[https://i.imgur.com/sW8HPV5.jpg]
She awoke to herself as she struggled.
She was instinctively trying to free her carapace from the gelatinous shell of the egg, her swimming antennae pulsed but were confined by the tight confines of the brood pouch. She continued to push and slowly worked her antennae loose, then her carapace pulled free and she could move away from the shell.
She became aware of her surroundings in the brood pouch.
Another was here, a sister.
Below her was another.
There were the three of them in this clutch, brood sisters. Both sisters soon freed themselves from their eggs as well. Around them the shells began to dissolve into fragments of detritus, floating within the brood pouch fluid.
She became aware she was hungry. She remembered, she knew, hunger was a signal. She must feed. She began to rhythmically wave her phyllopods within her carapace. The brood fluid began to flow through her carapace halves and through the setae on the ends of her phyllopods. The setae trapped the fragments of shells from the brood fluid and collected them into her food groove. Muscular contractions moved the food down the groove into her mouthparts, she began to eat.
Her first meal.
Her sisters were feeding too, she could feel the currents they were creating in the brood fluid as they drew it through themselves and filtered it. Soon the fluid was clean of the shell fragments. She was no longer hungry.
She became more and more curious about her surroundings. Through the translucent wall of the brood pouch she could see vaguely a less translucent mass, egg shaped, pulsating.
It was a heart, pumping fluid through the body that surrounded them. Their mother-sister.
Even as she became aware of her, she knew that they were one. The same. Just as she was one with her brood sisters. The blood pumped by the heart was identical to that pumping inside her own smaller carapace. Each of them the same, yet individual.
She saw below her the food passing through her mother-sister’s gut, and beyond that, the five pairs of her mother-sister’s phyllopods, churning rhythmically as her own had, filtering food from the water as mother-sister swam, pushing her swimming antennae in rapid pulls that launched them through the water in a hopping, erratic pace.
It was beautiful, mother-sister was beautiful.
The perfect life.
After a time, the light grew brighter and brighter and mother-sister began swimming downwards away from the light. She understood, in the brightness was danger, hunters seeking to feed on mother-sister, and the three brood sisters as well. In the depths, it was dark, there was safety in the gloom. Mother-sister could filter food from the detritus at the bottom.
Later, the cycle reversed, the light grew dim again. Mother-sister climbed up the water column to the surface. There the green food grew, rich and succulent and thick in the water. It had floated there at the surface, proliferating in the light while they hid. Now mother-sister could feed in the darkness safely, the predators could not see her.
She felt a jerk. A sudden confining pressure on her entire carapace. The brood pouch was constricting, pushing her downwards. She was turned around by the squeezing walls of the brood pouch, her brood sister was gone! Then another harsh squeeze and her other sister was gone.
For a moment, it was just her, alone with mother-sister.
Then another powerful contraction of the brood pouch and she was sent tumbling away.
Reflexively she raised her swimming antennae and gave them a mighty pulse, she went rocketing through the water. She was swimming!
She realized she was alone. She looked to the side with her eye, but she could no longer see her brood sisters or mother-sister in the dim shadow.
She was alone now, her purpose, to swim forward through the uncharted waters, to grow, and create more of herself. Daughter-sisters. Just as mother-sister had created her.
She began swimming through the dark water. Her phyllopods churned within her carapace, filtering the delicious greenfood from the water. The water was teeming with food, every pulse of her swimming antennae sent greenfood swirling in all directions. Without a need to search for food, she began to slow, trying to observe the waters around her.
She saw dark shapes loom in the water, a huge fish swirled into view faster than she could react. A carp, it slid past ignoring her, as a shark might ignore a tiny baitfish. She was unworthy prey.
She continued on, slowly the light grew, and she knew it was time to sink, to dive to the depths and hide from the sharp eyes of the hungry. She turned downwards and pushed towards the bottom. Darker and darker as she dropped, the light forming a gray-green tunnel above her to the surface. She reached the bottom.
She began to meander along the bottom muck, filtering out bacteria and scraps of detritus from the murky water. Much of what she ate was broken and decomposed but it was still good food. Aimlessly, she wandered around in the darkness, feeding and hiding. Slow, cautious but ever curious.
Then, her taste organs noticed a change in the food pulled from the water. It was suddenly much more nourishing than anything she’d eaten before. She followed the trail of food as it drifted towards her in the water, she turned this way and that. Sometimes losing the trail, then turning back to recover it.
A large object appeared through the dim murk. The food taste was coming from here! She pushed forwards and found an opening in the object, the food was unbelievably rich here.
There was also suddenly light. A long object, many hundreds of times larger than mother-sister, lay on the bottom surrounded by the mass of food that was slowly dissolving and forming the trail she had followed here
.
Bizarre trails of light shifted across the rectangle. Patterns flowingly appeared and disappeared in mysterious shifts.
She did not understand this.
It fascinated her, the hypnotic light patterns held her eye spot entranced. She hovered above the dissolving food and ate while she watched the patterns change, shifting, blinking, brightening, darkening. What sort of thing was this? It was dead, but it moved.
Slowly the current produced by her phyllopods pushed her forwards as she watched, she drew closer and closer to the lights, till one of her swimming antennae brushed against the surface.
[candidate detected- spiritual uplift system KX 51.07-1 start run]...
[candidate organism P- Arthropoda SP- Crustacea]...
