Goddess damn it!
Adon turned his head one way and then the other. Another wave of ants was slowly crawling their way toward him on the log. They were coming from two sides at once again. Maybe that was a tactic of their colony, or of ants in general.
He was almost through cutting the bat’s other wing, but he wasn’t sure if he would make it. The colony had moved faster with their reinforcements than he’d imagined. These darned ants were persistent!
Not as bad as the Vendetta Ants, though. The Exploding Carpenter Ants had attacked him and the bat suicidally, almost insanely in Adon’s mind, but they at least had a plan that was quasi-rational if you looked at it from the perspective of the whole colony. They were trying to secure a fairly large food item, even if the bat’s body was mostly composed of the thinner wing flesh rather than the smaller but thicker furry portion.
Adon couldn’t imagine any ant colony easily giving up on a dead bird that landed right in their lap, and the bat was like a small bird. This log might even be the colony’s home, since they were a species of carpenter ant. Their course of action was even more rational if they felt they had a home field advantage.
By contrast, the Vendetta Ants had been happy to just throw away scores of individual soldiers to chase down a single tiny bug that had wronged them. Even if they caught him, he wouldn’t have been much of a meal. Not an efficient use of resources at all.
Even though the Exploding Carpenter Ants blow themselves up, those Vendetta Ants are the real terrorists, he thought sagely. Maybe it was time to try diplomacy.
He activated Telepathy I. Now was as good a time as any to test it out. When it might save his life, or at least help him
Stop! Adon sent to the nearest ant. He wanted to target all of them, but perhaps unsurprisingly, Telepathy I was not that powerful of an Adaptation. He felt a mental block, and a sharp pang in his head, when he tried to target multiple ants.
Should’ve bought the upgrade. It was too late now, since the Adaptations took time—and significant pain—to take effect in his body. He would have to wait to upgrade to Telepathy II until he was somewhere safe again.
The ant actually stopped, though. As the other ants continued to advance, the targeted one stood there and, from its body language, just looked confused.
Stop! Adon sent over and over to the other ants. He felt himself developing a splitting headache as he used the Adaptation over and over. But each one that heard him listened. They all stopped. Adon had stopped cutting through the bat wing, too, so he could focus on targeting each ant individually.
Thank the Goddess. I might actually be saved!
In a similar situation, he knew he wouldn’t have been able to negotiate with the Vendetta Ants. He would’ve been done for, albeit with a big pile of dead ants all around him.
I will take half of the bat, and you can take the other half! he tried to send. But there was a loud static sound in his head, and an accompanying feeling of pain. His headache was worsening, though he didn’t think the problem was that he’d reached his limit.
Too many characters in this post, was the feeling he got. Along with the slightly increased pain. Really, I can’t send more than maybe one or two words at a time? Man, that sucks! He again regretted that he hadn’t chosen to upgrade to Telepathy II. Crap, I shouldn’t have cheaped out earlier…
It would be fine, he decided. He would just send simple, one or two word messages. Telegram style.
Half, he sent to the nearest ant. You. Half. You. Wings. Me. Body.
He started to send the same broken up messages to each ant in turn, though his head throbbed more forcefully as he continued. He managed to make it slightly less onerous by removing the “You. Half.” portion from the chain, so it went simply, “Half. You. Wings. Me. Body.” It was still a mounting pain, but now it escalated more slowly.
They should be happy with the wings, he thought. The wings looked much bigger than the body, and they were just as large as the body by weight, if not larger. They just didn’t seem as appetizing to Adon as the meat on the bat’s body, especially since the wings had some of the yellow goo on them.
None of the ants sent anything back. And they began approaching.
As the ants advanced, Adon began to feel on edge. Was he going to have to try and kill all of these things in close range?
He hoped not. He had just spent a lot of mental energy on communicating with them. Far from getting better, his headache was verging on migraine level now. Maybe he’d overtaxed his mental resources.
And he had only just grown in a bunch of new spines when he shed his skin. If he had to fight them again, and shed his skin once more, he’d be quite hungry when the fight was finished. That was assuming he survived.
