50. Innocence (Patreon)

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, 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 standards 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.