Death Hunters 12: Meanwhile

    [Progress Report: Kathara Harana

     The group is still at the anthropomorphic feline preserve, affectionately called locally the were-cat preserve, although the species here are as stated in my previous brief weekly report more diversified then those referred to as were-cats by the Aesperians. Hollia has been training with Rhulan and her grandmother the priestess Hyatha Aria. She has progressed significantly, now able to revert to a human form completely and to her Kokin form at will. Rhulan has also been instructing her on enhancing her magic via learning to use her natural Aesperian abilities to a greater level, which in reality has been allowing her to use those on more of a combat level and not relying on magic while at the same time enhancing her wind based magic. For greater detail regarding Aesperian abilities please see Priestess Hyatha Aria’s own notes regarding Aesperian genetic peculiarities. Together they have even taught Hollia to combine her natural Aerokinetic ability with her magic and her Kuhrai abilities. Rhulan has also been helping her sync up her power with her familiar Lin Lin. In conclusion it seems both the priestess Hyatha Aria and Rhulan the sorceress have drawn the same conclusion and tactic to aid one another in aiding Hollia in becoming stronger for the battles ahead.

    When not training Hollia the sorceress Rhulan spends much of her time floating high in the air above the preserve. While I had assumed, and stated as much in earlier brief reports, that she was keeping an eye out for another attack like that from the unusual creature prior to coming to this facility, she seems to either or perhaps as well be practicing her sword skills well out of reach of where her extensive powers could harm others. I had noted that during our encounter with the creature called Mata-Go-Lucky that her sword skills had been rather, amateur, or to be more polite, rusty from lack of sword use.

    Prior to this she had resorted to using her sword as a medium for a trap during our battle against the creature called Impchin. It is my observation and opinion that during her long imprisonment and prior lack of use of a sword that her skill in the handling of this weapon has indeed declined to amateur levels, granted this has been masked by her power and magic. However I do feel that she must feel that we may face enemies in which the proper use of a sword may come in handy. If it is true that one never really forgets and only needs to re-learn then I hope her skills rebuild quickly. As a side note, upon asking her about the view from up there she says we are actually much closer to the city of Osopika than we had thought, although there is a much closer town from which we have been acquiring supplies and others who work at this facility.

    Betty and Cookie Clean are becoming fast friends; Betty’s duties have changed from helping out the adventurers aiding the facility to household chores alongside Cookie Clean. While at first Betty suspected Cookie Clean may have been an agent for her enemy, an entity she refers to as the thing named Jim, she appears to have put that aside. It is no surprise to me personally that they are getting along as their personalities are very similar. However Cookie’s night time persona Dark Cookie is another story, the priestess Hyatha Aria very wisely set her to patrolling the perimeter of the facility immediately upon night fall, or shortly after there after. As the two are one, and as one never sleeps with each personality taking turns while the other seems to sleep with-in between day and night she has become a maid from sun up to sun set and a powerful guard from sun down to sun rise. Neither appears to be engaging in any sort of training, although a short while ago the priestess Hyatha Aria gave Cookie a device that if I understand correctly allows each to change places with the other until their regular change of the day to night or night to day change resets it. What purpose this serves is lost on me, and possibly on both Cookie personalities as I don’t believe they have done it yet; I suppose to a priestess it makes perfect sense.

    For my own part in all this, I am of the impression that the priestess Hyatha Aria is attempting to teach me something important by prohibiting me from staying in the main house and remaining in the company of panther-women; as my Kokin heritage is a private family matter I will not go into detail regarding this in an official report. However it is important to note that I have taken over some of the duties that were Betty’s; namely traveling to the small nearby town as stated prior in this and previous brief reports. This task may have something to do with dealing with Aesperians in a situation where I am neither with a group or in a position of authority in a place where alone I am mistaken for a panther-woman stating at the preserve.

    I have learned why the adventurers working at the facility seem to be in a constant rotation; a local adventurer’s guild job office has working at the guild as a “repeatable job” in which they work there for three days with the payment being some gold and some No-ma herbs. There is a list they get on for the job; it appears to be a common job for that town’s adventurers and those from Osopika just starting out. I have learned that the local adventurers actually consider us lucky to have gotten a long term job there, and somehow, possibly through Betty, although I should not conjecture, they have learned that Hollia is Hyatha Aria’s grand-daughter with the local consent being that we are being allowed to stay and work for her behalf. This is not a completely incorrect assumption.

    Sincerely:
   Kathara Harana]

   The sun beats down on the dirt area in which Hollia has been training, a slight breeze blowing some sand and making Lin Lin’s ear twitch as she sleeps in the grass on the outskirts of the dirt field. Hollia sits at a desk and chair made from the very ground, created via one of Rhulan’s spells specifically for Hollia so she can study in this nice quite space. She reads from one of her text books, she is still a student after all.

