Most of Nahma's sheddings did not have names.

There were literally tens of millions of them, distributed and scattered throughout Centropolis. They outnumbered humans two to one, which meant that trying to give every single one of them a name would not only be difficult, but borderline impossible. They possessed an intrinsic ability, one that allowed them to easily distinguish one from the other. Names were simply not necessary.

Despite that, Gren had a name.

Gren was one of the larger and older sheddings. He'd originated from one of Nahma's top-row legs, near the centipede's midsection. As a result, he was afforded a greater amount of respect from his fellow sheddings. He had a lot more strength and adaptability than most, a direct result of having simply been around for a long time. He featured a rippling green-blue hue and heavily reinforced sections. His mandibles were remarkably sharp, all four of them, and his eleven eyes were spaced with no clear thought behind them around his bullet-shaped head.

Bain had been extremely young when he'd given the name to Gren, unaware of the sheer quantity of sheddings in Centropolis. Nahma had immediately discouraged him from trying to give out any more names. Despite the fact, Gren had been extremely pleased to keep the name and flaunted it whenever possible. While it took a lot to bore or annoy a shedding, his siblings were more than a little tired with hearing his opinion on the subject.

Presently, Gren was concealed in the third floor of a mostly ruined building, chewing on a piece of rubble and curiously observing Bestmonster Bain and the evil corpse whose name was to be forgotten by all sheddings. They were removing chunks of human-made stone, trying to clear out the large cube-shaped building they had slept in that night.

Gren's head tilted in confusion. Why would one want to get rid of rubble? It didn't taste that bad, it could be put into hardening your carapace - there were so many good reasons to keep it around. Except, that's right, Bain couldn't eat rocks. He could only eat things that were either alive or recently alive. Or long dead. Pretty much anything that had been alive at any point, really.

Settling in, Gren decided to watch a bit more. Bain seemed interested in picking up larger chunks, holding them by his upper arms, and letting his lower one heal. The evil corpse was using his frustratingly admirable mental power to heave the pieces away, getting rid of them as fast as he could, and cleaning up the area in general. They were stacking the rubble in a large pile nearby.

Shrugging, Gren turned away. He didn't understand what Bain was doing, but he understood Bain wanted to do it, and that was good enough.

Wriggling slightly, he burrowed through the tasty human-made stone, digging a hole into the tunnels below. Not the tunnels Bain and his human underlings used, but the tunnels behind tunnels that belonged exclusively to the sheddings. In those tunnels, sheddings ate rats, discussed Bestmonster Bain and what he was doing, and generally helped Nahma out in any way they could. More often than not, that involved spying on brutes.

Seizing a less-than-fresh haunch of rat, Gren absentmindedly chewed on it as he crawled over his brethren, the sounds of their conversations washing over him.

"...evil corpse should die twice..."

"...centipede cult again..."

"...shadows leaking into rats..."

No important news there. At least, no new news.

Gren chuckled to himself, a low rattling sound that shook his body as he carefully moved through the crowds. It received a few odd looks from his siblings, but he ignored them. Odd looks were one thing, but his joke had been funny, and he had every intention of enjoying it all to himself. His brothers and sisters could go catch their own jokes.

He laughed this time, his whole fifteen-foot length rippling with the sound. He was being so funny today! He'd have to go tell his jokes to Nahma. The Beginner always listened.

Sometimes, the Beginner listened too much.

Every morning, Nahma would scan through every single shedding, carefully picking and choosing the information he decided was important. To have important news was to receive praise, and it felt better than anything. To have no news was to be ignored, possibly for the rest of the day.

Sheddings tried to get interesting news as often as possible.

Shaking his head, Gren wriggled out of the shedding-tunnels and into the main ones. He'd been getting a little cramped. He knew he was growing bigger, and the improved diet of old concrete was helping to reinforce his carapace and strengthen his mandibles. Supposedly, there were sheddings in the Deep that could breathe fire and move through walls without digging, but those sheddings did not come to the surface, or anywhere near it. They were dedicated to culling the ever-increasing, ever-breeding swarms of rats.

That far down, rats could get as large as twenty or even thirty feet. Gren didn't blame Nahma for bestowing greater abilities upon the Deep sheddings over those who eliminated the mere eight-foot or twelve-foot rats. After all, who needed great abilities when one could simply overwhelm their enemies in a never-ending wave of claws and mandibles? No rat on their layers could handle a good mobbing.

Rising to the surface, Gren applied a full pass-through effect to his carapace, and it slowly spread through to his insides and even the chunks of rat he'd just eaten. In a few brief moments, he was utterly unseeable. No - invisible, that was the word Bain used.

Crawling across the sides of buildings full of people hunched over desks, Gren observed the brute he was interested in. Hero, right, Bain called them heroes. Why were titles so unusual for humans? The heroes were brutes, that's what the sheddings called them. It made sense.

The brute - hero - that Gren was watching was covered in gold and white, with a shiny helmet to protect his head. Gren snorted amusedly to himself. Humans needed materials to protect themselves, but sometimes they took off the protection for no reason! They just walked around with no armor and acted as though they were completely safe!

Humans were stupid.

Well, granted, they couldn't really see the hundred-odd sheddings presently wandering across the outsides of tall buildings and through the feet of distracted humans. Gren's brethren had a lot of experience in the form of Nahma, namely that Nahma knew how to fool even the most observant brute. There were a lot of organs and reforming required to do it just right, but sheddings were versatile. They could manage.

