Primal I (2)

And that was pretty much the first new, terrifying hour of my brand new life of wormy goodness.

The next few hours passed with a lot less fanfare, my nervous gaze and the whole interesting array of senses which I was only now starting to learn how to fully interpret always were out to ensure that I didn’t find myself the sudden lunch of something that decided I looked tasty enough to help it advance in its own personal development, even as I evaluated and redefined my own new ‘self’.

Already I missed my human hands and other parts of me now gone, a phantom itch of every body part missing or altered now a constant low irritation in the back of my mind. I was never really all that attached to my human form, at least not in my teenage years. A thing which my friends had always joked about, swearing that I simply seemed to not be comfortable in my own human skin. I guess thinking back on it, I could agree, to shed my humanity for something else of my own design had always been something of an idle fancy in me, a day dream of transformation into any and everything... though amusingly never a bird. I never did have much in the way of a want to fly, to run, to leap, to throw myself across buildings and slam into them and keep going like a demented lizard… yeah, but never flight. I suppose I was weird that way, I was always the weird one...

I stayed still, studying my new condition intently.

I was a worm.

Fitting I supposed. I’d never been much of an interesting person, never particularly pushed myself to do anything in particular beyond the necessary. I was lazy, both physically and intellectually, no matter how many people seemed to comment on some intellect that I supposedly had.

Yeah, a worm… that fit... I could almost feel myself laughing madly, stifled only by the fact the worm that I’d become could not do so simple a task, it’s body having no facility for making sound beyond the ear piercing shriek it made I’d made as I ripped myself from out of the wound.

I focused my thoughts away from the depressive spiral that this might prompt… almost amazed that it didn’t throw me further into unwanted thoughts. Perhaps a quirk of my new biology? If so then it was a happy accident, something which could help ease the transition. I tried hard to focus my mind, casting though the sequence of events which had brought me here even as I tumbled off into chaotic tangents.

I breathed deep and settled.

Ok, so what did I know? Or at least, I had to think about what I thought I knew.

Zerg.

Or at the very least, I seemed to be something akin to them. Primal Zerg.

I’d died... at least... I think I had... the headache, the breathless night. I think I was gone, and this is what I woke up to. Or it was a dream, some strange complex, vivid dream from which I could not wake, not even enough to give know that it was a dream for sure. If I had still been human, I’m sure I’d have been hyperventilating… as I was now, I just had to settle for bone deep fear freezing almost everyone bit of my non-essential life processes into a stasis which my still rational mind idly noted as a good type of fear response for a small hiding creature. And this place, this horribly vivid place, was nothing if not a nightmare for my new wriggly self.

The fact was, if I was right, then I was on what was probably one of the deadliest games of ‘Dog eat Dog’ ever invented. If this was truly Zerus, then I all the way up shit’s creek without a paddle, or hands in order to try to swim. A horrible panic began to grow… a terrible feeling of being trapped, waiting for snapping jaws to work their way through my shell... for probing claws... for any number of horrors to work their magic and make me gone.

No...

No that wasn’t exactly true.

I wasn’t here without a weapon, or without hope. In fact, I was here and armed, at least… I if what I believed myself to be was true, I was here with a power which gave me a fighting chance. I was part of the rat-race now, but I could be so much more. The now fading sense of panic receded as I took final stock of my true options.

This place was deadly, removed from everything I’d ever known... uncomfortable in the extreme.

But I had also been blessed.

I was ZERG.

Adaptability was baked into what I was at every level, my body a tool for my survival so long as I was smart. And I could be smart... I could be smarter, I could choose my ways of being stronger, faster, harder, better...

It was almost akin to a religious moment, a vague all-pervading moment of utter and complete AWE as I internalized that realization. I was zerg, I was Primal... I could change, grow and transform myself to be ever more than I’d been before. No more hardware limitations, no more of my brain not performing tasks I knew that it should be able to, no more of my body not being what I wanted it to be. I calmed myself, turned my focus inward, and began to search.

The organism known as Zerg was a creature blessed. Within me I could feel the stirrings of it, the network of connection between my ability to grow and change, and the options I had with which to do it. Still nestled in my stomach, many intact samples of the meals I’d taken, stripped down to their most unique properties while the rest of their pattern was stored in my memory in the most vivid manner imaginable.

Essence.

The thing every zerg post Heart of the Swarm seemed to rave about.

The thing that should have made no scientific sense. But here now I could feel it, taste it, understand it in a way that finally made it come together for me. This wasn’t simply the DNA of the creature, the simple molecular data repository... no... this was that, and at the same time, it was so much more. It was an impression, a power, energy imprinted not only with the physical process, but also with the psionic tinge of everything the creature from which I’d collected it had done to alter and change, how every cell involved in the process had proceeded to grow from the last, how every change in the creature lead to what culminated in what it had become. And as a Zerg, even this small weaponized thing that I was, I could read it as plainly as I’d been able to read and dissect grand works of literature as a college student.

