NOVEL WEB 22. Demon Mom
Wrapping up my wet hair, I speed around the room, trying to scrounge up some clean clothing. I've spent the last few days chatting with Tara, showing her some more of my favorite stories, answering questions, getting bugs, chatting some more, and just kind of hanging out. It has been incredibly, impossibly cool, but…
"I'm really sorry, Tara, but I can't miss another day of classes. I mean, I could, but if you're trying to keep on the down-low and not become a public figure I probably need to keep up appearances too or people will start looking for me. Although, again, I personally think that there are going to be a lot of people who would just be super excited to help you."
"No, Evelyn. I just don't think I'm ready for that. There is a lot I have to do and figure out before I will be comfortable. Thank you, though. Your 'college' sounds like a very good use of time. You don't need to be with me, ah, twenty-four seven, I think is the term?"
"Alright. It's totally your decision. If you want to be my secret alien bug friend, that's pretty awesome too. Ah, here it is!"
Wrapped in a towel, tearing through piles of discarded outfits, I manage to find the one bra I'm confident I haven't worn since last time I did laundry. Mostly because it kind of digs in a little. Like, not that much, so I never threw it out, but I still really hate it? Still, by floor bra standards, it is the cleanest, so that's what matters.
…I should probably do laundry today.
"Can I turn around now?" Tara grumbles.
"No!" I insist. "I still have to put it on!"
"I do not understand why this is such a big deal."
"It's a cultural thing, okay? It doesn't really make sense but I can't just decide to stop being anxious about it!"
Tara drums her legs on my desk, where she is currently perched facing the wall.
"Fair enough, I suppose. I am experiencing a similar irritation. Your stories are quite interesting, now that I am reading them, but I cannot shake the constant feeling that there is something horribly wrong with doing so. It makes them very frustrating to try and enjoy."
"Yeah! It's kind of like that."
I toss on a fresh shirt and… meh, I guess it's okay if the pants are old. I do a quick check for stains, spotting a little mud on the ankles, but whatever. I throw those on too.
"Okay, you can turn around now," I tell her.
She scuttles in a circle to face me, quirking her antennae in irritation.
"Honestly," Tara grumbles, "it's not as if no one knows what you're hiding under there. Aren't there only two kinds of human? If I've figured it out, surely you're all in on it by now."
I grimace a bit.
"I mean, you could maybe argue that there are two basic kinds but… no, there are a lot of exceptions to that. Like intersex people and, um… oh! I know it's technically educational, but please don't look up naked people while I'm gone. It's school wi-fi, so they track stuff like that."
"Ah, I see. So I should look up naked people while you're here, then?"
"No!"
She chortles, and I return my towel to the bathroom with a huff. For the past few days I've tried to be very careful and not assume anything Tara says is a joke, because that's like alien communication 101. Don't ignore the culture gap! Unfortunately, Tara quickly figured this policy out and has been using it to make fun of me ever since, the little troll.
It's actually pretty weird how much of a culture gap the two of us don't have, communist Space China notwithstanding. She picks up on idioms and vocal quirks surprisingly fast. It's a bit startling sometimes, especially when I accidentally say something really obscure and figurative, but it's nice that I don't have to explain everything constantly.
"Of all the cool alien bug friends in the universe, why did I get the one who makes fun of me?" I grumble, trying not to blush from all the naked person talk. I am way too awkward for this.
"Oh!" Tara exclaims immediately. "I'm sorry, should I stop? It's not bothering you too much, is it? I just noticed the characters you like in your stories attempts to make each other mildly uncomfortable on purpose and that seems to work as some sort of camaraderie-building exercise, so—"
"It's fine, it's fine!" I insist, offering my hand to climb on. She obliges, and I carry her over to the bed so I can shovel the contents of my desk into my backpack.
"It's honestly pretty funny," I continue. "The clothing thing is just a super weird one for me, specifically? I wish I could be more open about it but I’m really, really not. It gives me the heebie-jeebies to even think about! When I used to go swimming I would wear my suit to the pool and wear it all the way home even though I was soaking wet, no change of clothes, because I didn't want to do anything like that in a public locker room. I guess a lot of people do that, but I don't know. It's the example that comes to mind. Swimming would have been a lot more comfortable, especially after the fact, if I could just do what I would always see so many other people doing and change clothes in relative public."
