Path of the Hive Queen

Silence. Darkness, cozy, cradling.

Thudding. The beat of a heart.

Sensation seeped into the dark void. Slight movements, a body. A vague sense of the world around it, of up and down.

She opened her eyes. That should have made things better. It didn’t. Instead, she was assaulted by a screaming, blinding confusion of colors and light. Those only made the disorientation she felt worse.

Disorientation. She felt disoriented. She realized that now, although she hadn’t before.

A few moments of silence stretched out, far too long, then the painful intensity of the light faded, the world putting itself into proper order. Now, she realized it really wasn’t that bad. Her surroundings were kind of dim.

She tried to turn her head to see better, but stopped, claimed by another bout of disorientation with a side note of vertigo. She took a deep breath and sensed her torso expand slightly. It felt odd. She was cradled in what felt like a cozy, unyielding container of some kind. The hardness of her back and her limbs brushed against its sides, letting her know it was roughly cylindrical.

She raised her head again. This time, she realized that it was perilously close to a jagged edge of whatever held her. Angrily, she pushed outwards with all of her limbs, or at least all of the ones she could get to properly move. There was some resistance, then the material gave way.

She almost tumbled out and fell flat on her face, but reflexively caught her balance. Now she stood on her legs, on uneven, stony ground. She was in a dark space with a high ceiling, with gray walls and a rocky floor. She blinked, suddenly noticing the box floating at head height.

After she stared at it for a few moments, it disappeared.

She blinked again, not out of a sense of surprise this time, but because the first time had seemed wrong somehow. It took her a moment to realize it was probably her field of view.

She had no idea what to think about the box, and suddenly realized that she had precious little context to begin to think of anything. Anything at all. She’d woken up here, in this dim cave or vault or something — Actually, it seemed like the thing she’d been in was an egg. Dark chunks of its shell still littered the ground.

Well, of course it was an egg, where else would she have come from?

She took a tentative step forward. Her instincts said that this was perfectly fine, but another part of her mind wasn’t so sure. The part that had classified the floating thing as a blue box, that had been able to read it and understand what its message meant. She knew people weren’t supposed to come from eggs, that was a thing for chicken or insects.

And she was a person. In fact, she was pretty sure she was a young woman. Except that her body didn’t seem to quite fit that knowledge. She slowly ran her hands over it, which gave her a couple of rapid realizations.

First, she was covered, or at least some parts of her body were, in some hard material, not just skin. Second, there was something at her sides. Their shape was a little hard to ascertain with just touching, but she definitely felt like the outline of her torso wasn’t human.

All of which meant that, third, she definitely wasn’t in a human body.

And what the box had said, Hive Queen — that felt familiar. That was her. She knew that the same way she knew that her mandibles should be kept clean and that eggs were best laid in a safe environment.

Wait. Back up. What do I know and how? For lack of anything better to do, she slowly started walking out of the room while considering the mess that was her mind.

She knew a lot of things that humans should know, but there was context missing. She knew what a car was, how school worked, how to smile politely and pretend you were listening to someone, that the Internet was full of trolls.

But she couldn’t say how she knew that. She had a vague sense of herself, but it was as if someone had stripped all the pertinent facts out of it. She didn’t even know her name. She just couldn’t recall it, no matter how hard she thought about it. She didn’t know her age, or her ethnicity, or what town she came from.

At the same time, she was obviously a Hive Queen, whatever that was. Besides something cool and great and the natural terror of lesser lifeforms — wait, where did that come from? Just what the hell does this all mean, anyway?

Before she could start to panic in earnest, she focused on her surroundings. The room she’d been in led into a corridor with uneven, dark walls. There was light coming from the other side. She hurried forward, absently touching her face and confirming that she did indeed seem to have mandibles on the sides of her face, though they weren’t arrayed like they would be on any kind of insect she knew about. Her whole face was kind of wet and sticky, just like most of her body, actually.

Huh. She seemed to have pretty normal hands. Five fingers, opposable thumbs. Maybe the claws on the tips were a little longer than fingernails, but they probably wouldn’t get in the way too much, if she was careful. That was something, at least.

The corridor seemed to lead directly to the exit. When she reached it, she paused to let her eyes adjust, then took a closer look at everything.

The walls were stone and the corridor, as well as the entrance, seemed pretty rectangular. Were they actually artificial? There were some odd holes in the stone of the entrance, and a slit at the top. Besides that, she didn’t find any identifying details.

“Great,” she said to herself. “Now where am I?”

Oh, she could speak. That was good. Her voice sounded a little croaky and raspy, but she could probably even pass for a human with a bad cold on the telephone, if she tried.

Shaking her head again, she turned around and took her first step past the entrance.

Beyond was … a forest. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected, but it wasn’t this. It seemed like a rather idyllic scene, actually. The sun shone from somewhere beyond the trees, birds sung, and she could even hear the burbling of a stream in the distance. The grass was lush and green in a small clearing around her.

When she turned, she saw that the land rose into a few stony hills, the largest of which she was standing on, or beside, rather. The entrance was set into the hillside, which was a little rockier than the rest. Beyond the rough doorway of gray stone, grass covered most of the hill. It might have been a bunker that had long been abandoned and overgrown, but no one would build a bunker that badly and only from stone.

