Chapter Text
1 - Bug
46b woke up from his restful sleep. He yawned, blinking his small eyes in an uncoordinated fashion.
He fluttered his wings over to his purple list of duties for the day, carved by the queen’s second-to-highest ranking officials.
“Blah!” He hissed in the colony’s language. “Same thing again?!” He angrily pushed the gooey list back up into the tube with his antennae and headed out to eat breakfast in the main dining area.
He reached his usual line where he sat every day and moved the food down from the ceiling and started to eat the floating fruit.
After he was done with breakfast he started to walk to his usual station, before seeing a group of gatherers of some sort heading out of the large colony.
46b followed them from a distance, leaving the colony for about the fourth time in his life. When he was a new rank, his assigned guardians would bring him out to gather something that the queen would enjoy. He would mostly find slugs and apples, which were neither in the queen’s favor.
Usually one of his guardians would have to find something unique and enjoyable, but pass it off as 46b’s. His guardians always tried to do their best, but he was unsure whether it was because they genuinely cared about him, or if they were fearful of what the punishment would be for bad caretaking. 46b was never good with emotions.
When they were stopping in the middle of a forest, 46b stopped as well and lowered himself with the rest of them, but from a farther distance.
However, clearly it wasn’t far enough, because one of the others saw him and immediately reported it to the leader. She marched over towards where he was standing. It was 23a.
“What are you doing here?!” She boomed at him. He twitched his wings slightly as he tried tot think of a good explanation in time.
“Sorry!” 46b exclaimed. “I was.. uhm.. I was trying to count how many seconds it took to get from my quarters to my station, and I.. I closed my eyes and I wound up outside and I couldn’t see the colony so I just followed you!”
23a did not look impressed whatsoever. “You are not a toddler, 46b. You should not be partaking in childish activities. Just because you only started your stations a month or so ago does not mean that you can still act like a child.”
“Got it! Won’t happen again!” 46b replied with a very anxious smile. “So, are you going to send me back now? Because I still don’t know where to go.”
23a looked away for a second, her wings humming slightly in the quiet breeze of the forest. “Well, seeing as you are already here, and we can always have an extra set of antennae, you can forage for slugs with us today. For some reason the scientists want to experiment with them, they say that we are related to them. Hogwash, I say.”
46b was delighted. “Interesting.” He replied, trying to look thoughtful. “We do look pretty alike, and some of them can fly. The only difference is that all of us can.”
“I’m sure there are a lot more differences between us and unintelligent slugs, 46b.” 23a called as she headed off, rejoining the rest of her group as 46b followed.
When the group split up to look for the slugs, promising that we would all return at this very spot, 46b was off. He looked around for loose rocks that slugs could potentially be hiding under, he used his antennae to hear where they were underneath the grass, and by the end, when he had more slugs than he could carry, he returned back to the spot where they had split up.
When he dumped all of the slugs out, he noticed that everyone else had a measly 3 or 4, some having only 1 or 2, and some came back completely empty handed.
“1, 2, 3, 4..” 46b started to count his pile of slugs, in the end reaching to 17. He moved them towards his right wing.
“I’m impressed.” 23a spoke. “Clearly gathering is for you, 46b. When we get back to the colony, I will tell someone to report this to the queen, and she will decide if your schedule shall be moved.
46b’s heart burst with pride. “Thank you, 23a.” He replied in a much calmer tone that he was actually feeling in the moment.
The solution the group had figured out to carry all the slugs back to the colony was to only bring 20, and have each person carry 3 or 4 back.
When they arrived at the colony, all seemed in peace. There were workers outside of the walls, fixing patches where holes were, and a breeze filled the area.
But then, 46b saw something in the corner of his eye. “A rival colony!” He blurted pointing to where the other colony was carrying some red sticks. They dropped them, then flew away fast.
And everything went black for 46b.
When he woke up, he heard a yelp. He was strangely refreshed and energetic for someone who had just been in an explosion.
When he opened his eyes, he found a strange object with two faces on it. 46b made a puzzled expression on his face and the object’s faces both started saying at the same time.
“What the goo are you saying?” 46b asked, confused. An odd look of recognition appeared on the strange object’s faces.
“Here, is this better now?” The object suddenly spoke in the colony language, causing 46b to jump back a little bit, into the air.
“My name is 10.” 10’s faces spoke. “So I have no clue who you are, but I was fiddling around with my recovery center and typed random letters and numbers in and you appeared. Are you 46b? Because that’s what I typed.
“Uh, yeah.. but where am I? This is not the colony.” 46b replied. He looked around again, turning around to see a large gray box with symbols that he couldn’t recognize glowing, and a conveyor belt coming out of a large black box.
“You’re at- wait.” 10 tilted slightly. “..oh. I don’t really have a name for this place but like, I’m doing a show where I have a bunch of people on it and I like, kick people off and stuff, and there’s a really cool prize! I was thinking, it’s definitely too late to join now, but if there’s another season, you should join!”
46b was confused. “Uhm, that sounds cool, I guess. But did I just die? In that explosion? Or did I just get blown all the way over here?”
10 smiled slightly. “Oh, yeah I just recovered you. I don’t know what explosion happened, but you definitely did not make it out.”
“Fantastic.” 46b sighed sarcastically. He brushed off his wings, even though they were now spotless.
“You’re funny!” 10 exclaimed. “You need a cool nickname. I’m gonna call you.. hmm.. Bug!”
Bug. He liked that name. Even though Bug liked his home, it was out of the question now. He didn’t know how long he had been gone for, and he was very far away from anyone he knew, but soon people he would know.
Starting over with a new name, new life, even new language, suddenly sounded an awful lot more appealing than somehow finding his way back to the ruins of the colony. Bug flew off with 10, ready to start his new adventure.