"I think I understand," Tara murmurs. "I certainly get your general point, at least. Would you like me to wear clothing?"
I give my big beetle buddy a considering glance, raising an eyebrow. It is a good point. Is it weird? She is a person and stuff.
"Nah," I eventually decide. "Not unless you want to. You look like a bug, and bugs are adorable and wonderful and always clothesless and that doesn't really bother me. The weirdness is explicitly about humans or particularly humanoid things, so you don't really bother me."
Tara nods, mostly by bobbing her entire body up and down.
"That makes sense. But you've mentioned this is both inherently cultural and something that doesn't afflict everyone. I'm a bit confused by that."
"Oh, well, humans have a lot of cultures. And in some places, America being a significant one, lots of extremely different cultures live right next to each other and bump elbows a lot. Er, that means that we get packed together into a small space. Anyway, there are some people that don't care in the slightest about nudity, but I'm definitely not one of them. It's just how I was raised, I guess. Modesty got really ingrained in my brain."
"Like truthfulness in mine," Tara mutters.
"Like truthfulness!" I agree. "Modesty and truthfulness are both virtues, but maybe ones we were brought up to take way too far."
"And now the instincts are inescapable," Tara finishes. "Yes, I think I understand completely. It is frustrating. I wish I could enjoy these stories like you do."
"Maybe someday," I reassure her. "But for now, I really gotta go to class. You have enough food, right? I noticed you really like the grasshoppers and butterflies, I can try to find more of those if you want. After class, I mean. Oh, right, books are on the bed, fiction pile by the pillow and nonfiction on the other end. Um, feel free to use the laptop if you want? I take paper notes. I saw you log in a few times so I assume you know the password already?"
"Yes. P-h-i-d-i-p-p-u-s-A-u-d-a-x, correct? With the first P and first A capitalized."
"Um. Yeah. Wow. Didn't you only watch me type that once?"
"It seemed pertinent," she answers simply.
"Still, wow. Good memory. No way I could do that in one go."
My friend bobs her body in another imitation nod.
"I doubt I could have either, up until recently. But I am trying to develop as many skills as I can."
"Yeah, understandable," I sympathize. "Hey, don't worry too much, okay? Something brought you here. If it's possible to send you all this way, it's definitely possible to take you home."
"Yes," Tara agrees, "and I will find it. Thank you, Evelyn. I will see you when you are done with your 'college' today."
"For sure!" I answer with a grin. "I really do gotta go now, though. Class started five minutes ago."
---
Hsthressis isn't ready to hatch when I wake up, which mostly surprises me because her egg is so small. Sthrenslians are only slightly larger than my hand, after all, and my smaller eggs tend to develop to maturity faster. To that end, I've been spending the morning thinking about tiny bodies, specifically the Evelyn Tinkerbells.
They're a flawed design in many ways, especially for the purpose that I'm certain is about to become very important: entering Sthrenslian tunnels. I want to be in contact with the Sthrenslians, partially to not go crazy and partially to see if I can somehow make an effort to be forgiven for my crimes. I know I don't deserve to be forgiven, but I'm legitimately scared of what isolation would do to my mind, and since I don't intend to commit suicide my mental health is arguably important for the physical health of… well, the whole planet.
I hate thinking like that. I hate the arrogance of it. 'Arrogant' is one of those words that I would hear thrown about by my mother whenever she was angry at my dad. I don't want to give the impression that the two of them fought a lot; my home life was pretty darn good by most standards, but fights inevitably happened from time to time. It's a bad word, a naughty word and a cruel insult. I'm a humble person by nature, generally not thinking much of my importance in the world and being okay with that. Like, back on Earth, there are problems everywhere. Disease, starvation, systemic abuse, hatred, violence… I feel like any reasonable person should want to solve those problems, even devote their life to solving those problems. But I'm just some girl who likes bugs, and I planned to get a job looking at bugs. Not because I don't care about those issues, not because I don't think it would be better for me to try and help with those issues, but because I really genuinely don't believe I have any shot at fixing them, even if I worked myself to the bone. I think I'm not a good enough person for that, that I would be miserable to even attempt to tackle any of it instead of devoting myself to the obsession with my object of interest. To assume that I could be more than that would just be… well, arrogant.
