1. Far Away From Home

Welcome to the first chapter of my new story, Hive Minds Give Good Hugs.  Thank you so much for your patronage.  Vigor Mortis's update schedule will not change.  Enjoy!

“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 weak fists, 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 say 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 possibility 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.