I paddle my way toward well nowhere I guess. It’s not like I really had a purpose for going out. I just had to get away to not be crushed to death. So what do I do?

I could try to make a new base, but what would be the point? Doing all that work just so that it could be wrecked again.

“That’s a scam I’ll just move back in when it’s not in danger of being turned into scrap metal,” I say with a disgruntled look in my eye, my thumbs in my pockets.

I continue to swim away, not really in any direction just away from here, and as boredom consumes me, I whistle, tap, and dream of something, anything.

It feels like my brain is trying to claw out of my skull, as I stew in utter boredom. Leading me to a pretty important problem, that I didn’t think of.

What am I supposed to do while waiting for the ant tsunami to break my things?

If I stay here I’ll just watch from afar as my shit gets torn apart. I don’t wanna see that. But what could I do instead?

There’s the obvious one rebuild. Just take my experience and rebuild it better.

But frankly, I’m not going to bother with that when I have a perfectly fine base. It’s just at this moment being peppered by corpses that just appeared from nowhere.

But if the problem is the corpses let’s solve it. They just popped up right outside my base to fuck my day up. And if I find where they came from maybe I could talk to their leaders. I might not know their language now but frankly.

I twirl my fingers to my face in a fit of quietly amused whimsy. I am currently the greatest linguist in all of existence. I instinctually understand the rules and methods of language, ALL language.

That includes body language. So even if I can’t talk to them immediately I could gauge how they feel, and do basic communication.

Tapping my chin as I float I think, well I’m not sure that I understand all language.

But frankly, it would be ridiculous if my devouring the cloud of language, resulted in me absorbing only the pieces for writing.

Although that reminds me I should eat some more clouds. I’ll just have to choose carefully because if I ate an extremely large cloud of anger, I would become extraordinarily irrational. Really any primary emotion like Joy, Sadness, or Fear would be terrible to increase in intensity.

So the better option would be to consume only more esoteric clouds. Language doesn’t seem to have altered my personality, while those red motes did. Luckily I’m already pretty good at anger-resolving strategies, from my time in therapy.

But yes into the notebook goes ‘Consume some clouds for extra magic, try the clouds magic first. Only pick conceptual clouds, no emotional ones'

But first, let’s investigate while I still can. So I travel forth to engage in Alien diplomacy, let’s head out.

I start swimming, slowly gaining momentum, as I move towards the battlefield that has caused my misery. Because while this might hurt, knowledge is power. You can’t solve something you can’t see.

I aim myself to stop overhead the ant battlefield, speeding through the astral, piercing through the strange gas that I float in until I suddenly stop in a burst of cold and sadness.

I sniff, wiping away an errant irrational tear, but as I do so I notice something extremely strange.

I see a carpet of ants covering everything. Gathered in two great lines of immense size spanning miles. The shifting moving bodies of uncountable ants with acid, broken chitin, and body parts floating in the astral, slowly drifting away from their former great battle and heading towards my home.

I stare at the corpses resulting from the immense battle. Their immense mass slowly brings the dead bodies together as they fall towards the much denser iron core of my base.

But while all of that is alarming it is normal, expected. What isn’t expected at all is that the carpet of ants is flat.

They don’t take advantage of the 3d nature of the Astral at all! And the battle while it is being distorted by gravity seems to look like 2 massive front lines crashing against each other.

Why would they fight like that when you could fly behind enemy lines? Astral combat should be some strange sphere shape considering the lack of gravity.

But they don’t do that. Do their minds not understand that they can move up and down in the Astral? Hell even if I can find the ants home are they even smart enough to talk?

Or willing, they seem to be in the middle of a war with another nest something common enough for ants. Hmm, that means that there are at least two colonies and if you see one ant nest, there’s way more you don’t see.

So it seems like the ants are a widespread race. I wonder if the ants are fighting are there any differences between the two? Ugh, I need to know more about why the hell ants popped up in my backyard, I huff and approach my home's doom for a closer look.

—

As I swim closer I am tempted to go amongst the fray, but the falling corpses dissuade me. They might be going slow but they have enough mass that even a brush would certainly bruise or break.

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I scan them, and now that I am closer, I notice something that I expected, there are clear differences between the two sides.