How much of that is hypocritical justification for me to just ignore the problems of the world and do something that I love? I don't know. Probably most of it. A good person would grind herself raw, heedless of the suffering she caused herself as long as it brought joy to others. But that model of a good person isn't realistic. I don't think I could actually be that person, I don't think most people could be that person and I don't expect them to. But despite that impossibility, it's still the model of goodness that makes the most sense to me.
I'm getting distracted again. The Evelyn Tinkerbells should be upgraded and enhanced for subterranean travel. That means tunnel whiskers, that means bioluminescence, that means ditching photosynthesis. While I can make changes to the pre-existing bodies, it would be faster and more efficient to just redesign and lay new ones. I can leave the current squad Evelyn aboveground, to tend to the Ivylyns. Laying a new set from scratch also allows me to implement general enhancements, like moving from a pneumatic to a hydraulic muscle system, creating sacks to store excess fluid, placing the wings lower on the body so that they're closer to the center of mass (but not directly on top of it, so I still naturally orient myself feet-down) and so on. The new versions should be about eight times stronger than the original Evelyn Tinkerbells, which sounds really impressive until you remember that they are the size of my pinky. At that scale, multiplicative improvements are relatively par for the course.
I plop out the eggs and sigh, a bit annoyed that all my cool ideas take so long to finish growing. I should probably start to stockpile food that I can feed to my fortress body when that part of me finishes forming a stomach, but actually storing a bunch of food without the fortress to hide it in seems like a risky idea. Still, I don't have anything better to do with my time, so I do it anyway. Fish, sloths, and those damn birds. They die and get added to the slowly-growing pile. Then, finally, I feel the Hsthressis body wake up.
Immediately, I halt all conscious and unconscious thought in its mind, functionally placing it in a coma. I have to make sure the transition is as seamless and uncorrupted as possible, and I already know the brain isn't a perfect match for Hsthressis'. It should, however—keyword 'should,' because I have never done anything like this before—it should be able to change and adapt to her thought processes if she's the only one doing any thinking with the body.
That, of course, will be the difficult part of the trick. What Hsthressis asked me to do still keeps her as part of my hive mind. Which means, technically, I will always have perfect and unrestricted access to every part of her mind. I have to just… not use any of that access, ever, because that would be a horrifying violation of personal privacy and bodily agency. Basically, I'm terrified, but I feel like I'm obligated to follow through with her decision instead of one that I might like better. Because, you know, I murdered her.
I focus on the Hsthressis simulation I've paused inside my head and set it to run in her new body. Immediately, I'm bombarded with her initial thoughts and feelings, but I make a focused effort to ignore them, to let them pass without acknowledgment, and my ADHD brain succeeds at that about as well as one might imagine. I feel her confusion, her panic, her realization that she can move. I feel my claws—her claws—slam against the inside of the egg shell. I've made a mistake, I think, but I can't back out of it now.
The shell shatters, Hsthressis coughing out egg juice taking her first breaths in her brand-new body.
"What the hell!?" she hisses, scuttling around in confusion.
"I told you you'd be hatching," I hiss back at her, because everything in her language is at least kind of a hiss.
"Evelyn? Is that you?"
Seeing what she sees (and then quickly trying to not do that, because again, gross violation of personal rights) I remember that Sthrenslians don't have eyes, and their echolocation is optimized for much smaller spaces than the great outdoors. This is probably quite uncomfortable and frightening for her, the equivalent of being stuck in the dark.
"Yeah, it's me," I confirm. "You're safe, don't worry. I'll get you back underground with your family soon. First though, you need to eat. Getting born is hungry business, in my experience."
I offer her some meat from my pile, dropping it down next to her. I choose a fish because I suspect the difference in anatomy will make it the least likely to carry diseases to her. Although, since her body is technically one of mine, she's probably as immune as I seem to be.
"Right," she mutters. "Thanks, I guess. Born?"
"Yeah, I mean, I had to make your new body somehow," I answer. "Welcome back to life, my technically-kind-of-daughter."
"Fuck that," Hsthressis grumbles. "The last thing I need is a second mom. Especially if one of them is a demon."
She starts munching away at the fish, and I can tell she likes it. Well, I did it I guess. Next stop: weasel civilization. Let's hope I didn't fuck up my only chance for social interaction.
…Who am I kidding. If I haven’t yet, I definitely will soon.