Primal I (4)

It’s a process of whatever was left over from my primate brain I suppose, this need for companionship, the chemicals in my brain which combined with the networking system to induce a need in me to seek out others for comfort and emotional bonds. I suppose the Zerg that I am must have copied over more than a few features from my old mind, or somehow I’m exerting something of my old mental image on this new organism separately.

Maybe it that the old me was now there, embedded was deep within my Essence, inescapable in his foibles as a human-being. Maybe I was just crazy or something. But the biting gnaw of loneliness was beginning to get to me, and this strange world which I now lived in was beginning to feel hostile in a manner which it just had not before.

I’d never been anything but an introverted loner at heart, content to go days on end without even the hint of human contact, though my experience of the world had always been coupled with a certain enforcement of said human contact due to a very extroverted family. Like I would often say, I wasn’t social, but I’d been forced to learned how to socialize; a skill which served me well whenever I managed to duck my head out of my shell.

But that had always been with the assumption of other human beings nearby, of the ability no matter what I’d been doing, or where I was, that human contact was a commodity easy to come by, just out of my reach only because I put it there myself. It was always a comfort to know that there were people to go back to just outside of my hermitage.

I was starting to get an oppressive feeling in my gut that there was no such refuges here on Zerus.

Dog eat Dog...

There had been hints, tantalizing, juicy hints contained within the messy narrative of the rushed Primal Zerg section of starcraft HoTS, that there was more to the Primals than just throwing themselves at each other in a frenzy of hunger and need, that there was a civilization underlying of some kind, wild and savage in its nature… yet civilized none the less.

To join it a deeply risky venture…

It felt as if their very presence were an oppressive force haunting just outside of my vision.

For the millionth time I sighed, scooping up the last of the internals of a particularly difficult Hell Shell, the thing had almost tagged me twice with what seemed to be highly charged plasma bolts, attempting to fry me up before tentacling my vulnerable parts and rendering me down. Whatever this guy had gotten it from must have been one hell of a kill, I could taste the maturity of the Essence that the Hell Shell possessed, and in comparison to its usual relatives, I couldn’t help but think that the Essence of this one was particularly masterful, likely much of it copied from whatever lucky meal it’d gotten.

I’d even considered actually incorporating the bio-plasma attack. It was the sort of thing that would eat up a fair amount of metabolic energy, and I wasn’t sure about the amount of space that it would take up in my body either. These kinds of things had a tendency of being a little chancy to develop and upgrade. At least twice I’d come across other Zerg who’d misapplied or experimented with more volatile weaponry and developments for high energy biological applications. Zerg were good with those in general, but a fuck up on the initial design or even flaws in containment which weren’t modeled for because of limitations of one kind or another could easily see even a highly advanced and skillful weaver of essence kill themselves messily and provide a lucky break to some other Zerg who found them at random. Particularly interesting weapons that just didn’t work out correctly could cost a chain of lives as every Zerg coming across the corpse of the one who failed takes it at as a challenge to succeed where their previous meal did not. In an odd manner it kind a made the Zerg a rather intense force for innovation, even if it was a bit brute force in nature.

And as for energy, while current metabolic energy was always a concern in balancing, over all collection of energy was never a grave worry for most Zerg. They were as much masters in its extraction as they were in the art of adaptation. Zerus was a high energy world and every inch of it taken advantage of by Zerg organisms competing for sunlight, air, water, minerals, and each other’s bodies.

I curled next to a Hell Shell in contemplation as I began the process of growing a downsized version of the plasma death ball blaster that it’d been trying to kill me with in my tail, itself now improved with structural innovations taken from the essence of that kill. I wished more of the structural adaptations from those things were applicable to me, the best stuff that they usually were their armoured bodies… but those particular structural adaptations only worked in conjunction with a process of putting down ‘roots’ and insinuating themselves into an already stable structure in order transfer force from where they were struck and into what held them stable. It was fucking ingenious… and doubly frustrating how I couldn’t actually make use of it with the current direction I was taking carving out a Niche for myself. I could probably use it for something if I ever needed to hunker down and cocoon up, but I didn’t trust that so much, what with my own armour breaking methods scoring me so many meals, though my own size was quickly approaching the size of a horse in total, pretty much the maximum of what I wanted if I was going to stick with the Niche I’d carved for myself.

Either way, call it boredom, call it loneliness, or call it frustration with the current state of things... I found myself trying out something odd.

I caught one of the scuttling herbivore lizard things that were ever so common alive.

