Impossible.

At first, Lucy thought the bug-creature-man-thing had somehow read her thoughts, but as it buzzed closer it muttered to itself in consternation, and she discarded that idea. Pincer-hands clacking and beaked mouth gaping, the thing was clearly as confused as Lucy was.

Though not as terrified.

As strange and oddly wonderful as it was to hear what sounded something like a human voice, Lucy found herself overwhelmed with fear. Her membrane suddenly felt sticky with it, like she was drenched in sweat in the middle of a swamp rather than thousands of feet below the sea.

The droning noise increased for a moment, and the bug-man was gone.

Lucy kept backing out the way she’d come, her Awareness straining to see ahead of her to find out where it had gone.

Then she felt the death-giving dryness of air on the back of her membrane, and a dagger slipped into her back.

As she struggled to shift the focus of her Awareness through the pain, an image gradually resolved: the bug-man, holding up a wickedly-edged pincer for inspection.

Lucy watched bits of her cytoplasm drift off into the current, unsettled by the sight.

Then a bright pink, proboscis-like tongue unfurled from the bug-man’s mouth, darting out to taste the yellow, sludgy cytoplasm dripping slowly off into the water. The bug creature was tasting her cytoplasm.

Lucy’s world fuzzed black around the edges, crowding in around her. Only then did she notice the hit-marker drifting away.

[-8]

[HP: 2/10]

As the creature continued to stare at her with its beautiful jeweled eyes and a thoughtful expression on its face, Lucy bolted.

***

For the next few minutes, Lucy’s Awareness skill got a good working out as she tried to look behind herself while moving forward as fast as possible.

Being conscious of the whole sphere around her was possible while standing still, though it took some serious effort not to default to just looking the direction Lucy felt as ‘forward’. She’d briefly tried it out back when she was first transformed.

Before all these murder-crazy organisms started trying to eat me and chase me around!

Though, she reflected, stopping for a moment to feel the vibrations of the water, it doesn’t seem like Bug-Man followed me after all.

After the casual stab and taste test, the creature had simply hovered there, in its little bubble of air. Lucy hadn’t stuck around to hear its thoughts on her cytoplasm. Its tongue had worked thoughtfully as its multi-colored eyes flashed like shattered stained-glass rainbows.

That was the image stuck in Lucy’s head as she ran back to the column of sulfur, and even though he had stabbed her with a claw, she still felt a strange desire to know more. She had understood the creature when it talked, after all, and it was the first thing she’d actually spoken to down here!

But her caution won out in the end, and she didn’t turn back. Being stabbed on their first meeting was more than enough to let her know exactly how much the bug valued her well-being. The pure casualness of the attack…

Lucy shivered, and continued on.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

She thought she might have gotten turned around somewhere. Instead of the dark grey stone she was familiar with from below, the tunnel was now increasingly covered in plant tendrils.

The tunnels stretched ever onward, winding and curving, and Lucy began to wonder exactly what part of the hydrothermal vent she was in.

She reckoned she was somewhere deep in the stone structure of the vent, and the tunnels through which she swam must be some sort of microscopic cracks in the stone.

That made sense, but apart from that, she just couldn’t know for sure yet.

And when she tried to reason it out based on the ecosystem…

For the first time, she wondered if anything unnatural was going on.

No shit, Sherlock. Was the insect-man your first clue?

Lucy stopped swimming and opened up her System, first checking her Energy before opening up the Shop.

[Energy: 10/100]

[Opening Shop of Life]

The familiar image of her own body greeted her, and she navigated to the list of organelles available for purchase. She scrolled through it aimlessly, knowing there was nothing there that could immediately resolve her energy situation but checking again anyways.

It never hurt to be thorough, right? Unless you’re so thorough that you spend all your time on one thing and mess up something else that was really important, or if you’re so focused you miss a warning sign, or if…

The thoughts rambled on ceaselessly as she scrolled. This time, she focused entirely on anything energy-related. Fighting upgrades would be great in the future, but first she needed to make sure she would even live long enough to have a future.

Other than the mitochondria at 50 EP, she saw only one option.

Chloroplast - 20 EP: Harness the endless energy of the sun! It’s slow, but it works. Just ask trees. Upgradeable.

That was it. The mitochondria was out of the question for the moment, unless she got a windfall of points somehow, and the chloroplasts would do her exactly zero good without sunlight.

A thought struck her then as she remembered the little beam of light she’d seen down in the chasm. It definitely wasn’t sunlight, but maybe there was something bright enough down here that the chloroplasts could function at least a little bit? Or maybe she could find a way to change them to produce energy from heat rather than light.

It seemed far fetched, floating there in that dark tunnel. The water was warm and there was certainly enough heat rising up from somewhere, but Lucy was no engineer. She’d be lucky not to destroy the original chloroplast in the process, even if she could use Gene Stealer to alter the organelle.

And she couldn’t even afford it in the first place!

Lucy was getting ahead of herself. She knew that, but she still couldn’t keep her mind from racing. She wanted to come up with a solution to her problem, and she was used to solving things by thinking about them. By coming up with a hypothesis and testing it out with a specific experiment.

Here in the dark, empty tunnel, she felt…lost. Even if she’d known where exactly she was geographically, she was so far out of her element that for a moment the weight of it pressed down on her like the weight of the ocean; miles of dark water above her.

Then the buzzing noise came back, and Lucy nearly jumped out of her own skin, floating as fast as her cilia would take her before she even realized she was moving.

Well, my reflexes are improving, she thought, pulling up her HP, which had regenerated somewhat in the time since she was stabbed. Not that it would save her if the bug attacked again, since a one-two combo from those pincers would spell her end even at full health.

[HP: 5/10]

The thought put a little extra pep in her cilia, the tiny filaments pushing with all their wavy strength against the water to move her forward a bit faster.

She looked behind herself as she swam, managing to focus her Awareness solidly behind her even as she maintained her full speed. The buzzing noise faded out behind her.

The noise was definitely coming from behind, so as long as I keep moving and—

The buzz returned like a swarm of killer bees directly in front of her, and Lucy barely had time to stop herself before running straight into the bubble of deadly air that had appeared in front of her, with the bug-man buzzing its wings inside. This time, its eyes were cold and black, devoid of color and seemingly of life.

With a casual movement, the bug gestured to Lucy.

“The strange one too.”

It stared at her a moment longer, and then it was gone, water rushing in to fill the space where the bubble of air had been, leaving no trace of the creature inside.

Then Lucy got a flash of something coming towards her. She tried to dodge out of the way, but the net that encircled her was too big. It cinched tight, and from inside the hair-like strands that bound her tight, Lucy looked out and saw a blank-faced organism holding a rope of the same material.

The organism with the rope was white and wrinkled, with shriveled nubs for arms and little more distinction to its oval-shaped form than Lucy herself had. But its body was strong, and when it tugged on the rope, Lucy was yanked forward, yelling internally as her cilia swished through the water uselessly.

As she was dragged helplessly through the water, Lucy looked for some weakness in the net that held her. But when something squishy jostled against her side, she gave a good look to the mass of jumbled grey blobs that she had suddenly joined.

Her mind reeling, Lucy started to feel sick as she recognized them. At first the memory was unclear, a picture-image that didn’t make sense. Then she placed where it came from: the customization screen in her Shop interface.

The other creatures that had been captured looked just like her.