Chapter 1

In a small, unexplored portion of the home galaxy, a fierce battle raged. Far above a tiny little blue planet, and hidden by the planets' own moon, a desperate Protoss fleet fought against a similarly desperate Zerg swarm. Neither of the combatants had the advantage, and would, if not for pure chance, simply wipe each other out.

That chance depended fully on whether the Protoss captain choose the artificial UV light or the systems' own natural UV light for his photosynthesis that morning.

Captain Kassundun clutched his forehead, and groaned psychically. The rest of the bridge crew, situated around him on a multitude of hovering platforms, found their own mental buffers being taxed as a level 8 psychic had a headache right next to them. The luckier ones, being older or simply having better-constructed mental defences, merely found themselves slightly inconvenienced. The not-so-lucky ones... Well, one of them had fallen from his platform, and was currently being mopped up by a janitor far below. The other, an ensign, had slumped backwards in his seat while foam dripped from his eye sockets.

[I tell you, Ferun, this sun's light is poison!]

Another Protoss Captain, this one female, spoke from the screen hovering before him. Aboard her own ship, the scene was frantic, with every one of her pilots red-lining the reactor in an attempt to urge more speed from it and risking a submolecular temporal detonation. [Well, Kassundun, maybe you shouldn't have volunteered before your own scouting team tested it! Can you hold out until we arrive?]

The Captain groaned again, and turned to his weapons regulator. [Ugh... Depends. Lysup, what are we embattled with again?]

[...Zerg, sir. The only thing we actually fight since we put down that Sundrop-mad cult? We chased their remnants out to this system after we struck a crippling blow?]

[Right. Zerg. Indeed, we should be victorious.]

[Captain, shields are at 20% and failing.]

[...if it's all the same to you, though, could you perhaps hurry, Ferun?]

The opposing ship, which was much rather a massive, living behemoth instead of what would more traditionally be called a ship, wasn't doing much better. The organism itself was larger than most moons, and was fighting the gravity of this one. It would have been having difficulties already were it in good health, but this one had been subjected to multiple barrages of plasma fire, warp cannon rounds, and sheer blunt force trauma from a squadron of suicidal Arbiters.

It was not doing well, most would agree, and those same entities would unanimously agree this was for the best. For within this behemoth sat yet another, one hated and feared among the Protoss, even more so than the typical Zerg organism. IT was the Overmind, and if any one creature could be said to be the personification of pure evil, IT would be.

IT sat, curled inside the cavity of the Leviathan that had been specifically designed for this purpose, and ITs consciousness felt along the connections of every single other Zerg organism that mattered. The ones that mattered, of course, being those in and around the Leviathan, who had fought for IT and alongside those. IT reached out to those minds, those tiny consciousnesses that were seemingly tiny mirrors of ITself, and crushed them with a single thought, assuming direct control over ITs army.

IT became, in a single second and in no particular order, the Leviathan itself, the Scourge swarms that flooded from the Leviathan's wounds, the Mutalisks that took flight from a hundred orifaces, and the various assorted Zerg morphs that sat in fleshy cocoons around the ship, secured for intergalactic transport. IT abandoned the latter almost immediately, removing ITs control and leaving them brain dead, but in stasis, waiting for control indefinitely. IT instead focused on the fierce battle that was occurring outside the Leviathan.

The problem, IT reflected, was that the Protoss Captain could not go on the offensive due to his disability, but the rest of the crew acted as a defensive safety net, as they didn't need complex battle tactics to defend their ship. They simply needed to shoot at the Zerg. Meanwhile, the Zerg didn't have a large enough swarm to overwhelm them, and was losing dozens of fliers for single kills. Simply put, at this rate, the Protoss would actually outlast the Zerg.

And yet, IT had no other choice. It didn't matter how many times the Leviathan circled the moon, as the Carrier could effectively drift forever without needing to restock on fuel. The swarm was out of resources. Even if they could make it down to the planet on the other side of the moon, IT would inevitably...

IT paused, then scanned the planet below. Psychic signatures, billions of them. Life. The planet below had life. Intelligent life, to some degree, or there wouldn't be quite so many. And hopefully, life that the Zerg virus was compatible with. Even slightly psychic life. Mostly ones or twos, the occaisional three but nothing-

A four. Curious.

A four changed everything. IT could infest a four, improve it, make it into a tool to be reckoned with, and then IT could absorb it into the Hive mind. IT urged the Leviathan into action, beginning to swing around the moon...

Alarms echoed around the bridge of the Protoss Carrier.

[Sir, the behemoth is changing course!]

The Captain looked up, glaring at his screens. [What? To where?]

Another ensign, this one at the scanner control, interrupted. [Captain, scans are coming back from the planet... It's got life. Sentient life. Zerg-compatible, too. If the Leviathan reaches the planet...]

[We can't allow that. They'd be wiped out, or worse, absorbed into the collective.]

[Indeed. Captain, their course will take them right past us.]

[I shall be damned if I allow that. Pilots! Ramming speed!]

In an instant, a hush fell over the bridge, only interrupted by the Ensign at scanner control keeping track of the behemoth. [Sir, behemoth at 600 meters and closing.]

The senior Judicator spoke first. [Kassundun, we shall be killed. If not by the impact or the crash, than surely by the Zerg themselves.]

The Captain stood, an imposing figure even with his hand grasping his cranium. [We shall overload the engines. Our deaths shall be glorious.]

A female pilot towards the front turned back to him. [Sir, you suggest suicide? We know not what happens to those caught in the wake of an engine overload. All research suggests vaporisation.]

