"It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change."

- Leon C. Megginson

***

A rational, thinking mind was not meant to experience certain things.

This is why the most effective torture methods are much more punishing psychologically than physically. Pulling a man's fingernails out at the root is painful yes - but he can understand, at least theoretically, what is happening.

This is not the case with being born. When human children are born, they lack cognition. They have no context for what is happening, so they aren’t trying to fit any of it into a pre existing framework. They just take it for what it is because really, babies are fucking stupid.

I can’t quite say at what point I became aware of my situation. I remember sitting down in front of my television. I remember working. I’m pretty sure I had a cat. But I couldn’t quite put my finger on what my work was. Or my cats name. Or my name. Somehow though, I do remember that cats are ungrateful shits, and if I’m in a coma having a nightmare right now, then mine is probably eating me alive.

I struggled in futile terror while I was thinking this. Because as soon as I became aware of my circumstances I became aware of three things. One, I couldn’t see. Not one iota of light penetrated my eyes. This wouldn’t cause me so much panic except for Two; I was suspended in a slick, viscous liquid that made it impossible to breathe. I could feel the stuff squick against my eyes as I writhed in terror lashing out at anything I could to try and swim up. Which is how I learned the third thing: I was in a man sized orb with no exits.

So to sum up, someone, somewhere, had decided to trap me in an inescapable chamber full of goo.

Well fuck that.

I began smashing my fists into the walls of the room, putting as much force into the blows as the putrid liquid flooding my mouth would allow. At first, nothing happened, and my heart began to hammer faster, and faster, as my body desperately tried to force oxygen through my veins that my lungs just weren't taking in. I was beginning to feel myself growing faint when the first inklings of a crack appeared  before me. The only reason I could see it was because of the glorious flicker of light that spill through into my prison.

With renewed vigor, I braced myself against the wall behind me and lashed out with my feet at the crack. Each strike expanded the damaged area until, with a wet popping noise, a hole appeared and the liquid presently drowning me began to drain out of the chamber.  

Almost painfully slow, the goo spluttered out of the hole and I took my first wheezing breath of oxygen. After inhaling deeply a few times, I calmed down enough to note the distinctly terrible smell in here. Wrinkling my nose I looked down at the light spilling in from the hole. My vision was blurry from goo, and I couldn’t wait to get out of here and wash my eyes out.

Assuming whoever put me in here isn’t waiting for me outside on a tricycle with a creepy mask on anyway. I most certainly did not, want to play a game.

Less urgently now, I cautiously began to kick out the edges of the hole I had made, more and more light spilling in until I was able to make out dark brown muck coating the floor outside. Finally wide enough for me to pass through, I hesitated for a moment. I didn’t know where I was. I didn't know who had taken me. I was pretty sure I was naked. I wasn't exactly filled with confidence.

I took one last breath before I heroically flopped out of the hole - and was immediately blinded by light. A searing pain stretched straight from the rays of light above me directly into the back of my brain. I screeched on the ground for a moment, a high pitched keening emitting from my throat as I raised my hands to cover my eyes and find relief.

It only lasted a moment before my hands were pried away by a strong grip on each of my wrists. That same grip easily hefted me up onto my feet, letting go of my hands and wrapping around my shoulders to steady me.

I found myself staring directly into someone's crotch. My still bleary eyes tracked up the massive form of the man in front of me, taking in sparse patches of fur, scale, and smooth pitch black skin that seemed randomly placed along the heavily muscled frame. When my eyes finally alighted on his face I stared dumbfounded.

This man had no face. Or rather, He lacked facial features. The odd combination of scales, fur, and skin continued until it reached his neck, where it flowed into one single patch of leathery, midnight black skin that stretched across the face. There was no nose, no ears, and only the barest movement of his… of it’s jaw muscles told me there was a mouth somewhere on it. And crowning it all, were two oversized, sickly yellow orbs where eyes should have been. Each one was easily the size of a fist, and the eye sockets around them seemed to shift and change size at random in a way that made me think it was quirking its eyebrows at me - even though it absolutely didn’t have eyebrows to quirk.

‘What the fuck?!’

I had meant to yell the words but instead only a perturbed gurgling noise escaped me. The thing towered over me for a few moments more before stepping past me. I turned my head to track his movements, too afraid to make any sudden movements and have it refocus its attention on me. With a sickening popping noise my head continued to turn until it was quite literally on backwards.

I wish I could say that was the point at which I realized I wasn’t in Kansas anymore but like I said - babies are fucking stupid. No, what really set off my spidey senses was the ‘chamber’ I had just escaped. I had been expecting to see some sort of Saw inspired drowning chamber. Maybe something with mirrored glass walls so some sicko could watch me die slowly. Instead I was faced with the insane image of a man sized egg. It was stuck to the wall by an amber orange substance that greatly resembled tree sap. It was nestled amongst over a dozen other eggs, that even now were beginning to crack and break open, releasing confused duplicates of the thing into the open air. There were slight differences of course. For one, the Big Thing was ripped. Corded muscle rippled along its body as it moved in a way that gave it the bearing and postureof an action hero. 

The smaller things  were scrawny mewling creatures. Like me, they had no idea what was going on, newborn as they were. Also like me, they seemed to really hate the rays of sunlight drifting down to the forest floor through the canopy of leaves above us. Big Thing walked up to each newborn in turn and yanked their hands from their faces, standing over them long enough for their eyes to adjust to the shade he provided, and then moving to the next thing in line.