She took a deep breath, then another for good measure. She didn’t know where she was, where any of this would be located on a map, but she had a feeling it was a long way from home, wherever her home might be. People like her definitely didn’t exist there, as far as she knew. Besides, only a few of the trees and bushes looked vaguely familiar, and none corresponded exactly to something she could have named. Most of them seemed completely foreign.

She tried to pinch her arm, then realized she couldn’t through the hard, chitinous material that covered her. It actually looked more brown than gray in good lighting. Instead, she pinched the skin of her face, which seemed to be free of that hard exterior. The pain helped her to focus and push away the stirrings of panic.

She wasn’t going to have a panic attack. Sure, most people probably would panic after being dropped alone in a strange place like this, but for all she knew, this was perfectly normal for her. After all, she didn’t have anything else to compare it to, did she?

She started walking, less from having somewhere to go than a desire to get away from the place where she’d woken up. Where I was being born, actually. Probably. Hatched? Oh god.

She pinched her cheek again, then forced herself to focus on her surroundings. The forest wasn’t too dense, so she could find her way between the trees easily enough. She saw a few small animals around, though they disappeared quickly once she got close to them. She didn’t get a good look at any of them. The birds were mostly hidden in the branches of the trees, and she didn’t recognize the few she saw.

She decided to go towards the sound of the water. That might be dangerous, but she had no other reference points. Besides, she suddenly realized she was really thirsty, and hungry, too. In a survival situation, you were supposed to look for water and shelter, right? She could probably climb a tree or something, later, or even go back to where the egg had been.

As she walked, she tried to bring back a blue box. They reminded her of some kind of prompt or interface component, like in a video game. But concentrating as hard as she could on it didn’t get her anywhere, and saying things like “Information!” or “Status sheet!” out loud only made her feel silly.

Of course, if this was a video game, then there would probably be monsters. She eyed the forest around her nervously. She’d have to make finding a weapon a priority. Even if monsters weren’t an issue, there could be bears or wolves in this forest. Though those weren’t supposed to attack humans unless they were very hungry.

But she wasn’t a human anymore, was she? At least, assuming she’d been one before. To be fair, she didn’t have any proof of that. Although, someone giving some random unborn Hive Queen human knowledge or putting a human mind into her both seemed like completely crazy ideas, but she did feel like she had more personality than a complete newborn.

It didn’t take long to reach the waterway she’d heard, just a few minutes. It was still farther than she’d expected, given the ambient sounds of the forest. She must have really good hearing. Probably better than human hearing.

Carefully, she stepped onto the banks of the river. It was really more of a brook, with rocky banks and placidly flowing water. There were no other animals in sight right now, though the forest grew pretty close to it, so she couldn’t see too far up and down the river. A little awkwardly, she clambered onto a larger piece of rocky ground at the edge of the water. She started to cup her hands to get a drink, then paused and leaned further forward.

The river wasn’t great as a mirror, but she did get a reflection of herself from the water. It was a little distorted and not exactly sharp, but she still froze and stared.

Her head seemed to be mostly human, except for a few features that seemed vaguely insectile or reptilian, or something. At the sides of her cheeks, she had bony outgrowths that turned into what she’d thought of as mandibles, reaching down past her chin. Her lips were thin and her nose seemed to be slitted. Her skin color was grayish brown. She reached up and ran a hand through her brown hair, past small horns, noting that it felt coarser than you’d expect. It was still stubbly and very short. Apart from that, she clearly had a girl’s face.

She didn’t need the water to see her legs, which were covered in a hard material a bit darker than her face, though it softened at the joints. Her feet looked largely human. But she did get a look at her torso, which made her suck in a sharp breath.

Most of it was also covered in the shell, although she apparently had small breasts with no visible nipples. What caught her attention was what she could see of her back, though. There seemed to be a second layer to it, a bit reminiscent of a beetle’s shell, just at her sides and mostly underneath her arms. She tried to move it, but it didn’t do more than flapping weakly. Beneath that, though, she caught a glimpse of what had to be some kind of membrane. Do I have wings? Seriously?

She bent and cupped water in her hands, using it to scrub herself. But while she managed to get her face and most of her body reasonably clean, the things she was most interested in remained covered in stickiness. She just didn’t have the reach or proper angle to clean them.

She eyed the water, then sighed and instead started drinking. She didn’t think submerging herself in it was a smart idea. On closer examination, the water was flowing treacherously quickly, and she didn’t even know if her body could swim.

Drinking from it was probably a health risk, but she wasn’t sure she’d find another source of water anywhere close by, and dehydration would definitely be bad. Besides, her instincts were pretty insistent on getting water.

Finally, she scooted back from the edge of the river and turned to scrutinize the forest again. With her thirst quenched, she was starting to feel her empty stomach roaring at her. Entering the world was hungry business, and she could already feel the strength in her limbs fading as tiredness set in.

Now she had to find something to eat in a place where she didn’t have the faintest idea what was edible, or even what her body could use. Great, just great. Don’t forget ‘don't get eaten by monsters’.

Unless I’m supposed to be the monster, I guess.