Supposedly, humans couldn't reshape their insides. They couldn't even redo their outsides, unless they were a brute of very specific abilities. And that was another thing - brutes were limited in their power! Even the evil corpse had only one ability, to do odd things with impacts and redirecting them. Keeping them for later, like a tasty snack or a good idea. Gren shook his head in pity.

If Nahma told the sheddings to, or got involved himself, the humans would fall very quickly. It didn't matter if the brutes had a particularly unusual ability - Nahma had many, many, many powers, and the sheddings could pick and choose them at will. A helpful side-effect of being directly produced by the Beginner.

Most sheddings selected adaptability and supreme regeneration as their specialties. The abilities were extraordinarily fluid and didn't require an exceptional amount of focus to use. Gren himself was currently in the possession of those foundation two, but could also slide between spaces. It'd taken him a while to figure out how to slide between spaces and spaces, or spaces and spaces and spaces. Sometimes it stacked up more than he could manage, but he could slide all the way from the giant brute-nest to the tunnels.

Nahma had been exceptionally pleased when Gren told him the new way to use space-sliding. He'd even gone through Gren's mind to copy the method for himself! It had been an enormous honor to be able to teach the Beginner something, even if Gren was sure Nahma had known all along what it could do.

Ever since then, sheddings were encouraged to experiment with the abilities they chose, and that had opened up a wide variety of interesting uses. Such as the unseeability, for example - it was really just a creative use of adaptability, making the insides the same color as nothing.

Gren hadn't been the one to figure that one out, unfortunately. That one was used a lot.

Having finished his musings, Gren decided to abandon his observation of the gold-white brute and slid back into Bain's topside area. He tilted his head curiously. Now, Bain and the evil corpse whose name would be cursed were getting rid of the colorful splotches on the walls of buildings, scrubbing at it with squishy yellow objects that squeezed white foam. The yellow objects were remarkably adept at removing the splotches, but weren't covering an especially large area.

Gren's eyes narrowed. A good spray of shedding-acid would melt through it perfectly well. In fact, once the sheddings figured out how not to melt the human-made stone and adapted their acid accordingly, they could probably remove the splotches from Bestmonster's whole area. In one night, if there were enough of them.

The gigantic ball of fire that crawled through faraway space was beginning to move down, sinking past the taller buildings blocking Gren's view of it. Recently, a human-minded shedding had used Gren's sliding technique to slide all the way to that ball of fire. The shedding had promptly returned, but lit on fire, mostly cooked on the insides, and screaming. Nahma had calmed it down and repaired it, and the first words out of its mandibles had been "The ball does not have new food."

Helpful information. New food was always interesting.

Bestmonster and the evil corpse whose body didn't deserve to be eaten continued moving the giant pieces of human-made stone until the ball of fire was long gone. The giant cube still had a lot of holes in it, but they went back into it regardless.

Gren frowned. Having holes in one's defenses meant they were left defenseless. It would not do for Bestmonster to be left undefended. Unprotected. Nahma would be displeased if he could see it.

Taking the hole he'd previously used, Gren poked his sizable head into the shedding-tunnels and spoke loudly. "Family! Bestmonster Bain needs help!"

Heads turned, thousands of them, and questions began flooding in, faster than he could process them.

"Bain needs help?"

"How do we help?"

"Can we eat?"

Shaking his head, Gren shouted loudly. "Bain needs help! He did not ask for it, but I am sure he wants it. His cube-cave is in disrepair, and his area is dirty and in need of cleaning."

Sheddings hissed in annoyance. Bain's territory dared to need assistance? Why didn't the stupid humans help him? There were plenty of them, after all. What purpose did they serve if not to be of assistance to Bestmonster?

Gren caught their attention. "We will help! We will show the stupid humans how helpful we are, and Bain will be happy again!"

This pleased the brood enormously. While they didn't know all the details, they knew that Bain had been greatly unhappy recently, and it had involved the corpse who should die many times. To make him happier was something they very much wanted to do, especially if it was something as easy as cleaning.

Approximately an hour later, over a hundred thousand sheddings flooded to the surface of Bain's area, startling a human who began screaming. Two sheddings silenced him. They didn't kill him - Bain didn't like it when they killed humans, so they tapped into a Nahma-given ability and stilled him. He'd be able to move again in... well, they didn't really care how long it was, so long as they didn't interrupt them.

More sheddings were coming up, and Gren crawled up on top of a wall, twisting his head so he could see his family easier. "Family! We know what we have to do." He hissed the words with the hive-speak so that he wouldn't wake up Bestmonster Bain. He needed sleep and rest and a lot of food if he wanted to fully regenerate a limb. Although no shedding would admit Bain had a shortcoming, it was unfortunate that it took so much time and effort to regain something as simple as a limb.

The family assorted into a jumbled heap, sitting and crawling all over each other, millions of eyes looking at Gren and blinking, shining and glittering in the reflection of the white ball in the sky. Now that ball had been conquered - Nahma's family was efficient in their strength and speed. It had taken some time to get used to the lower weight and lack of air, and the sheddings living on it had had to get rid of their lungs. Some problem with imploding or something - it wasn't important. The point was that Nahma's family was already digging tunnels and setting up caves, collapsible areas, and all sorts of fallbacks. It could prove helpful if they wanted to expand further than just the main ball of rock and water and dirt they were based in.

Shaking the train of thought off, Gren announced, "Bain wishes to rid this area of colorful splotches and unnecessary pieces of human-made rocks. If you can fill holes in buildings and make them as smooth as the rest of it, do so. Remember, stay as quiet as you can! Bestmonster needs his sleep!"

The family nodded as a whole. Bain's well-being was of utmost importance.

They got to work.