I've heard people talk about body dysphoria, and while as a human I certainly understood the feeling of considering myself to be hideous and disgusting, by my understanding it's an experience distinctly different from my own bouts of dangerously-low self-esteem. I remember being told it's more like a revulsion of the body itself not only in specific details but in concept, in that at its most basic level there is some disturbing, creeping wrongness permeating every level of one's self-awareness. I worry that, given my current circumstances, I should feel like that too. But... I don't.

Every day I fall further and further from human, and while that terrifies me on an intellectual level in practice it only makes me feel better. The ESTOL bodies are the furthest things I've ever made from human; they have no head, no arms, and no legs, only wings and siphons. The way I twist my jets and glide on my wings feels like nothing I've ever experienced before. I pull air in through holes in my body, gaping tubes that run through my entire torso, pressurize it, and rocket it out through the other end. I can open them completely and feel the hollowness, letting the wind twist inside of me as it pleases while it dances over the short, sleek fur of my torso. And while I'm quickly getting lots of experience adapting to new sensoriums, the ESTOLs once again use systems totally new to me; the dome-like black heads of the eagle-bats are actually eyes, ones that can see in a full hemisphere around themselves. I've adapted them for the ESTOLs, so they don't bulge out very far and don't have quite the same range of vision, but I'm still seeing and processing an absurd amount of visual data from a single body at once. The dome-eye lacks much depth perception, but the eagle-bats are also capable of echolocation, and those senses combine unconsciously to let them—and now me—perceive the world with an intuitive three-dimensional understanding. The entire experience of being an ESTOL is completely and utterly alien in every sense of the word, and rather than being disturbed or confused as I would have expected, I just find it all extremely goddamn cool.

I mean, I made this! I know exactly how it works down to the internal anatomy. I considered all of this while I—Evelyn 'Weird Bug Girl' Montgomery—designed and crafted every aspect of this body knowing I would end up being it. When looking at it that way, how could I find it strange? How could I consider it dysphoric? It is quintessentially, categorically, unambiguously me in every possible way. Flying is cool, biological pseudo-jet-engines are cool, acid cannons are cool, and I'm kinda fucking cool. There, I said it. I'm awesome. Fuck yeah!

...Or maybe I just feel this way because I'm currently eating four unique swamp-species at once and my brains are absolutely overloading with a dopamine rush I would call 'orgasmic' if not for the fact that being an alien hive mind has turned me asexual. In the biological sense, I mean. I don't have sex organs so an actual orgasm isn't physically possible. ...Actually, wait, am I also asexual in the orientation sense now? I haven't felt even the slightest longing for that kind of thing since coming to Acidsucks, but maybe that's just the terrifying threat of death and/or loss of personhood. Hmm. Let's test this by thinking about dicks. Actually, now I'm curious, how would I even make one of those? Every species I've devoured so far uses a cloaca or external fertilization or something like that. But it wouldn't be that hard, you just basically take the tract which normally moves the sexual fluids, separate it out into its own tube, elongate the… wait. This isn't what I intended to think about. It answers the question, though, doesn't it? I'm way more interested in the puzzle of reverse-engineering a dong than I am in actually looking at one.

By the way have I mentioned that eating a new species is really fucking delicious!?

"...Er, Evelyn? Are you okay?" Priestess Saslitak asks me.

I jerk my head her way, belatedly realizing the body I've been using to follow her around is shaking while an open-mouthed grin showing lots of teeth splits my face. Right, yeah, I'm also doing things other than enjoying meals and I definitely shouldn't be acting like a total weirdo creep in public.

"Fine! Yes!" I say a bit too loudly. "I'm fine, having a great time, very good, what were we talking about?"

"Er… you wanted to see our farms," she answers. "I'm taking you to one of the public ones."

"Yes!" I snap my fingers, which causes a few nearby Sthrenslians to flinch. "I remember that, yes. Please continue. Um. Actually, when you say 'public' farms, how does that differentiate from private farms?"

"Farms that use the blessings of the homewyrm are only tended to by the best of our workers," Saslitak explains.

Hmm. 'Homewyrm' again. That thing I'm not allowed to see, whatever it is. Dang, that makes me suspicious and curious, but I really need to focus on not fucking up and doing an accidental blasphemy.

"Great, makes total sense," I lie poorly. "Lead the way!"

She does, and I'm taken through a series of strange, winding pathways that seem like they must have some kind of purpose for their shape but it isn't one I can divine until I can finally start to get closer to the farm. These tunnels must be some kind of ventilation system, because down here it very literally smells like shit.

I'd never really thought about it before, but how does a limited-space underground society dispose of their own poop? The answer, apparently, is that they don't: they recycle it. As I buzz down the tunnel and finally start lighting up the farm itself with my bioluminescence, I come across an impressively-sized room with literal fields of fungi, all of it growing from what is clearly composted poop.

