Chapter Text
As Rose awoke one morning from uneasy dreams she found herself transformed in her bed into a monstrous vermin. She lay on her disgustingly squishy side and if she lowered her head a little, she could see her peach torso and legs almost stretching away from her.
Her pedipalps along with half her legs were inexplicably absent and at the end of each remaining limb, five smaller digits seemed to hang there helplessly as she looked.
“What’s happened to me?” She thought. It wasn’t a dream. Her room, well, Sophodra’s storage room which Rose was using as a bedroom, seemed gargantuan to her. Rose guessed the distance from wall to wall to be roughly the equivalent of some entire bladders. An orchideo, roughly the size of a building, was laid upon a seedbox. Rose had found it in her room the day before and Sophodra said she could use it. All she had to do was hook it up, a lengthy process, but not necessarily a challenging one. Below that rested a scattering of flowers, any one Rose could’ve used as an entire bed, rather than bedding.
Rose became dimly aware of the curious fact that she could see the flowers at all despite them being all the way on the other side of the room and not being able to smell them at all. [1] The flowers themselves seemed to have also changed in the night, becoming a colour that Rose had never seen before. They were now a warmer colour, if still pale. It was like the sensation of a gentle breeze over your body, not strong enough to chill you, but to clear the air of any scents that stuck around too long, like the memory of an old friend’s name, just at the tip of your tongue, like the feeling that no matter how busy your life is, you can always find happiness in the smallest moments.
Rose felt a layer of skin slide over her two eyes, she was sure she had only two now, and kept them covered. She wanted to stay there, in her world of darkness where she can drift back to sleep and wake back up as herself again.
It didn’t work, each new feature of her body she discovered while laying on the floor motionless was like a thorn in her side, preventing her from relaxing more than a few seconds. The curtain of fur that grew straight out of her head, the way air seemed to rush in and be expelled from her mouth via some unknown force [2] and she could practically feel the slick oils coating her entire body. Rose felt a tightness as every muscle in her body clenched her breathing became shaky, as if each exhale had to stop and think for a moment before truly committing to leaving her. She was disgusting, a horrible creature that someone could step on and barely think anything about it. A wetness crawled down her cheek and deposited itself on the floor, Rose opened her eyelids and her enhanced vision now looked like a blurry smear, she flickered her eyelids closed and then open and the blurriness seemed to dissipate and a small gush of wetness joined the first. Rose leaned her head to look at the floor. Fluid was leaking out of her eyes, was she bleeding? The liquid was clear, but Rose couldn’t remember what colour Gub blood was. Rose didn’t feel any pain, Rose wondered briefly if Gubs even felt pain, but a memory of Sophodra flashed into her brain and scolded her for asking such a question. Rose clenched her eyes shut as another wave fluid escaped them. Rose remained like that for several minutes, salty water pooling beside her head as she wondered if she was injured. The tears stopped, as if someone tightened a faucet on her head and Rose realised her muscles were now untensed and felt as if a burden of stress has just been lifted.
Rose opened her eyes again and felt her eyes rotate in their sockets to look down at one of her new appendages. It was one of the ones closer to her head, with five splayed digits that had something that reminded Rose of chitin at the tip of each. Rose focused her mind on moving the longest one in the middle, to uncurl it so that it was pointing directly away from the limb it was connected to. Within a few seconds the didit reacted, obeying her commands, but not without taking the one to its left along with it. Rose tried bringing it back so that it would touch the flat plane that all the fingers seemed to sprout from, the one to its left responded again, almost as if there was an invisible strand of silk connecting the two of them. [3]
Rose tried moving all of her digits, left to right, in order and accomplished the task in only a handful of tries, she flexed all her fingers outwards making the appendage as a whole as flat as possible, then she clenched her fingers together, making them resemble a tightly crumpled lump of silk. She moved onto where the appendage was connected to its limb, and found that the joint was surprisingly flexible, supporting around 90 degree movement in all directions, allowing her to move her hand in a circle around it. Next she examined the joint in the middle of the limb, it was much less flexible, like a hinge, it allowed her only to change the angle at which the two halves of her arm was connected at, from where they could touch each other, all the way to the point they resemble one long, unbroken limb. She tried to then move her arm around the joint that connected to her abdomen? thorax? She didn’t know what to call it, but she found that the floor she was resting on impeded her movement of her arm, so very carefully, she took her other arm and planted it onto the floor, flexing her muscles she was able to leverage her torso upwards and manoeuvred it so it was parallel to the floor.
With the full range of her arm’s movement available to her, she concluded they were quite similar to her pedipalps. With careful adjustments of her shoulder and elbow, she found she could move her hand away and towards her, while keeping it completely level. With further experimentation, she found she could use it to touch any part of her body, to the furry top of her head, to the bottom of her feet. Speaking of which..