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With another squelching pop I rotated my head back into position and shakily lifted my hands to stare down at them. Patchy black scales and fur glared back at me, daring me to deny the truth before my own eyes. I was still staring at my hands when my brothers and sisters ambled up next to me chirping at each other in a way I found oddly comforting.

Of course, that was when another question dropped itself onto the mental backlog I’d been building for myself.

Where the fuck was my dick?

---

Things as I had decided to mentally classify whatever the fuck I was right now, had some really weird biology. For one, I couldn’t talk properly. I stood in the middle of my cohort of Things for the better part of five minutes trying to speak to the others, who watched me with varying degrees of amusement as we all waited for what I’d guess was our Dad to finish checking on all of us.

I realized pretty quickly that I neither had vocal cords or lips with which to form words. I did however, have a mouth full of tiny serrated teeth three rows deep that seemed to take up almost the entire contents of my skull. When I finally mustered the courage to open my mouth as wide as I could to check, I found I could easily widen my jaw enough to fit one of my brothers or sisters heads inside. There was also a thick ropey tongue in there that was shaped more like a worm than a tongue, and my motor control over it was fucking terrible. It took me another five minutes to reposition it so I wouldn't bite it off when I closed my mouth.

So I couldn’t talk. The bright side was, it wasn’t hard to make and interpret the chirping noises the other Things were making, and I was busily pretending to be as happy to be alive as the others were when Big Thing stalked over to us with panther like grace.

His monstrous maw opened and shut a single time, making a terrible grinding sound as its larger, more ferocious looking teeth brushed against each other. I guess we all instinctively knew Big Thing was calling for silence, because the chirping noises we were making cut off abruptly and we all huddled together around him.

Nodding in approval, Big Thing led us out of the dense grouping of trees our eggs had been nested in and deeper into the forest. I couldn’t tell if the trees were huge, or if I was just really tiny, but some of them had trunks so large that I was pretty sure I could hollow out just a portion of them and still have more space than my entire house back home allowed for. The forest floor was covered in the thick black mulch of a thriving ecosystem and I had to force down a chittering sigh as I lamented my lack of shoes.

As we trudged through the undergrowth I tried to get a feel for my surroundings beyond ‘forest’. My sense of scale was out of whack - probably because I was a child - but even then, when I compared Big Thing to the shrubs and bushes we were passing through I found that they dwarfed even it. Memories of the Jurassic Park movies flitted through my mind as my only frame of reference for this type of fauna, and I shuddered then began to pay more attention to the dark corners that seemed all too common once I started looking for them.

My brothers and sisters ambled along mindlessly behind Big Thing, complete without caution or worry. Big Thing himself seemed equally unconcerned, striding forward and shoving foliage out of its way with careless abandon.

Something about this entire scenario seemed really weird to me. For one, if that was our ‘nest’ why were we all leaving it? Where was our mom, or whatever the hell it was that laid those eggs?

I surreptitiously began glancing at the other members of my cohort, trying to gauge if they had a better understanding of what was going on than I did. I was brought up hideously short when my return to reality was accompanied by the realization that the only one still walking forward was me.

I turned to find the cohort of Things standing in a loose, outward facing circle in a clear area at the center of a copse of enormous trees. They seemed to have completely forgotten about me, and I quickly darted back to them, wedging myself at the outer edge of the impromptu formation.

Big Thing was nowhere in sight, a fact not lost on my brothers and sisters who mewled plaintively into the forest and shivered as we huddled together. It dawned on me in that moment that while I had been thinking of my fellows as thinking beings, I really had no way of knowing if Things were really all that smart at this age. Big Thing at least seemed to have something approaching human intelligence. I already knew my situation was weird, but the uncanniness of it all just continued to ratchet up a notch whenever I actually thought about it.

So that’s why, cowering in a clearing with what was essentially a group of children, I was the first one to spot the Bile Spiders.

They were slow at first. The first one inching a single wicked sharp looking limb out of a nearby shrub and slowly dragging the rest of its bear sized body into view. It was one of the most horrible things I had ever seen in my life, putting modern horror movies to shame.

They were spiders in so far as they had Eight legs, a bunch of eyes, and a huge abdomen no doubt used to spin webs of some kind. The rough shape was all there. But the details weren’t. While I knew spiders in my own world were typically covered in fine hairs that allowed them to sense changes in their environment, these things had a complete lack of such auxiliary parts. Instead, their waxy grey bodies were positively riddled with glowing green sacs of fluid, with sharp ridges of chitin rimming each one like the fangs of a vampire just waiting to bite down on them.

Seeming to notice that I had spotted it, the Spider focused in on me, with a baleful intelligence that scared the ever loving shit out me. Panicking I urgently tugged at my nearest siblings arm and made a trilling noise that I hoped  conveyed my desperate need to run the fuck away.

No answer came, and when I turned my head to see why, I understood. Two more of the Spiders were behind us. The three of them were penning us in with their prodigious girth in a way much more reminiscent of wolves than Spiders.

The stillness lasted only a few moments more, before something strange happened. My cohort, every last one of them, exploded into motion with a synchronicity that boredered on the supernatural. Like bolts of black lightning, they split up, a handful of Things running at each Spider, their jaws unhinged to display a maximum number of teeth. I stared disbelieving at the sight before me, wanting with every fiber of my being to take this opportunity to run the hell away. Yet somehow, I too found myself running towards the danger I found myself in.

God help me I was going native. Traitorous body. Stupid instincts.

There was only one upside to the madness. I hadn’t noticed it until just that moment, but I was unreasonably hungry. I mean, I was so hungry that I think if I’d acknowledged it before this moment, I would have tried to eat another Thing. And damn if spider wasn’t starting to look really tasty.