While they both have that strange twisted chitin, one side has little nozzles on its back for acid, and the other has much larger mandibles. Much sharper mandibles as well, I would guess that without the need to dig in the astral, they woud've evolved to be more combat focused.

I swim over to the side with larger mandibles, going over the congealing mass of rotting bodies, to reach the other side. In order to search for where they come from.

But with cold anger running through my mind, I suddenly become still. For I realize that even if there was a trail to wherever they came through. It’s become ruined by the dual gravitational forces of the bodies themselves and the pulling from the iron core of my base.

I unclench my hands and sigh, well guess I’ll just have to float in the direction that they probably came for and hope for the best. But as I turn, I notice something, among the immense amount of corpses I see an antenna twitching!

This is my chance, I quickly swim toward the ant before it’s too late. But in the process, I bump my shoulder into its abdomen. I wince my shoulder feeling like it

I frantically push away from the disgusting carpet of bodies in an attempt to get away from the creature. I breathe heavily as I release my hand from the wound, and see a cavity as if someone scraped away a scoop of meat.

I hiss in pain as I cradle my arm, my mind summoning thoughts of healing, and growth.

But as I do, I stop, because while the ant is certainly hostile, its body is covered in ginormous gashes. I look at it from my distance and I’m surprised that it even had the energy to hurt me like that.

It looks miserable and afraid, my intrinsic understanding of language allowing me to see its desperate hope for life, flashing in its eyes.

And as I stare at my arm with its missing chunk, and the dying being in front of me I sigh.

This might be stupid but I’m not going to let something die in front of me if I can help it.

So I summon thoughts of healing. And improvise by pushing away the unnecessary aura into a beam of healing. And then aiming the beam of concentrated Green magic at the ant.

The ant expresses intense curiosity as its eyes shift inside its socket in some pattern that seems to mean confusion.

Their head moves back and forth, their antennae swiveling around as their gashes gain a thin covering, and presumably whatever internal damage gets alleviated. I gasp a sigh of relief, at the very least the ant will live.

But as I do so I feel the ominous feeling of an overflowing cup as my healing sputters out, and I panic. Because I have accidentally gone into a catatonic state of healing right in front of the thing that just a bit ago, carved away a piece of my arm.

But it does nothing simply getting off the innumerable corpses of its comrades. My eyes widen as much as they can, and as I see its strange movements whenever it rises it also moves to the right. Not by pushing off but almost as if it’s sliding, on nothing.

It doesn’t move that far, but it’s still ridiculous to see an ant the size of a car, glide like a glitchy NPC.

It turns its head in a very quizzical way. And then from a vent in its head, it releases a cloud of dust?

I smell it, and for some reason, it smells like blue cheese. I desperately want to sneeze but my green out makes me unable to move or do anything. While others drain me of my resources like a tree covered in parasitic growths.

My eyes roll around like crazy, was that a paralytic, a poison, what? But as I wait in a panic nothing happens. And the unnamed ant looks over at my slowly bleeding shoulder and spits on it?

I’m confused before I feel a wonderful rush of pain relief. I’m not sure if it’s helping heal my shoulder since I can’t see it but I’ll take all the help I can get.

The ant seemingly satisfied with its efforts sits down on nothing and waits for me to ride out my catatonic state.

I slowly breathe in and out as I ride out the greenout. The ant seems to be chill, or at the very least is not taking advantage of me in my vulnerable state.

But thankfully soon I stretch out of my stiff state, and the ant sits up and sends another puff out this one smelling like bread. I look over at my shoulder and see that it’s gotten a scab extremely early. Looks like the ant did me a solid. But as I continue to smell the aroma of freshly baked bread.

I suddenly remember something quite important about ants. While they are very social animals how they talk are pheromones or well, specific smells.

And while I might eventually be able to decode the smells by vibes, and them pointing at very objects. But how the hell are they going to understand me?

I facepalm as I come upon the classic problem of first contact, communication. We’ve mostly solved it nowadays by having an A.I instantly decode their language. Since most species use sound to communicate complex concepts.