It made for a particularly poor companion, at least at first. The scared, scuttling thing continuously tried to escape, its powerful gnashing flat teeth attempting from time to time to reach my softer bits and maybe earn that tiny, tiny chance at freedom. It was almost cute once you got past its attempt to crush my armour between its powerful jaws to little avail. To small and too weak to gain any real perchance.

I named it Skizzy.

It took a little while to teach the bloody little thing not to try to dart away at every chance it got, almost a week of constant and continuous vigilance, outsmarting it at every turn as I starved it from its usual diet of tree bark and small shelled creatures. Instead whenever I managed to scrape together a meal of my own, I’d feed it the scraps, some of the left behind biomass and bits which still resonated with Essence. A thin, limited meal but none the less it was actually still more substantial in some ways than its base food sources.

It was just a bit fascinating to see the slow transformation of the creature, first ending its constant attempts to escape me as it grew and changed, aspects of the diet I’d been giving it seeping in and the little critter began to develop according to the pressures which I’d been exerting upon it. For one it was getting bigger, after about three weeks it’d increased its size from that of a really big rat, to the size of a smallish dog, for another it was definitely getting smarter. During the initial week of foiling it’s every attempt at escape it had been pretty straight forward, seeking simply to dash quickly from point A to point B. By the end of the week, its attempts had slowly become more elaborate... seeking to distract me with moved items and sounds as it tried to figure me out. It only was near the end of the second week that the attempts at escape had dissipated all together, my feeding it bits of powerful essence every day at least seemed to have encouraged its compliance. I tasted its essence once, innocuously as I could so that it wouldn’t flip-out and go back to trying to run away… some of the changes inherent seemed interesting. For one its brain had enhanced in size, the essence of its mind flowing with ever greater activity as the dense Essence it was fed and the dilemma of its survival despite captivity pushed the little creature towards mental enhancement.

By the fifth week of my little experiment it had stopped all semblance of escape attempts and had instead began to follow me about dogging my heels as I hunted. Little by little the creature changed, a small trail of prehensile tentacles trailing behind its head like a twitching trail of hair and from its behind as a fan of tails, its body filling with sensory hairs and especially sensitive lines in places where I tended to touch it whenever I held it close at night. Its flat toothed maw gave way to a much more complex set of chompers as I began to widen and vary its diet, and its feet slowly developed into a series of claspers and hooks which would allow it easy purchase on my armour. I’d even managed to teach it the very basics of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ behavior via rewards of food and withholding food then coupling those with specific noises.

By the time I was done the little Zerg had become something far different from the creature it had started as. And I couldn’t help but think that it hadn’t stopped getting smarter as well.

Well, that at least was a reminder that I had been neglecting my own mental biology to a fair extent. Beyond general improvements to speed of thought and energy efficiency, I hadn’t really done all that much with my brains... I suppose a lingering fear of damaging the who that I’d been still lurked at the back of my mind. It at least made me begin picking out more of the tweaks and tricks such as improving my reaction time and even beginning to program in a suit of reflexes in order to properly take advantage of my body design, as well as incremental advances in my sensory processing apparatus... small steps. But the fact was with my new little friend, I couldn’t help but think that maybe I might be doing myself a disservice, that maybe I should be looking deeper into more radical upgrades to my mental capabilities, in case one day the little bugger had finally grown smarter than I was, and decided that it didn’t need a pet like I needed it.

I knew I was taking advantage of the little beast... its previous simple existence supplanted with my ‘training’… domestication of the Zerg. Hahaha… I freely admit that this was probably a terrible idea. And yet, it was one which I could not bring myself to end.

Skizzy had become far too close to my heart.

I thought as I shared with it the heart of a particularly large creature, something that seemed to be a progenitor of the Quill-gore model of Primal which I remembered vaguely from my gaming. Actually pretty similar to the pig-thing which had given me the big break I’d needed from eating it after the incident at the circle of stones. I still hadn’t figured out why the tentacle wolf hadn’t eaten it, though I dared not stray back into that part of the forest for fear of a similar attack on my own person.

I still didn’t think myself strong enough to face the creature if I were to encounter it again.

The little zerg moved on my still body, my beak still dripping with the hot fluid of our shared meal. Skizzy’s talons dug noticeably into a sensitive area between my armour as its tentacle and sensory hairs stood on edge. Its sensory suite at the very least had become at least as advanced as my own... and it was freaked.

I looked like I was about to make another friend.