    Special attacks and magic is not the same thing as weight lifting or sword practice, no one can not just get up in the morning, drink a protein shake do some stretches and get to it. Neither magic nor special attacks can be summoned just by stretching out one’s arms and tensing their muscles, in fact this could potentially have the opposite effect and lock up one’s powers; a natural safety lock against blasting things just because one is a little stressed. While yes this is part of it, it lacks the crucial element, mental focus, and alertness. At the same time one can not study if they are exhausted, as such Hollia’s situation is perfect, she needs to keep up her student studies and she needs to practice; put on top of this the fact that she doesn’t allow either to distract her, and can remain in a time to focus mindset after her lessons which never drain her with complexities as she is indeed a brilliant student.

     Rhulan floats, hovering up and down a good distance from her, more like some ominous overseer than a teacher, arms crossed and eyes closed. She is aware of everything around her, she can feel the dimensional portal open on the other side of the main house as Cata sends her letter on its journey, she can feel Betty and Cookie Clean inside speaking with the Cat-girl Mina as they prepare lunch, and she can feel Hollia pause on her text. Rhulan opens her eyes as Hollia looks up at her.

    “Excuse me Miss Rhulan,” says Hollia looking back at her text, “There is something about this chapter I don’t get.”

    “Really?” says Rhulan genuinely surprised, “what’s it about?”

   “Well,” says Hollia, “It’s about the Stingers, this is supposed to be an upgraded text sent by my parents with all the latest information right? But it still doesn’t make any sense to me; I mean my parents have dealings with the Stingers all the time, but nothing they’ve told me about them explains why they would want to enslave our world and make the people grow food for them. I mean they could have just invaded and set up a permanent colony, my parents say this is what they always do when they find a world or environment they want; from what they tell me about what they say. They just send a new colony there, you know…”

   Hollia traces circles on her desk with her finger, “I mean, you know…like insects.”

    Rhulan laughs, as she chuckles in her fist she looks at Hollia and smiles, “Don’t let anyone tell you, you don’t have a good head on your shoulders Hollia.”

   Rhulan levitates over to her and lands pointing at the book, “There is a lot more to history than even those who might know would share, there always is. In this case it’s something even these people who wrote this might not know; not sure the Stingers would even share this with your parents or anyone they deal with.”

    Rhulan thinks it over for a moment, “well,” she says, “lets begin from the beginning, I can skip most about the Stingers as you are familiar with them, but what it comes down to is that the Stingers didn’t come to live here because they didn’t want to interfere with Aesperians reproducing so they could take advantage of that.”

    “huh?” says Hollia genuinely confused.

    “Okaaay,” says Rhulan, “Then at the total beginning, okay today’s lesson is, Stinger reproduction. To start you know there are three queens in a Stinger colony, the first being the Warrior Queen, which is what came to that gathering back in Stratalia, then you have the Dragon Queen who remains in the colony and lays most of the eggs, you know like the soldiers, scouts, drones, and what not by well breeding with the Warrior Queen, who despite looking female can play the part of both the male and female, and then you have the super-queen…”

    Rhulan pinches the space between her eyes, “Okay starting over, from where a colony begins should work. Okay when a new colony forms it is a Warrior Queen who starts it, from the moment she becomes mature she already has inside her two eggs. Which hatch out to become a Dragon Queen and a Super-Queen. Okay, the Dragon Queen is really big and looks like a cross between a humanoid bee and a snake or something, kinda like those nagas that have the humanoid torso, only…bee like. The Super-Queen looks like the Warrior Queen only her body is like some bee colored armor version of her. But appearances aren’t important, how they reproduce is, like I said the after the two other queens are mature the Warrior Queen will then play the part of a male, she’s a hermaphrodite, and this causes the Dragon Queen to lay the eggs that hatch into the basic soldiers, drones, and what have you that you and anyone else studying from that book would be familiar with.”

    She points out the pictures of the large humanoid muscular yet covered in an exoskeleton over sized heads soldiers labeled Buggers along with humanoid ants, giant wasps, and large bees with pouch bags on their legs.

    “Well,” she continues, “hold on…I think I messed that up…yeah sorry,”

   She thinks about it, “yeah sorry, its been well almost fifteen hundred years since I last thought about this, yeah all those
drones and guards and scouts the Dragon Queen will lay the eggs for those with out breeding, but to produce the soldiers like the Buggers she breeds with the Warrior Queen, yeah that’s right. And if the Dragon Queen breeds with the Super-queen, who is also a female like hermaphrodite then super-soldiers are produced who tend to have mechanical like forms or cyborg like forms…”

   Hollia stares at her dumbfounded.

