5. Ripoff (Patreon)

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 unphased 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 tounge-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 fourth 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.”