head unchanged. Her body had become a hard shiny blue like some kind of beetle. Her size continued to dwindle until she was barely five centimetres long. A third pair of legs erupted from her middle segment and then two pairs of wings. A pair of segmented antennae grew from her forehead.

As soon as she could make sone sense of the strange sensations coming from both her transformed body and the newly sprouted antennae, she took a few careful steps. It took a while to discover how to walk with six legs instead of just two. What took even longer was the coordination to flap the wings. Nearly half an hour went by before Chloe was able to reliably take to the air. There were strange scents in the air and she followed them. She soon discovered that she was definitely not at the top of the food chain as an insect and had to escape several times from now much larger predators. Finally, she decided that the outside world was just too dangerous and she headed home. Fortunately, the screen wasn’t completely sealed (she’d been bugging Stefan about that for weeks) and she squirmed into the kitchen. She was hungry and found some breadcrumbs to eat. It didn’t really satisfy her but it would have to do.

Later that evening, when Stefan finally got home, he saw the shiny blue insect in the centre of the table. He was about to squash it when he noticed the head was definitely not a normal insect head. Quickly deducing what had happened again, he put out his hand and let Chloe crawl onto his palm. She strutted around showing off her shiny body and then launched into the air. Stefan, startled, stepped back. He could barely hear her high-pitched laughter as she buzzed around his head. Finally, she had enough of her fun, and settled again on the table. He looked at her, somewhat puzzled. She’d become nearly everything imaginable before but now she was some kind of bug. He began to wonder whether there was some connection between he scrolls he was translating and these changes. But that was impossible …

Photo Credits:
Woman: https://www.DeviantArt.com/SwiftCreekPhotos
Beetle: Creative Commons: Lais Pinheiro