Hive Minds Give Good Hugs

Completely silent, the faceless, acid-dripping beast above me prepares another spray of caustic fluid. I know I’ve been trying not to panic again so soon but holy shit I’m on an alien planet and it’s trying to kill me and eat me I’m going to die. This acid sloth thing is twenty pounds of nope in a ten pound sack and I am out of here.

It’s not long into my second panicked sprint of the day that I realize the acid isn’t stopping on its own. The burning pain is just getting worse, eating deeper and deeper into the back of my chitinous neck. Not hearing anything chasing me, I stop. I have to deal with this acid now.

First things first, I wipe my burning hand on the grass. It helps a bit, so I do my best to gather up as many clumps as I can to try and wipe off my neck. The acid just devours the grass like cotton candy shoved into a waterfall, obliterating the organic matter at a terrifying speed. Still, it can’t be all-powerful or anything, right? Every little bit of acid doing chemical reactions on grass is a bit not doing chemical reactions to my spine.

This doesn’t seem very efficient, though. I lean back, pressing my neck against a tree, and start rubbing. It hurts. Oh god, it hurts so much. I feel the acid break through my freakish shell and start hitting muscle. It burns like death. Tears stream down my cheeks as I bite down screams, not wanting to attract any more of the horrifying monster that did this to me.

I don’t know how long I spend trying to rub the acid off my body, but by the end of it I’m sitting under a newly scarred tree, bawling my eyes out into my one good hand. The other still works, but I can see right inside the exoskeleton to the freaky bits within and I just… can’t deal with that right now. My neck hurts a lot, and there’s a huge hole there when I feel for it but at least I’m not paralyzed. My body is in working condition. It just hurts like hell.

I get back up and begin heading towards my cave. I make sure to look up at the trees more for this leg of the journey. It feels like I ran in a blind panic forever, but thankfully it doesn’t take too long to get back to where I started. Not that the return trip wasn’t incredibly stressful, but I don’t encounter another one of those acid drooling tree monsters and I’ll take that as a win.

Passing into the clearing, I note my cave is at the top of a small hill, just barely tall enough to peek over the trees and make it visible around the forest. The spongy, fuzzy grass covers the hill, which is for some reason devoid of trees. Perhaps it’s too rocky? Either way it makes a great vantage point around the forest, plus potential cover from inclement weather thanks to the cave itself. I can’t think of a better place to set up camp than this, although I suppose I don’t actually have a camp to set up.

So. This is my life now, probably. The pain really helps my brain register how real all of this is. I need… oh fuck, I need so much. Food. Water. Some semblance of sane reality. You know, basic essentials.

But before that, before I can try to do anything else, I just need to sit down. At least for a bit. I need a moment to look around and really take this insanity in. How is any of this possible? Why did it happen at all, let alone to me? It’s just… totally beyond my ability to understand.

A calm breeze passes over the alien forest, wafting scents unlike anything I’ve ever smelled before through my nose. Though the brush of air against my wounds and alien body fill me with discomfort, I have to admit the weather is calm and the temperature is pleasant. I certainly hope it stays this way, since I don’t have the slightest idea how to make a fire other than “rub sticks together.” No time to be afraid of how cold it gets at night here, I suppose. I’m stranded on a hostile world that almost certainly isn’t Earth. I have no water, no food, no medical supplies, no tools, no knowledge of my environment, and I’m stuck in a nonhuman body that I don’t fully understand. That is… quite a checklist.

I do appear to be some kind of cute bug, though. At least that’s pretty cool.

I suppose it’s best to start with that last one, at least while I’ve still yet to convince myself to stand up. I do my best to poke and prod around my new body, taking a closer look at all these alien oddities that are now the sum of my physical form.

First and most obvious, my hands and feet have tiny baby bug claws. They’re a bit less dexterous than my old human fingers, though not by much, and in exchange I get possibly the most useless set of claws I’ve ever seen in my life. Seriously, the chitin might be at least a little bit of protection, but they're barely above fingernails in terms of offensive potential. I guess they might help me out with climbing something soft, though, like those mesh-tree-mushroom things.

My exoskeleton is pretty firm at least, and I’m certainly glad to have it after that acid-spitting sloth bug thing attacked me, but I doubt it ultimately provides much protection beyond being a second, somewhat tougher skin. Which, hey, is better than nothing, but it’s definitely not filling me with confidence either.

It is worth noting, at least, that both my exoskeleton and my skin are gray. Specifically, they’re the same color gray as the rocks which comprise the cave I’m in. It’s probably not that handy though, since my hair is still a long, bright blonde, but hey, it could possibly help at some point, maybe.

Finally, I rummage about my head and notice that I have two big, long antennae. Startled, I grab one and give it a yank. This is possibly the worst decision I have ever made, as the resulting blast of intense pain quickly sends me writhing to the ground, screaming my whole vocabulary of words mom would be very disappointed in hearing. When the pain finally dies down from ‘oh god, please kill me!’ to ‘ow, ow, ow why,’ I decide to stop poking myself and start doing literally anything else, like figuring out how to not die.