[Five hundred meters.]

[Pilot, we cannot allow the Zerg to alight upon the planet. And, to our knowledge, these are the last Zerg in the universe. To wipe them out, and to protect a fledgling species, is that not worth the sacrifice of a single ship?]

[Four hundred meters. Its speed is increasing.]

The multitude of Protoss around the central command pod looked at each other, then back to the Captain.

[Three hundred meters from the ship's prow.]

One by one, they all nodded, and returned to their consoles. In front of the Captain, the female Captain's eyes widened. [Kassundun! No!]

[Two hundred meters. If we move now, it should be sufficient to knock them into the moon's gravity with us.]

Aboard the the other ship, an alarm blared, and one of Ferun's bridge crew shouted. [Captain, our engines are melting! We must cut them for repairs, or we shall overload them as well!]

[One hundred... Seventy-five... Fifty... Brace for impact!] Across the comm-link, Ferun's engines died, cutting the connection as all power aboard her ship shut down. The last thing Kassundun felt across the empathic link was a sense of anguish. Her ship would survive, which was more than he could say.

In a single, visceral instant, the two great ships collided with a soundless crunch. The prow of the Carrier was sharp, but it was not designed for this. It stabbed into the side of the behemoth, impaling itself inside endless veins and organs and flesshy tunnels, and rupturing many of the internal chambers. The plasma cells in the forward tip of the Protoss ship detonated, engulfing the connection point in a massive, yet soundless, explosion. This destroyed all of the fore of the ship, save the framework, which further bent and twisted into the Zerg behemoth and permanently locked the two together. And together they tumbled, both engine and gas-bladder silenced, into the gravity of the moon and, inevitably, to it's surface. There they lay, on the far side of the moon, and neither showing signs of any life.

The Zerg Overmind, however, had planned for this. When the plasma cells detonated, they also blasted apart carefully-placed organic drop pods, or rather, detached them. Using the inertia from the impact, they made a successful slingshot around the moon, escaping its gravity and entering the planets'. Of those hundred-odd drop pods, roughly half burned up in the atmosphere, becoming bright for only a second or two before the organic heat shielding failed miserably, and they exploded in the upper atmosphere.

In the state of Florida, in a collection of countries known as the United States, NASA had several scanning stations set up. A few detected the conflict beyond the moon, but dismissed it as false signals. More detected the flurry of meteorites entering US and Canada airspace, and set off alarms to get actual humans to check the data. Those humans, astronomers and astrophysicists all, initially dismissed the unscheduled meteor shower as a freak occurrence, and one that would be thoroughly stonewalled by the atmosphere.

As such, they were very surprised when most of the meteorites completely failed to do so, setting off alarms across the country, and in the case of several meteorites that missed very, very badly, other countries with overzealous missile defense systems.

In short order, North Korea declared war on Japan, China, the United States, and then Russia when the latter country didn't back them up on what was clearly an American missile test and subsequent invasion. All borders were closed, and they prepared for the worst. America quickly informed the rest of the world otherwise, assuaging some fears and excerberating others. North Korea remained wary, necessitating similar defences in Japan, Russia, and the US. Meanwhile, the United Nations began negotiations with India, China, and Australia in case of nuclear strikes. France's representatives became incredibly confused, seeing as how the day had started out perfectly peacefully. Queen Elizabeth the second, once she had been fully informed of the situation, had a good laugh over her afternoon tea.

At some point, the question of where exactly the meteorites came down was raised and answered by NASA, with the answer being, "In the US, centered around southern Nevada." This was contested, confirmed, denied, ignored, and misunderstood in the following hour, before cooler heads prevailed. We shall focus on one very specific impact, in some Northwest Las Vegas suburbs, which is significant for one reason, and one reason alone.

That meteorite landed in the backyard of the only level four psychic on the planet.

So! Here we are, the prologue of the reboot! Now, first things first, you may notice a dramatic increase in quality. This is intended. I've been practicing, with Ponies. Incidentally, I've already had several people ask, and my username on FiMFiction is "Felidae0".

(On a side note, FiMFiction has spoiled me, I'm afraid. It's a much better-designed website, with such madness as linking to other sites, and author's boxes for my own comments, and integrated comment systems!)

Now, for the new people reading this, or for those who find this in the future, this seems to have been, and still is, one of the first few self-insert StarCraft fics. I apologize for my involvement in bringing the genre here. The original concept was inspired through a combination of things: My frustration when the games didn't seem to fit such a versatile concept as the Zerg, my imagination when I kept redesigning buildings and animals and places so they were infested, and reading East Bridges' The Zerg Swarm.

I genuinely liked what he did with the concept, but he designed a whole other planet and people entirely; I wanted to plan out what would happen if the Zerg landed on modern Earth, and took another Human as Overmind. Thus the original concept of the story was born.

When I first started out, I just started writing. No planning beyond a very vague outline. I had no idea what would happen in the next sentence, but I had plenty of ideas about what should happen later. A lot of my early stories (which I have since removed, with the ones I particularly liked being slated to be rewritten) had this problem.

Now, I've got an outline. I've got a plan. I can't promise a solid update schedule without having written most of it in advance, but varied updates are better than no updates.

Finally, I'd like to apologize. I am genuinely sorry it took me this long to get back to this story. For gods' sakes, Blizzard actually updated more than I did in the interim.

Welp. Nothing more to do about it but actually post stuff. I hope all of you enjoy the story, whether you just found this story, or you've been following me since the beginning!