   “Yeah I know,” says Rhulan, “that didn’t make a lick of sense to either when I first found this out. I never really went too far into exploring their genetics unfortunately. Okay as I recall sometimes the Dragon Queen can also act as the male, but only with the Warrior Queen, in which case the Warrior Queen will temporarily transform into a Dragon Queen like form and produce elite soldiers who kinda look like the Warrior Queen and possess powers she has gained by first by either playing the part of male or female by breeding with humanoid species. I guess in a sense the Dragon Queen isn’t really fathering those as providing the genetic material for the Warrior Queen to metamorphose into the larger able to produce more than her starter eggs form. Yeah so the Warrior Queen is normally more like the king of the colony. Of course the Super-Queen normally plays the part of a male, there are usually human slaves or worshippers, I’m sure your parents have come across those, not something they’d come back and tell their daughter or anyone who wants to trade with them about I’m sure, well its these the Super-Queen normally “mates” with when not performing her or his duties for the Dragon Queen. For some reason the Super-Queen can’t impregnate the Warrior Queen, but if the Warrior Queen plays the part of the male she can impregnate the Super-Queen in which case the Super-Queen will lay a few eggs which become something that was dubbed Soul Hunters, not to be mistaken for those Death Hunters we’ve met of course. Now these Soul Hunters are apparently freakish humanoids who hide in shadow and can feed on energy. They are like the special elite operations strike force for the colony, heh, they can even turn invisible.”

    Hollia is blushing ear to ear and just staring at Rhulan as she takes this all in.

    “Any who,” says Rhulan, “The main point of all this is what I said about the Warrior Queen interbreeding with humanoids. See the Warrior Queen playing the part of either male or female obtains genetic samples through sexual activity, hence playing the part of either male or female, and retains this inside her. When she is changed by breeding with the Dragon Queen the Elite Soldiers she produces will look like the Warrior Queen but will have any powers obtained from the genetic father or fathers, men or women that is only those whose genetic material was used by the Warrior Queen like a father’s would be regardless of actual gender.”

    “So that’s why they’d want us to keep breeding with out them?” asks Hollia, “so…so that more people with powers they’d want could be born that they could use to make elite soldiers?”

    “Well,” says Rhulan, “that and one other quirk, how a new Warrior Queen matures in the first place.”

    Hollia looks puzzled.

    “Well,” says Rhulan, “now this is the biggest secret of the Stingers,”

    She leans in to Hollia and whispers, “Unlike any other of the Insectoids as we’ve grouped all the different sub-species, the Stingers can’t actually produce a new colony starting Warrior Queen.”

    Hollia looks at her surprised, “What?”

   “Yeah,” says Rhulan standing and stretching, “the Stingers are more like curse werewolves or vampires, they have to infect someone. Yep every Warrior Queen actually started life as a normal person till another Warrior Queen either seduced or abducted them, maybe even chosen out of the slave harem of the Super Queen. What ever the case is the Warrior Queen will repeatedly mate with this individual, but rather than obtaining a genetic sample will instead…uh…inject the person with a special…venom…via reproductive means, and regardless of the gender of the chosen victim they will transform over time and over the course of these repeated mating sessions into a new Warrior Queen, they will become a fit healthy female version of their own species with the
Warrior Queen’s eyes, antenna, claws, wings, and that tail with the stinger at the end, laid over top of it.”

    Hollia looks down at her book, then back up at Rhulan in total disbelief, she knows Rhulan is telling the truth, but this…weirdness is just something she’s never heard before about these…people…her parents and other merchants had been trading with all this time.

    A thought occurs to Hollia and she hesitates to ask but manages to ask the very thing Rhulan has been expecting her to ask since she started.

   “Miss Rhulan,” she pauses and catches her breath, “I…well, I have to ask, I know you fought the Stingers and all…but how…how do you know all this about how they reproduce, I mean like…”

   “Its something they’d keep to themselves and not want anyone especially their chosen victims to know right?” finishes Rhulan

   She smiles, turns around looking up at the sky thinking for a moment before turning back to Hollia, “Well I wouldn’t have
known any of this if not for one individual entity, someone I knew once called Hive Mind.”

    “Hive Mind?” asks Hollia.

   “Yeah,” says Rhulan, “As you know not every ship from when we first arrived on Aesperia remained, and you know we met the Stingers because they shot down some of the ships that got too close to that giant ball tree world of theirs we call the Galactic Tree. Well one of those ships belonged to Hive Mind.”

    Rhulan looks down at her feet for a moment and then back up at Hollia, “Well, Hive Mind wasn’t just one person, more like a group of girls with strong telepathic abilities. In fact their telepathy was at least partially present at birth; the children could share each others thoughts like they were one individual with multiple bodies. In fact this family had been like that for at least a few generations by that point. They would always have more than one baby, usually twins and upwards to septuplets, and it would always be girls.”