"...This is pretty incredible," I admit. "Efficient use of waste product."

I recognize one kind of mushroom here from my meal with the True People, and while I'm tempted to ask for one of each of the others I know these people are in a food crisis. My own gluttony can wait until I've solved that for them. Saslitak beams at my compliment, wiggling in agreement.

"Indeed! Sss' teachings have brought us great wisdom."

I nod absentmindedly and buzz into the huge cavern, impressed with the scale of this operation. With this many mushrooms, it's surprising that they struggle from a food shortage… no, wait. My city girl energy is showing. How long do these things take to grow? I run some mental simulations on the subterranean mushroom I've already eaten, determining that, on average, they don't finish forming spores until they've been growing for fifteen weeks. Assume a Sthrenslian eats an average of one fully-grown mushroom a day, assume the Resonant Gems have one hundred members, assume that between this and their other fields they grow ten thousand mushrooms at once… yep. That's below breaking even, and I'm pretty sure I'm being generous with those numbers. There are at least a dozen workers in this field, and since I couldn't hear this far I wasn't counting them when I made my initial estimate for how many Sthrenslians are in the Resonant Gems.

That's when I realize the reverse is true for the workers; they've been here since I showed up at the Resonant Gem cave and they have no fucking idea who or what I am.

"Oh, u-uh, hello everyone!" I greet, waving. "My name is Evelyn! I know I'm probably, um, a little weird, but I'm here to help! I hope we can be friends!"

Complete silence answers me. I'm utterly ignored as the workers continue to toil away, checking mushrooms for damage and proper growth, carefully extracting the spore-filled ones and depositing them into a small leather-lined woven basket, the top of which is then sealed except for two holes that the worker sticks tentacles through in order to pop the highly-pressurized spore cap and trap it all inside. They then pass off the basket to another worker who goes around and evenly spreads the spores wherever mushrooms have been already picked. It's kind of neat, but I do feel increasingly embarrassed as I just float in the air, continually ignored.

"U-um," I manage to pipe up eventually.

"Could you stop making that horrid buzzing noise up there?" one of the workers grunts at me. "It's distracting."

I blink, taken aback.

"I… erm. Are all of you really not even remotely interested in the fact that I'm a talking, flying alien?"

There's a pause.

"...Not really."

I… huh. I float down to the worker who said that. They're still hard at work, despite the conversation.

"Um, is there somewhere I can land?" I ask them quietly. "The air-walking thing I'm doing causes the buzzing, but I don't want to mess up your pretty fields."

I also don't want to walk around in their poop, but I diplomatically avoid saying that.

Briefly, the Sthrenslian stops what it's doing to reach over with a tendril and grab me around the waist. I let out a chirp of surprise, but he just gently deposits me on his back.

"Oh, um, th-thank you?" I acknowledge, sitting demurely down with my feet under my butt.

"You're light," he grunts in acknowledgement.

"Oh, u-uh, being heavy makes it hard to fly."

"'Thly' is air-walk," he clarifies.

"Oh, yes," I confirm.

"Good, simple word," he grunts.

It really is a simple word by Sthrenslian standards. The nature of their language is more than a little difficult for me to transliterate so I mentally autopilot it ninety-nine percent of the time and ignore the ridiculous nuances, but damn are there some ridiculous nuances. Sthrenslian is a language where diction matters, certainly, but you can have a bunch of words with exactly the same diction but are completely different due to relative duration and pitch. Whenever you speak in Sthrenslian, the very first syllable out of your mouth isn't a word at all; it's spoken like one but it has no inherent meaning by itself. I'm going to translate it as the 'base note.' Every syllable of every word in Sthrenslian not only has a sound in the way English words have sounds, but they have a certain pitch and length difference from the base note. You'd have to use musical notation to write down the Sthrenslian language at all, and for obvious reasons the Sthrenslians have no real concept of 'singing.' They're always singing, it just sounds like discordant, annoying hissing because the pitch changes are meaning-motivated, not aesthetic-motivated. Anyway, when this worker says he liked my word because it's 'simple,' it's because whenever I say a word in English I default to matching the pitch and duration with the base note exactly. It's actually pretty uncommon for a word to be like that. (This is presumably because, like the creators of English, Sthrenslians wanted their language to have as much complicated bullshit as possible.)

"Thanks," I manage to say rather than ranting about any of that out loud. Go Evelyn, flex that atrophied self-control muscle!

"My name is Worker Rshult," the Sthrenslian answers. "You may stay, but please do not try to help."

"Uh, alright then," I nod, flying a different nearby body to Priestess Saslitak so she can continue the tour. I'm not really finding anything growing in the tunnels anyway. "Thanks."