[candidate organism C- Branchiopoda SC- Phyllopoda]...
[candidate organism O- Anomopoda F- Daphniidae]...
[candidate organism S- Daphnia paradoxa]...
[candidate designation- ???]
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
[no designation detected . auto assign designation. Affirmative]
[candidate auto-designation- Daphne. CONFIRMED]
[initiate candidate Daphne class/level analysis]
[Running. Please Stand By ] …
Daphne became aware that she had a name.
How this occurred she was uncertain, she had been dazzled by the flashing shapes moving across her field of view. What they meant was a mystery to her. But she suddenly had a name. She was Daphne. She remembered her brood sisters and mother-sister. Were they too Daphne?
Thinking this she knew it was not. She was Daphne, they were her sisters.
What of her future daughter-sisters? Would they be Daphne as well? Thinking this she did not know. When it came time for her to lay, perhaps then she would know. For now, Daphne was herself. She had found something new in these waters, a name.
[Analysis Complete]
Candidate Daphne Species - Daphnia paradoxa Diet detritivore, herbivore
Trophic Level
1
Strength
0.01 Stamina 0.01 Agility 0.04 Vitality 0.05 Intelligence 0.0000001
Charisma
0.001
Spiritual Energy
NA
Skills NA Innate Abilities swimming, filtration, parthenogenesis, epigenetic morpho-plasticity, extremophilic estivation
[Candidate Daphne meets system requirements]
[Initiate Candidate Daphne Uplift protocol 1.0]...
A beam of energy shot from the shining rectangle and enveloped Daphne. She was instantly rendered unconscious as the light surrounded her in a glowing maelstrom of swirling power. For approximately an hour a brilliant shining light gleamed through the weave of the tiny pouch, carelessly dropped into the pond. The shining jade tablet transferred incredible levels of spiritual energy into a nearly microscopic crustacean, while the sweet sesame candy dissolved beneath it all.
Fish swam closer, attracted by the light and the temptation of the rampant spiritual energy, but any that approached too closely were zapped aggressively by the tablet’s defensive protocols.
They were too late. The tiny crustacean had been the first to the prize.
[Uplift protocol 1.0 complete- System Initiate Daphne - Level UP!]
Initiate Daphne Species - Daphnia paradoxa Diet detritivore, herbivore
Trophic Level
1
Strength
0.1 Stamina 0.1 Agility 0.4 Vitality 0.9 Intelligence 0.001
Charisma
0.001
Spiritual Energy
NA
System Detection of Hostile Predatory Organisms- System auto initiating Initiate Daphne innate ability {epigenetic morpho-plasticity}
Initiate Daphne physiology modification for defensive anti-predation
Neck Teeth Level 1
Tail Spine Level 1
Initiate? Yes-No ]
Daphne understood the meaning of the voice. She could not read the text of the notifications, but somehow the concepts being communicated traveled directly into her tiny mind and told her two important things.
She had grown stronger, and that she was in great danger of being eaten.
She was offered a choice to change, to grow stronger and protect herself.
She accepted.
Once again, swirling energies surrounded her, and she felt forces acting on her body, her muscles, her heart, and especially her carapace. The section of carapace on her head just forward of her primary swim-muscle attachments began to thicken and extend forward and upward, stretching out above her eye-spot into the water. It became a sharp crystalline lance projecting out before her. A neck tooth, HER neck tooth!
On either side of her primary neck tooth, shorter sharply curved ones extended out, her head was now a crown of spiny neck teeth, threatening and fierce.
On her dorsal abdomen she already had a tiny tail spine, but it too began to thicken and lengthen into a trailing spine, equally sharp as her mighty neck tooth. She was now armed to defend herself, to strike out and feed in dangerous waters. No longer was she defenseless, food for any passing predator.
How she had grown! With the new length of her tail spine and neck tooth measured in, she was almost as long as mother-sister. Though her body was still far smaller.
She began swimming away, no longer fascinated by the shining rectangle. It was now carried within herself, a part of her.
Despite the massive changes she had undergone, the sun still shone on the surface, she needed to stay deep to avoid the larger predators that she couldn’t protect herself against even with her new defenses. She ate and swam and twisted about along the bottom muck, reveling in her new neck teeth and the ferocious picture she presented.
As she swam, one of her antennae brushed against something invisible in the gloom of the murky bottom. With a whirl she was snared into a basket of thin bristles attached to a nearly invisible pair of arm-like antennae. It was a predator!
Faster than she could even begin to react, the arm bristles had scooped her entire body into an inescapable cage of bristling hairs, locking her from pulling out of the grasp of the deadly hunter.
Even as the creature moved to swallow her, she could barely see it. Its flesh was transparent, it had been invisible in the darkness.
The hungry worm’s mouth gaped open to swallow Daphne whole, she was powerless to stop it. It curled its grasping antennae-arms and pulled her into its mouth.
This was a mistake.
Daphne was armed with a cruelly sharp neck tooth! The force of the worm’s own arms forced her neck tooth straight through the worm's head and directly into its brain. The worm writhed in spasmic agony as the tooth destroyed its life. The violent muscular spasms flung the worm’s antennae-arms open and Daphne was thrown free of its twitching corpse.
She had survived.
Initiate Daphne has defeated Chaoborus Larvae Level 0.1 Level UP