(HMGGH) 14. Speak (Patreon)

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:

"Will 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 as 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 I'm going to need every victory today that I can get.

I am a lean, 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 stopped 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 burns 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 to 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 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 tax me if I'm on another planet!

Anyway, I still make it to the clearing, only making a few stops 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 attached 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 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.