In the meantime, I've finished peeling apart and slurping down every flower and bug on the outside of the swamp. Disappointingly, none of them seem to be a magical miracle cure, though I've learned some interesting things about the soil here. It's incredibly rich, but also incredibly poisonous. It's the same poison as the air, though, so this might be a good place to farm stuff…? Stuff for me to eat, anyway. This would totally kill a Sthrenslian.

With the local environment sampled, I move Squad Evelyn deeper into the swamp. It has the soggy ground and misty, humid air I associate with swamps, anyway, but unlike the very dark and brownish-grey environments I think of when considering common descriptions of Earth swamps, it's difficult to think of this place as the same. It's just so ding dang colorful here! Blue flowers with red leaves bloom near purple algae growths growing around yellow rocks next to green-tinted pools of water. It's also really, really hot! I rest the squad next to one of these pools, sampling the flowers and sniffing at the yellow stones. Considering that recognizable stench they're almost certainly sulfur, so I wonder if these green pools are like… geysers or something. That'd be cool. I can feel the warmth of the water from here.

As I stare into the pool, though, I notice something incredible. I call it a 'pool' rather than a 'lake' because it's pretty darn tiny, but as I glance down it's apparently super deep! It looks like there might even be a complicated system of underwater tunnels down there. And wait, is that… a fish!?

It is! There's a fish here! It's tiny and hard to see, barely the size of a minnow and exactly the same color as the water. But its small size means I can probably out-fight it with my ETEs. I tense up, going completely still as I wait for it to get closer to the surface. Some of the purple algae blooms float around the edges of the pool, and it seems to be moving up to nibble on them. I lock onto my target, unleash my strength, plunge into the water, and immediately start to fucking die.

My body no longer feels anything but pain as I jump into what is clearly not water at all but—and may I just say fuck this goddamn planet—a startlingly concentrated solution of all-natural acid. Even my highly resistant chitin starts rapidly burning away in an excruciating, agonizing explosion of nerves and agony. But who cares about pain? There's a fucking fish swimming in this shit and that means I want what it's got. Whatever kind of acid-resistance it has must be insane! I grab for it even as I feel myself dying, but it unfortunately and somewhat predictably gets away. Then I drag myself out of the not-water, accepting more burns on some of my hands in order to prevent myself from completely biting the dust.

"That fucking hurt," I grunt.

"That was incredibly stupid," Mr. Mooshi opines.

"Hey! How was I supposed to know it was a pool of murder-acid? There was a fish in it."

"Given what we know, the pool is probably sulfuric acid," Mr. Mooshi says, ignoring me. "Which means the poisonous gas is probably hydrogen sulfide."

Hmm, okay, that makes sense. There are sulfur deposits here, everything smells like farts, and I died really fast the first time I tried to navigate around this place. It still doesn't explain the way this place glows at night, though.

"I think it might," Mr. Mooshi argues. "And we might have a solution to our sub-caveman tech level here."

Shit, I think what he's getting at. I send one ESTOL and a couple of ETE supports further into the swamp, trying to follow wherever feels warmest. It doesn't take long until I find the source, but I'm still startled to see it.

A door to Hell.

...Not literally, of course, because Hell is not real. But back on Earth, in the Turkmenistan desert, there is a place called the Darvaza gas crater, also known as 'The Door to Hell.' And it's called this because it has not stopped being on fucking fire since 1971. It's just a rocky hole in the middle of the desert, and yet the stones continue to burn. Why? Because it's actually a slowly-leaking natural gas deposit.

This pit in the swamp is similar, but the fires burn much brighter and hotter in the twenty-foot diameter hole than the Darvaza gas crater has ever been known to. It's a moderately-sized bonfire, and one that the local flora and fauna seem quite adapted to. Black-barked trees hang branches out over the inferno, where a red-scaled pterodactyl-like creature rests happily above flames that I'm scared to even approach. I set about collecting and devouring nearby mosses and flowers, but my mind is already forming plans on how to kill and eat that big dino-bird.

Meanwhile, in less on-fire parts of the surface, I notice the sun start to set as The Little Evelyn finally gains consciousness and I punch myself out of her shell. Considering Warrior Katrk's condition, I'm definitely pulling an all-nighter tonight, but maybe I'll luck out and some nocturnal creature will be the key to saving him. Who knows?

I flex my fishy body, stretching my webbed fingers and playing around with the wicked Reaper Maw claws growing from my shoulders and cradling my head for optimal catching-and-eating purposes. Swimming with a fish tail is predictably simple and natural, but even having purposefully designed this body for speed, I'm startled by how fast it can go. Well, no reason to waste any time. I'll get used to being a cute mermaid as I go.

Rocketing off down the river, I start the second phase of my rescue mission immediately.