But he felt optimistic. The ants were moving forward slowly, cautiously, with a measured pace that they hadn’t shown when they were just trying to take the dead bat from him. Almost as if they were worried that this was a trick, and they might be the ones to be attacked. Or as if they were trying not to seem aggressive. So, maybe, just maybe…
The nearest ant reached Adon and began crawling over the piece of the bat’s left wing that was still attached to its body. The next closest ant did the same with the bat wing that was partially attached on the right side.
The pair began laying down two scent trails. A cocktail of smells unlike anything Adon had ever smelled before. But that was good, he hoped. After all, he had already experienced some of the most hostile smells that other ants produced.
Hopefully this species wasn’t so qualitatively different from the Vendetta Ants that he was reading too much into this. But based on his past experience and the fact that they were emitting multiple scents at once, he thought they must be describing a complex task. Maybe they were laying down the odor of their agreement with him.
Whatever the precise nature of the ants’ communication in this case, each and every ant began working to cut the bat’s body away from its wings. They ignored Adon completely, and he stepped out of their way so that they could work faster without having to walk around him to move from one area to the other.
It took less than a minute for them to sever both wings. It certainly helped that the bat was not moving anymore. But as the bat’s body dropped away from the log onto the ground, Adon couldn’t help thinking that they could certainly have killed him if they’d applied that effort to him instead.
Maybe if I’d said, ‘Mine. Mine. Back!’ or something like that, instead of trying to share, they would have chopped me up like that. After a few brave ants blew themselves up to glue him in place, of course. It was a haunting mental image. He had no clear way of escaping them if they got within close range in sufficient numbers.
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Adon hopped down from the log, walked to where the main part of the bat body had fallen, and picked it up with his front limbs. He sprayed a little silk onto it to use as a rope and hoisted it onto his back.
Then he got as far from the ant colony as he could. Before they could change their minds.
Once he was a decent distance away, he stopped, pulled the bat down from his back, and began eating. There was no point in walking around with such a bounty of meat. It was practically asking for some larger predator to mug him.
He ate through the pounding in his head that still hadn’t gone down. The throbbing pain kept him from going into a feeding trance, though Adon still managed to appreciate the rich flavors. The dense, lean meat tasted like a cross between chicken and pork. Even the rib bones went down easily. Though they weren’t hollow like bird bones, they were thin and fragile compared to what a larger organism’s bones would have been like.
When the meal was finished, Adon walked slowly through the garden, moving at the pace of a funeral march. He was bloated with bat flesh. And with his head pounding, he retained barely enough focus to keep himself moving in what he thought was generally the right direction
He was exhausted, but considering what he’d just been through, he counted himself lucky that he was still walking at all.
Keep moving, he reminded himself. He needed to get somewhere safe before dawn. Before the bird started looking for him. There was no way he had enough focus to maintain different skin coloration right now. Plus, he had to find a good place to spend his fresh Evolution Points. He had a total of 321 Evolution Points now, and he thought he would check whether that was enough to get a look at the specialized evolution option before he did anything else.
Kind of an oversight before, not to have tried that after eating the second egg. Although he doubted this number would be enough for the evolution he wanted—and he still wasn’t sure he was ready to evolve yet—it was important to gauge how many points he needed to have in the bank before he could purchase his chrysalis.
As he rounded a corner, he thought he spied familiar sights in the distance. The light of the slowly rising sun aided him in scoping out his surroundings.
I was trying to find my old stomping grounds. Looks like I might be almost there.
In fact—well, he had been almost blind before, but still—wasn’t that the Vendetta Ants’ colony up ahead? He remembered the basic geography, even if before he’d only had a broad outline of it.
Adon automatically began changing direction. He’d already angered the Vendetta Ants once, and he had enough of a headache right now with the actual throbbing in his head. He didn’t want to remind those crazy monsters of his existence. Especially not after the trouble those other ants had already given him tonight. Although that had turned out alright, he had no faith that the Vendetta Ants were capable of listening to reason. It was all in the name.
As his head turned in the other direction, he saw a golden figure in the distance. The girl! The, uh, princess, maybe? In any case, Social activity!