   Rhulan chuckles before continuing, “come to think of it, if not for the Stingers Hive Mind could have been the genesis of their own sub-species, kind of like the cat-girls. Imagine a whole race of telepaths whose children born in groups shared a single mind and when they got older they joined the family psychic network, a race that would need to breed with the males of other Aesperian descendent or other humanoid possibly descendent races.”

    *sigh*

   “Well, any who.” she continues, “The Stingers shot down their family ship, when I went to the Galactic Tree I found the ship using my Aesperia prime to track it. It’s thanks to the records on the ship detailing their time there as the sex slaves of the Stingers that I learned all about how Stingers reproduce. In fact thanks to this, well not sure if you or your parents noticed this, the Stinger queens and Elite soldiers of the Galactic Tree have a psychic link with each other. Yeah apparently they turned one of the Hive Mind into a new Warrior Queen.”

   Hollia looks down at her book, “I’m sorry you couldn’t get there in time to rescue them.”

   Rhulan scratches the back of her head, “well, it was like two hundred years after the fact, in fact the records were pretty badly damaged, the best protected ones were the basic life form data Hive Mind gathered, and some other history. I guess they weren’t so much slaves, as pampered lovers. Just their family ended right there by interbreeding with the Stingers. So in a way the Stingers we know today are the descendents of those Stingers and Hive Mind…”

   Rhulan narrows her eyes, “but mostly the Stingers, after all thanks to that they decided to try and find Aesperia and scope our world out for new powers they could take through breeding.”

    Rhulan sighs, “Any who might as well finish the story, well like you already know I fought with the Stingers to stop them from using us. Well at that time I of course had no idea about any of this other stuff and just figured they were aliens using us for cheap farm labor. After a while I noticed they stopped using lethal force against me. For some reason they had switched to try and capture me. I figured this was perfect, rather than fighting through their army to get to their base I would just let them capture me.

    So I let them capture me and they put me on a prison ship. When we got to the Galactic Tree I blew it up. Now I realized the ship was of Aesperian design, well you know our original universe’s technology any way, so I figured that some of the ships that left Aesperia must have been caught by these guys so I used Aesperia Prime to track any down, and that’s how I found Hive Mind’s ship. I downloaded…”

    She sees Hollia’s blank expression, “It means I copied the information from their machines to mine so I could view it later. So really I didn’t learn all this ickier stuff till sometime later. Well long story short I confronted the queens and threatened them that if they didn’t stop interfering with Aesperia that I was going to destroy the Galactic Tree, so I….”

   “Miss Rhulan?” interrupts Hollia, “you…you could destroy the whole Galactic Tree? Isn’t it like as big as Aesperia?”

    “Yeah about that…” says Rhulan a bit nervously, “I have this move called the Life Force Destroyer Vortex. I had crafted it when fighting these aliens who had invaded our home galaxy from outside the galaxy….yeah I wont get into that, any who I created this move to destroy their organic ships. It’s really just a mix of a limited quantum singularity field and a life force siphon. Normally it wouldn’t be all that destructive as it can only focus on one life form at a time and drain their energy, but the Galactic Tree…”

   She pauses giving Hollia the chance to finish her sentence, “Is just one big life form…a giant floating tree!

    “Exactly,” says Rhulan, “and since I had been single handedly fighting back their entire army they had little reason to doubt me…especially as I had already started the move and they could sense its power.”

    “Wow,” says Hollia, she had heard many stories from her parents and had known before most that the Stingers had not returned to invade Aesperia thanks to a pact they had made with Rhulan, and even with her absence they honored it per their code of honor, but to think about their reasons and…Hollia blushes realizing the reason the Stingers would have been trying to catch Rhulan rather than kill her would have been to try and either mate with her or turn her into a new queen.

     Rhulan waits, but Hollia doesn’t question her about the possibility that she might have actually really gone through and killed a planet sized billions of years old life form inhabited by billions of beings from two species of Insectoids, of which only one was responsible for attacking Aesperia. She is certain not long ago Hollia would have given her grievance over this possibility.

   Rhulan shrugs and says, “Any who, I think that is enough mental work out for now time to start your training.”

    Hollia stands, the desk and chair sinking back into the earth as she sets her book down by Lin Lin, waking her up to float back over to Rhulan with her waiting their instruction.

   Some distance away by the house another had been listening in for most of that conversation, Cata.

   “Damn,” says Cata, “Who knew Stinger sex was so complicated.”

   Cata isn’t surprised as Hyatha Aria walks up behind her, after all Hyatha Aria is aiding Rhulan in teaching Hollia, “Indeed,” says Hyatha Aria, “it really does make Kuhrai reproduction seem simple by comparison doesn’t it. Now please help the younglings with today’s lesson Kathara, its good that you wish to learn more, but you have other duties to attend to.”

   Cata bows, “of course priestess.” and heads off as Hyatha Aria continues over to Hollia who is waving in greeting to her grandmother bringing a smile to the old Kuhrai’s face.