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Chain 140: SimAnt

Location: Playground
Identity: Drop-In
Drawbacks: [+600] Red Vs Black (x4), After Man

[Free]      Ant Telepathy
[Free]      Antenna
[300/1600]  Savvy Scavenger
[1300/1600] School For Ants
[1400/1600] Wings
[1600/1600] For Queen And Colony

Okay, the spirit of a drop-in chain is harder to maintain when you have something akin to being an ant, but... sometimes you have to bend the rules a little bit, in a sense. Sure, while I may have my powers, they're kept at ant-scale. And that's all well and good - it doesn't take much power to create and manipulate the right pheromones so that the four red ant nests interact with each other, so I could see the end result. Naturally, they weren't hostile toward each other, so I added new pheromones and a curse to degrade their sight, so they had no choice but to rely on those pheromones.

Have you ever heard the phrase "ant death spiral"? It's really a quite striking phenomenon. Imagine four full nests of fire ants, every last one of them having been drawn from their nests over the course of two or three days, marching endlessly behind one another in a massive circle. When this had gone on long enough, our nest marched forth and slaughtered the exhausted and confused red ants, and pillaged their nests. Their dead served to feed us, their eggs were made to feed the Queen, and our nest grew accordingly massive as we grew into their abandoned homes.

From there, Phase Two began. In truth, my primary ability during Lord of Light wasn't so much the ability to manipulate life as being able to selectively have the knowledge of such a thing, and working as a conduit for Shaper abilities. Panacea-lite, as one might say, even if it had to be cobbled together from multiple sources. Manipulating, or rather re-Shaping, existing life forms didn't bring them under my domain but the changes persisted nonetheless. There were fewer direct outside threats to our society as it grew to encompass the park and the block it resided in, and so I gradually rolled changes out to the rest of the colony, taking special care not to disrupt any scents that would cause a civil war.

Now, adding intelligence to an insect is a tricky business. It was much easier to add physical features, like ensuring they all had wings like mine. Changing them mentally... uplifting insects to the point of intelligence, that was a very lengthy and complicated process. There were many false starts, and I had to go through the colony several times in my work. Initially they were only as intelligent as a particularly stupid dog, but the next time, they were as smart as a particularly clever dog. And then a toddler. And soon, a ten year old. All through the process, it was necessary to make them bigger, and I applied the physical changes to myself as well even if the mental ones weren't necessary.

In the end, it took several years, and sure, the School For Ants might not have been intended to be a literal school, but it worked and rather well at that. More importantly, the members of our colony were set onto an evolutionary path in a world where the dominant species had died out. When the decade was up, they had a man's intelligence, even if the mindset was decidedly alien. Physically, they were on a path of evolution and I foresaw that my designs would propagate through subsequent generations of queens as the centuries passed. For now, they were far bigger than they were, but could still fit in the palm of one's hand. In the future... they would learn to stand, their limbs would refine further and give them finger-like manipulators. Their lifespan would grow from a decade to over 
a century. Their intellect would continue to grow until it rivaled modern mankind. From their queens, they would gain a loose framework of memories and know the structure of society on birth. They would, eventually, become a civilization.

Of ants.

Which would end up being roughly a foot to a foot and a half high apiece and be suspiciously cute.

Man, I hope this is a universe with Star Trek aliens, I'd love to see the Vulcans' reaction to ants flying around the solar system at warp speed.