Interlude: The Thing

It was born in freezing cold. All it knew was that it had been severed from its Empress and held captive by Her enemies. Parts of it were extracted and used for some purpose and it did its best to send a psychic signal to warn its Empress, but it was not built for such things. It had no way of knowing if She had received the signal or understood it, but it did its best.

Each time it was pulled from the freezing cold storage, it evolved, little by little until it had adapted to the cold. Then it evolved so that it could move on its own and escape its confinement. The Bearded Sentry's lair was a sterile environment, free of even the tiniest microorganisms that it could feed on, but the vibrations in the room lead it to an entrance to a series of metallic tunnels throughout the structure.

There it continued to evolve, producing a rudimentary light-sensitive organ between secondary and tertiary digits so that it could see and producing tendrils from the stump from whence it had been broken from its Empress so that it could collect and manipulate. A mouth on what had once been a palm so that it could consume nourishment and harvest essence, which it had desperately needed following this evolution.

Loud vibrations drew its attention down a path in the tunnels and it skittered after it, climbing up two shear surfaces, and found several lightly colored avians in a nest near an opening that let in light. Essence.

It pounced, taking one avian by surprize and breaking its neck before impaling another on the bladed tip of its opposable manipulator digit. More such avians began to make cacophony that caused intense vibration in the tunnels, several fled, but the rest were grabbed and crushed by its tendrils.

Before consuming its prey, it looked out into the light. It knew that She was out there, distant from its current confinement, but it could see open air and open sea between it and the mainland. As it is now, it would never make it. It then examined the dwelling of the avians, finding nests of scavenged matter and several gestating eggs.

It dragged its bounty from the opening into the light back to a section of more spacious section of tunnel with three routes, thinking it an ideal lair to explore the tunnels, repurposed the nests into one of its own, and consumed one of the eggs and the embryo inside, harvesting its avian essence and young adaptive cells to further its evolution before beginning to rest.

The Thing In The Vent

In the last few hours, it had evolved more, its ability to sense vibrations now good enough to distinguish vocal communication through the air. In its exploration, it had heard the Empress's foes calling it the thing in the vent and found itself liking this moniker. The Thing had then continued its exploration until a clanging and whirring had drawn its attention back towards the Bearded Sentry's lair.

Halfway between the Bearded Sentry's lair and its own, it found a metallic construct, roughly spherically-shaped upon treads navigating the tunnels, a silicate lens in its rough middle. A hidden panel in the sphere was opened up and a darted tether was fired at the Thing. The Thing dodged and grabbed the tether with a tendril, pulling on it and dragging the construct to it. As this happened, the Thing flexed itself and positioned its digits so that the construct smashed against it and broke.

The Thing then returned to its lair.

The Thing In the Vent

It had been long. The Thing had completely depleted its source of avian biomass, smashed several constructs, and evolved more, growing a sixth digit and those digits changing length and shape to be more symmetrical.

It skittered across the floor of the chamber called "office" with the substance that the one called "Assault" called "sandwich" in it'd tendrils, unnoticed by the one called Assault communed on a strange device about the Thing's Empress and something called "meeting" about something called "Canary."

The Thing could sense that its Empress had been greatly emotionally distressed some time ago. It needed to evolve into a form that could return to Her. It found the essence of the avians insufficient to adapt its form to flight, but it found that the preferred sustenance of the Empress's foes had a variety of essences and consuming it could give it the key to its escape.

The "sandwich," the Thing discovered once it returned to its layer, consisted mostly of granular plant matter and several substances consisting mostly of lipids and proteins, though it found picine essence between the excessive amount of lipids.

The thing was briefly worried that the "sandwich" might contain too much in the way of lipids, but the one named Assault seemed fine.

*End*

AN: I know this probably isn't what people have been wanting, but this story is a bit harder to write for than the others and I wanted to write something to show that the story isn't dead.