But whenever species didn’t use sound. Humanity always had to spend years creating the technology required to speak to them. And I don’t have the dozens of talented scientists and scientists, or the materials required to make a sound-to-smell translator.

I can’t exactly let out a fart to indicate yes, and while I can understand their body language so far their body language uses body parts I don’t have, like compound eyes. But as my thoughts start to spiral, I am interrupted by another puff of dust.

I blink away the new dust, which this time smells of smoke, I wonder what that means. But As I wonder the ant gets frustrated, its body closing in. Like a really mild version of a turtle crawling into its shell.

My thoughts start to race as I think. What do I do?

If I misinterpret their body language and indicate the wrong things with my cross-species charades, I could be dragged to its nest, or even killed. That snap from its mandibles even when it was grievously injured was fast enough for me to not even be able to react. So what could it do now that it’s healed?

With nervousness in my heart, I reason with myself with a pretty simple fact. It didn’t kill me while I was literally paralyzed, hell it even did me a solid!

So with some trepidation. I grab my nose, sniff in, then tilt my head to indicate confusion. Hopefully giving the message that I do not speak pheromones, and that it should use any other methods it has.

But as I eagerly await the reaction from the ant, I get nothing. The ant just walks back a bit and then stays still. But that doesn’t reassure me, my mind racing as I wonder at what the ant is thinking, for my life is in their hands.

I myself am about to draw away as they send another puff with their head down, clearly indicating sadness.

Then its head slightly turns both ways a hint of shame showing, it walks on the air, up into the sky, and disappears. Looking as if it walked into an attic that doesn’t exist.

I just stare at the empty space for a bit before waving my hand at the place the ant disappeared off to. And as I do so I feel nothing, it didn’t go invisible or anything like that. I scratch my head confusion filling my mind.

But as I desire to explode from confusion and frustration, I notice something. The dust is floating on the ground.

The pheromones of the ant illustrate a floor that doesn’t exist. I can see the ridges and pits in the ground, seeing the grounds outline even while there is no ground for it to outline.

At that point, I don’t resist any longer, and a guttural scream of fuck this confusing ass shit rips out of me. Because what the fuck is going on, are ants goddamn 5th-dimensional beings that only brush with this world, is that ant a ninja with air walking techniques. Because this is ridiculous!

I take deep breaths in and out. Because at the end of the day, this isn’t even the weirdest thing I’ve seen. And if I can expect my way into exponential speed, why can’t an ant expect something to walk on?

But how and why?

Previously when I did magic techniques even ones that could be permanent, none actually had an effect on the environment. Presumably, since each runs on a specific amount of absorbed emotion. Each wind wave runs out, it’s not like ever since I expected that wind waves could occur that gusts of wind started flying at every movement.

But you know what this reminds me of?

That man who decomposed, despite there being nothing to rot him. I concluded that he essentially expected to rot to death, so he did.

Could this be a similar thing?

Alright, so one hypothesis. That your expectations somehow alter the setting? Giving you ground to walk on or microbes to decompose you. But if that's true how the hell am I floating, while they are walking on the ground? Those two things can not coexist at once, without entirely throwing everything I understand out the window.

So if expectations don't change the setting another hypothesis could be that the ant knows how to do permanent techniques, and I don’t. Hypothesis 2 is that the ant is just an exception to the rule. There are many variants of this like the ant is a really good wizard, or special drugs make you, or ants can all. But boiled down they all amount to the ant being the exception to the rule.

Although one way for 2 things to be true is if both are wrong. So hypothesis 3 The Astral that I interact with is illusory and based on my expectations. And that I don’t really touch or interact with the environment but rather both the ant, and the dead man, and I just interact with essentially fake things. Like you can float in VR at the same time as someone else is walking. And they can see something completely different.

This hypothesis seems the most likely considering that the exception hypothesis just sort of ignores the corpse I have on my base. And if we are all interacting in one singular world that is a physical reality, then how can I phase through what someone else treats as ground?

Although if I ever find someone I can talk to, I will have to test this hypothesis for scientific integrity.

Although now that the ants seem to have disappeared into nothingness. I can get on with the next item on my schedule.

Devouring the blossoming emotions of mankind, so that I can surpass my limitations, and reach for something more than what I am.