I am no Bear Grylls, not by a longshot. I’ve got the basic outdoorsy knowledge of someone who enters national parks on purpose more than once a year. At the very least, I don’t think I’m in danger of doing anything Darwin-award-level stupid. I suppose I will start by looking around a bit before exploring? But, uh, y’know, maybe from the safety of this cave.

I am at the mouth of a small cave, maybe twenty feet in diameter. It digs into the side of a large, grass-covered hill, resting a short way below the top. The hill itself is maybe the size of a large house, and no plants larger than grass grow directly on it. Surrounding the hill on all sides, however, is the forest. This forest is massive and takes up the majority of what horizon I can see. The forest itself is not particularly tall by tree standards, maybe 20 to 25 feet at most, but I think I see much taller trees far, far away. I note multiple kinds of the weird mesh-mushroom-trees even directly around me, with different patterns to how their net-like branches weave and billow to catch the light. Overall the forest is dominated by one kind of tree, however: the kind I met my acidic nightmare on, with short, thin fronds speckling the white branches with red. I see now, in retrospect, how the acid-spitting monster’s body is shaped to disguise itself as one of those spiderweb branches, waiting for some dumb schmuck like myself to carelessly walk underneath it.

I wonder what kind of creatures it normally hunts, and what kind of creatures hunt it.

In the opposite direction from the mouth of my cave I spot a vast mountain range, though the sight of them only serves to reinforce that I’m not in Kansas anymore, metaphorically or otherwise. Carved out of the horizon in white stone, massive holes bored clear through them, they almost look more like a colossal skeleton than a series of rock formations. The highest bits are capped with snow, at least. That means there’s water here! Which, you know, I had assumed given all the life, but it’s really nice to see some confirmation. I might even be able to walk to the base of the mountains within a few hours, but I will probably be in trouble if there’s no other source of water closer to my hill.

Up above me, the sun makes its lazy arc around whatever planet this may be. Well, presumably the opposite of that happens and the planet makes it arc around the sun, but whatever. Best I can tell, it travels more or less parallel to the mountain range, and while I suspect based on the direction of travel that it is currently morning, I really can’t tell how long it will take for the sun to set. Also, though I don’t look at it directly since I’m not (that much of) an idiot, I think it might actually be a lot bigger than the sun I’m used to. Not to mention a lot… oranger.

As cool and terrifying as the implications of that are, though, I probably shouldn’t contemplate it any longer than I have already. Turning around, I figure that I’m probably going to sleep in this cave when the sun goes down. Because of that, I should probably explore it to make sure nothing inside is going to cause me to die horribly. Plus, maybe if I’m lucky, I’ll find something that I can eat instead of the reverse!

The mouth of the cave is oddly straight, traveling diagonally down from the entrance. In fact as I walk along I get the feeling that this cave is… a little too straight. Like it isn’t so much a cave as just a hole. In solid rock. I can’t imagine this is a natural formation. Something bored this with machine-like efficiency.

It isn’t a long walk before I see the remains of my egg, still sitting mostly upright. My. Egg. Something about that just hits home harder than I expected. I am not human anymore. I am not on Earth anymore. I’ve seen absurd amounts of evidence for that in a very short amount of time, but it’s looking at the egg my body spilled out of not an hour before that I really start to feel the crushing weight of what that actually means.

What’s left of the gross fluid that was inside the egg with me is splattered around the floor in goopy blobs. The shattered chunks of shell I managed to punch out are still scattered about. For some reason, the more I stare at it the more my hunger twinges, parts of my mind insisting on thinking about what it all might taste like…

I blink. Am I seriously considering this? Uncooked cannibalistic floor egg? I really am. I am absolutely ravenous, some part of my body wants to put that egg stuff in my mouth, and honestly? When I think about it, out of everything on this entire crazy alien planet, an egg that I just came out of is the number one most reliably not-poisonous thing that I know about.

…Actually, I don’t want to think about that at all. Screw all this thinking! It’s time to eat!

I pick up a shard of downed eggshell and bite into it. It tastes…well, it actually tastes like crusty chipped butt, but in seconds I’m tearing into it anyway. Before I know it I’m ripping off pieces of the egg, crunching them into powder with my teeth, and shoving down the next bit before I’ve even swallowed. The eggshell was big enough to contain my entire body, but even after I’ve devoured it all in the span of a minute, I’m still tempted to lick the gunk off of the floor, too.

Fuck it. I do that. It actually tastes better, floor plate and all.

I let out a satisfied exhale, too relieved from the meal to care about how absolutely disgusting it all was. I feel better. A lot better, actually. My neck doesn’t even hurt as much.

Looking down at my hand, I see a thin layer of exoskeleton starting to reform in the hole burned by the acid. It’s excruciatingly slow, but fast enough to notice is still pretty darn fast. So... I can regenerate. That’s… good? Definitely good. Kind of a holy shit moment, but I’ve gotten so many of those today I’m not going to question a good one. Is it passive or is it tied to eating? I’ll have to keep an eye on it.

Well, my first meal on an alien planet is done. That counts as an accomplishment, right? Food is checked. I just need to hope to magically encounter more eggs without any of the local fauna trying to take them from me!

I’m so fucked.