He wanted to run toward her—and also to run away! He felt a sudden sense of stage fright at the idea of talking to a female human, even though he was now a different species entirely. He automatically jumped to the assumption that he would be rejected in some particularly devastating way. It was utterly ridiculous. And yet…
When exactly was the last time I spoke to a girl who wasn’t related to me? His mind couldn’t produce an easy answer, which was worrying.
Finally, he came up with a terse exchange he’d had with the checkout girl at the local mall a couple of months before he died.
He’d been out to meet a friend from school—Cedric was his name!—who hadn’t seen him in years and remembered Adon being fun and still in somewhat decent shape. Hell, he might have even remembered Adon being charming and funny. Crazy the tricks that memory plays on people, he thought bitterly.
It was awkward when Cedric saw the new Adon. The obvious contrast between the old friend he remembered and the new person he was encountering was apparent in the way that Cedric looked at him. The way he spoke. He had been careful, obviously trying not to say anything to offend Adon. But that very caution only made things worse. Adon’s social difficulties had shot through the roof that day, as he watched his former friend walking on eggshells to avoid upsetting him.
Though the pair had met up in the mall for sodas and planned to go together to an arcade, they found they had little to talk about. Almost by the time the fizz in his drink had died down, Adon had read the situation, regretted going out on a limb, and started thinking up an excuse to leave early. The whole experience had left him even less confident in his social skills than usual, and frankly doubting his worth as a human being.
Other people grow up, he remembered thinking. Why do I just grow worse?
During his escape from the mall, he’d stopped at the food court for a dozen donuts—they were his poison and his comfort—and found that he could hardly speak to the college–aged girl working register.
“D-dozen. Ass-assorted. Please.”
“Any particular selection?” she asked in a chipper tone.
When he just stood there, staring at the wall and swallowing saliva, trying to think of something to say, trying not to look at her—and damn it, she was cute too!— the girl just rolled her eyes a little, smirked, and said, “Okay, sir, Carl there will just choose some for you.”
She pointed with one thumb at an old man with long, stringy gray hair who was standing behind the counter, closer to the donuts. He didn’t move, just stood in place.
The cashier raised her voice slightly. “ Carl, you heard me?”
“What’s that, Laura?” His voice creaked like old floorboards or an ungreased hinge—or poorly maintained stairs.
“This guy wants assorted donuts, so just pick a random assortment!” she said a bit louder.
“He doesn’t want to choose?” The old man’s voice sounded baffled.
It was all Adon could do at the time to stay in place and not burst into tears.
“You just want, er, random donuts?” The old man’s voice grew louder as if he thought Adon was as hard of hearing as Carl apparently was. “A dozen of them, was it?”
Adon felt his face growing hot with shame as he imagined everyone around looking at him. Thinking about him. How fat he was. How socially clumsy he was. How much he sucked.
Don’t run away. Don’t run away. Don’t—
“Uh, never mind!” he said, snatching his wallet up off the counter. He ran from the food court and didn’t stop running until he was close to the mall entrance. He found himself breathing heavily, hands on his knees, staring at the ground, looking at nothing. He was drenched in sweat.
Why does my life have to be this way?!
In the present, Adon tried to swallow down his mounting anxiety. It had been a bad idea to reach back for that memory. Bad medicine for what ailed him.
It doesn’t have to be this way, he thought. It doesn’t have to be like it was, that is. He had to remind himself that in this life, he had never run away from a social interaction with anyone. That just an hour or so ago, he had actually used verbal communication—negotiation, one of the most delicate forms of communication!—to secure food from other creatures that were intent on taking it from him.
Certainly, it had helped that the ants had turned out to be fairly reasonable—ants probably had a very well developed concept of sharing, if any creature did—and it probably also helped that they didn’t seem to have the capacity to talk back.
Still, if I was still the same old Adon as back then, I would have just run off, he thought. I absolutely considered it. It was the safest method of surviving that situation. But instead I trusted in my words. That’s who I am now. Who I’m going to be!
He began walking toward where the girl stood. She was in front of his old plant, he noticed. Even though it was quite far away, he’d recognize it anywhere. The place where he’d been born.
She came to see me! he realized.
That was a green light to engage in social activity if he’d ever received one. And he was going to talk to her.