Rose hadn’t tried moving yet, her first impulse was to crawl with her four remaining limbs, but she would never crawl with her pedipalps and she knew Fire Gubs only walked using two, Rose could now see why; the limbs were disproportionate in length, meaning that if she wanted to crawl she would either have her torso tilted towards the floor, meaning that there’d be a disproportionate amount of her weight supported by her hands, which were clearly grasping tools rather than ones for support, or she could rest her weight on the joint in the middle of her leg, but that could damage that too. Her only option seemed to be to somehow balance on 1/8th of her usual amount of legs and propel herself forward with them, how hard could it be? Gubs did it all the time.
Rose examined her legs, they were reminiscent of her upper limbs, a ball and socket joint where they connect to the torso, then a hinge joint, then an appendage with five digits connected to it, though her legs were a lot less flexible, which was completely fine with Rose. Looking at her foot, it was truly a bizarre appendage, with its oblong-wedge shape and flat bottom Rose suspected she was supposed to stand on. Rose moved her torso above her legs and shifted them so her feet were touching the floor, and very slowly, very carefully extended her legs, pushing her body straight up, only stopping to shift her weight or to prop herself up using her arm to avoid falling. After a few minutes she managed it, sort of. She was standing in an extremely wide pose, with her feet pointing in perpendicular directions, one arm extended straight out, and the other hovering over the floor, ready to catch her in case she lost her balance. Rose inched her feet closer together, stopping periodically to get acclimated to the new pose, until eventually she stood more or less in the confident, upright posture of a Fire Gub. She scanned her room and saw the flowers again. She oriented herself towards them and tried picking up her back foot and lurching it in the direction of the flowers. It didn’t work as she planned , in the split second without her other foot for support, her body started falling towards the floor. Once she planted her foot onto the floor, she found herself instinctively stretching her arms out to the side and pin-wheeling them around, miraculously, she regained her balance and recovered her posture.
Learning from her mistake, Rose shifted her weight to her front leg, practically standing on it, then lifted it, and brought it down in front of her. She only had a second to celebrate her success before she felt a vibration so strong it caused her to lose her balance and crash to the floor. Looking back she saw a giant praying mantis at the door.
Rose never saw Sophodra in so much detail before, she was aware of every bump and crevice on her exoskeleton, she could pinpoint exactly where her antennae were waving in the air and she had never noticed those black dots in her eyes before, [4] something about them unnerved her to her very core, she couldn’t explain it. Paired with the fact she couldn’t smell her at all, couldn’t read her emotions or even if she was saying something at all, it made her employer feel unnatural, alien, threatening. Sophodra faced Rose, seemingly noticing her for the first time and started crawling towards her. She seemed to be taking her time, each step advanced towards her much slower than Rose expected, like She was stuck in a cobweb. [5] As the insect approached, Rose involuntarily stood up and took a few steps backwards. Rose knew she needed to call out to Sophodra, to let her know it was her and maybe help her get back to normal. She didn’t notice herself subconsciously taking in a deep breath.
“Soph-” The surprise itself cut the word off in her throat , it gave her vertigo, the sensation of feeling vibrations that travelled through the air with as much ease and freedom as scents do. She raised her hands to the sides of her face and felt her ears between her fingers, then covered them completely as she heard a new sound, one so intense it made her press her ears into her head to attempt to make a physical barrier between her brain and the noise.
It came from Sophodra, it was the sound of torrents of water, washing away anything it came across, it was like a tyrant being able to silence others with just a glance, it was the instant and unavoidable destruction of lightning, it was the sound of monsters downwind, [6] it was something that Rose recognised it the the most core portion of her brain. It was danger.
With coordination Rose didn’t know she had, she pivoted on her foot and flung herself away, each leg was a mechanism, a spring whose sole purpose was to generate distance between her and Sophodra, each step’s momentum was carried forward into the next, her arms swung back and forth to counterbalance her strides. Rose pushed off the ground with each foot, briefly becoming airborne until the next caught her on her descent. Beads of liquid appeared on her forehead and her heart was beating faster than it had ever before in her life, and her lungs inflating and deflating at almost the same pace. It was the closest you could get to flying without wings. Rose looked ahead, despite how fast she was running and for how long, she was only nearly to the flowers. Rose felt her foot catch something and she looked down, it was one of the flower’s roots, something so small she had never noticed it before, never even seen it before, but now it was as insurmountable as a stone wall. With her front leg being unable to move out of the way, her back leg collided with it, causing her to topple forwards and collide into the ground, hard. She slid to a stop underneath the pink canopy of the closest flower. Her sides stung, her legs ached and there was a throbbing pain where her head impacted the ground. Her heart was still beating at the same rate, despite Rose being unable to use its energy, she breathed in and out rapidly, trying to recover from the pain. Rose tilted her head up, the flower’s stem was within reach, Rose clenched her teeth, pushed against the ground and stretched towards the stem-
Rose felt something hard press into her back and the ground being pulled out away from her as she was lifted into the air, without thinking Rose grabbed one of the flower’s petals as it passed her, it failed to stop her movement but Rose was left with a fistful of petal as she was torn away from the flower and carried somewhere else.