This wasn’t just the record of its possible body plan… this was nothing less than the holy bible of all that the creature had been, and could be with what it was. And even then, it was incomplete, ‘pages’ missing and full of holes which intrigued and assailed you with an unfamiliar desire to fill, to take pages from its work and use it to enhance my own...

This ‘Essence’ you found was not simply a repository of capability.

It was a work of unrelenting Art.

Which you’d killed its Artist in order to collect.

In order to be born.

A wave of toxic self-loathing washed over me for a moment, something hot and dire. The sensation of understanding the Essence taken was akin to my first time reading my first good book all over again. And then realizing that I’d stabbed the guy that wrote it. The strands woven together into a tapestry of essence and even this incomplete, amateur work brought me to a state of melancholy over the necessity of its author’s destruction.

I… I couldn’t focus on that. I couldn’t let myself dwell on the creature I’d slain to be born, now so intimately a part of me. And so I sank myself again into examining its legacy, the optimization of armour and structure which would be my first teacher in this forsaken place.

He’d made such beautiful legs...

And my sibling? What little of it I’d preserved, was barely even a short unique chapter, barely and badly written, most of its code and Essence undifferentiated from my own.

Pretty much useless, it had been trying to quickly spin a new format of muscle tissue from the material it’d gained from our mutual progenitor and birth places to create a mobility solution to escape me. Unsuccessful and uninspired when put next to the art which it was trying to extrapolate from. But then it was barely a babe in the first few moments of life. I couldn’t help the slight twinge of guilt that that particular thought managed to spur. I’d manage though; I wasn’t the type to get too sentimental over food just because I needed to kill it in order to live on the material it’d accumulated.

I focused a bit more, examining the essence and considering my own, working up the nerve to really delve in as I worked my way though the various potential upgrades which I could create. I couldn’t help but continue to fanboy a bit as I continued to ‘read’ the specs.

God, I’d gone over everything twice, trying to glean what I felt was the most useful parts that I could afford to utilize, I wanted those legs… badly, they had an almost insane combination of muscle types, from hydraulic to variant fibers to exo-skeletal connections to the armoured segments of them, only the design projection of them was iterative, each bit of it providing a step towards enhancing and growing the overall structures without needing to cave to structural limits in most situations. Fuck it… I could almost be the size of an elephant and still be able to use these legs just as well, at least that’s what the combination of my ability to read the essence combined with little things I remembered from my life.

Ok… so that was at best a vague guesstimate, but hell I was seriously geeking out over these legs.

Either way though, slowly, steadily, I spun my essence, concentrating on the ability to escape, sparing enough armour into the design to support actually encountering things I couldn’t easily get away from, and reworking some aspects of my current biology to fit what I was trying to become. In particular the hardiness which had allowed me to survive comfortably within the hostile biology of another zerg who hadn’t wanted me in there, and the ‘drill tooth’ structure which had seen me out of from under it’s armour plated chest.

I’d need to move it, maybe figure out how to apply the affect to my claws? The biology needed for it didn’t seem overly complicated; at least it didn’t seem that way as I orchestrated my new body. It was however energy intensive as hell, and the more I scaled the effect up, the more it seemed to zoom up in metabolic costs. Maybe I could arrange it into spikes on my new arms? Attach the muscles needed inside detachable units, it made the metabolic costs involved more tolerable if I didn’t have to apply a counter vibration to keep my attacks from shattering my own carapace every time I used it.

At least that’s what I hoped… this wasn’t a completely exact measure I could use, only the instinctive twinges which directed me into guesses of how each twist and turn of essence I designed would turn out.

Zerg were surprisingly inwardly facing creatures.

That suited an introvert like me just fine.

It took hours, tuning and growing with a deliberate slowness which would have baffled most others of my new kind. The slowness was simply an element of my own human doubt, crawling in as I mutated my body from what had been the form of a toothy beaked worm into something almost equally strange, larger and stronger than what I’d been, but not by much… there just wasn’t enough biomass to work with beyond the vegetable matter which surrounded me.

I figured I probably could just start stuffing myself on the greens… but somehow I doubted that plants which had managed to evolve into an ecological niche alongside of these super active, super adaptable creatures would actually be as ‘defenseless’ as they initially seemed.

By the time I’d finished, I looked something akin to a beaked Salamander crossed with a Frog and dressed in a beetle’s armour which guarded my multi-eyed head, arms and sections of my body with vital organs located. Toothy spikes lined it off as my four upper arms supported my weight. I’d managed to grow thumbs as part of the mix as well with a little bit of trial and error on my part. The foot of my leg had a single long toe with a grasping claw on the ‘heel’ portion of it.

I’d at the very least be able to grasp at branches as I swung though trees and launched myself with these ridiculously nice legs.

And so I emerged from under my rock.

I was ready to take on Zerus.