"What do you think, Mr. Mooshi?" I ask, leaning against my friend's adorable shell. "Am I just being paranoid?"

"No," he answers. "But not in the sense that being correct justifies paranoia, merely in the sense that you aren't harmfully impacting your life in order to try and justify your beliefs or assuage your worries. Paranoia is a serious mental condition, and while you shouldn't trust my diagnosis considering I'm just an aspect of your psyche that you project onto a large alien bug, I don't think you're suffering any symptoms that would raise a red flag. In short, you're not paranoid, just… anxious."

"So… business as usual, then?"

"Business as usual," Mr. Mooshi agrees. "Though you might be a little too comfortable with the current status quo, all things considered. Didn't you want to try and find a way home?"

That's true. I definitely do, and I've made very little progress towards that in the past month. In my defense, though, it's a big fucking problem! I'm not a rocket scientist! Like, sure, I've played enough Kerbal Space Program to have memorized the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation, but even if I can make a body that can survive the vacuum of space, and even if I can fill it with efficient enough fuel to leave the atmosphere, none of that matters because I have no idea where Earth is and, at minimum, I'm four or so lightyears away from Earth anyway. Y'know, assuming I got maximally lucky and Acidsucks happens to be Proxima Centauri b, but it almost certainly isn't. And can I just point out that 'four lightyears' absolutely fucking does not mean that I'm a four-year journey from home? The fastest man-made object ever hits a top speed of like… 0.05% of c. So that's… an eight thousand year journey! Very uncool!

This is not to say I've made no progress, though. This planet has some pretty incredible creatures on it, and sampling them has expanded my capabilities considerably. The swamp area in particular has a lot of super interesting life-forms that thrive in high-heat environments. Like the ignition hog, which is basically giant living bacon that cooks itself.

I'm not even kidding. These six-legged boar-like creatures fulfill pretty much the same niche as pigs do on Earth: they're powerful, clever omnivores that raise cute little family units and taste delicious. Unlike Earth boars, they thankfully don't seem to have any interest in rapidly expanding across the continent with reckless abandon. Also unlike Earth boars, they can set themselves on fucking fire.

Yes, I have found space Pokémon, and yes, it is awesome. See, the ignition hog can't metabolize all the hydrogen sulfide in the environment, so instead it stores the stuff, mixes it into most of the rest of its waste product, and then sweats it all out… instead of peeing, actually, which is kind of gross. But don't worry, ignition hogs stay clean by using a small spark to set themselves on fire! It smells like death and it's fucking terrifying, but the hogs are unharmed by the process. In addition to 'hygiene,' they use the ability to burst into flame as a method of intimidation and deterrent against predators, since Acidsucks is so terrible there are actually things that prey on flaming murder-swine.

Incidentally, it turns out that bacon transcends cultures. Repeat-meat pretty much all tastes the same to me and cooking it makes things worse, so I can't really enjoy it, but frying up any extra ignition hog meat I hunt after curing it with large amounts of sea salt is a new Sthrenslian favorite! And yes, I can both obtain sea salt and fry things now, because my sub-caveman fire-making techniques have been rendered irrelevant thanks to my newfound ability to set myself on fire. Take that, ancestors!

Also awesome: flamefins, which are basically chronically lazy pterodactyl-dragons. They're endothermic autotrophic thermovorous extremophiles, which is basically just the fanciest possible way I could think of saying 'they run on heat.' Sleeping for weeks at a time in or above the many fire pits in the swamp, their body generates energy by using heat to trigger internal chemical reactions. And yeah, they can spit a highly flammable fluid from their mouths that manifests as what is basically dragonbreath. Kinda shitty, anticlimactic dragonbreath, but damn it, it's still really cool!

Anyway, all these neat fire-based and heat-resistant creatures are legitimate steps towards being able to make myself into an organic spaceship, but they're not really big steps. It's still impossibly out of reach.

"Somehow, Mr. Mooshi, solving world hunger seems like a much more achievable goal," I admit. "And it's a worthwhile goal, so I'm gonna keep focusing on it for now."

"Fair enough," he answers.

As such, my main focus above ground has been expanding my sustainable food production to accommodate more than just myself and the Resonant Gems, as well as making that food production use methods that don't rely on my presence to function. The former is pretty easy. I can convert energy and matter into food in a dozen different ways. The latter, however, is fucking hard.

The vast majority of food available in the world is on the surface, because that's where the sun shines. Well, okay, it's probably in the ocean actually, but Sthrenslians are even more blind underwater than they are above ground, and also they can't breathe, so that's just even more problems on top of the one I'm already trying to deal with: how to enable Sthrenslians to farm on the surface. This is a very serious problem, and not just because the little guys are nearly blind up there. No, the issue is the fact that Acidsucks is terrible and everything here exists to kill you.

On the surface, Sthrenslian predators basically include every carnivore or omnivore larger than a human hand. Birds of prey especially are going to be a problem, as they may as well be ghost traps that teleport to your position from a Sthrenslian perspective. They're simply too small, and their world is too dangerous. The only solace they have is that a reaper maw probably wouldn't bother hunting them, since they wouldn't be worth the effort. Probably.

The first idea I had was to build the Sthrenslians some sort of greenhouse, so that they could have the safety, security, and vision of an enclosed space without blocking out access to the sun. The problem with that, of course, is that Sthrenslians don't know how to make glass and I don't either. The fires that occur naturally in the swamp as well as the fires I can produce using stolen ignition hog biology don't burn anywhere near hot enough to melt silicone dioxide. I'm pretty sure that forges work by constantly feeding the fire more oxygen, as that's like… the limit on how fast and hot the fuel can burn? I think? But my brain simulations use heuristics for non-biological problems; I can't create a mini-universe in my head and build a forge in it, I have to try to make one the old fashioned way because I definitely don't have the ability to make an organic body that can survive the necessary temperatures. …Hmm. I should swim to the bottom of the ocean, find some thermal vents, and eat everything that lives nearby. I'll put that on the to-do list. I should also just work on a non-biological forge, but it's not really a problem I want to tackle by myself and even Hsthressis is hesitant to experiment with anything that involves fire. She doesn't even want to be around when I cook!

Anyway, in summary? I've added more to my list of problems than I've subtracted, but at least I managed to subtract all the biggest problems. I've still been pretty lazy, though. I've made continual tweaks and performance improvements on most of my bodies, but I've only designed a handful of totally new ones. Most of those are just high-yield crops, too. The only totally new and interesting bodies I've designed are Evelyn Naptime (EN) and Big Dig Evelyn (BDE, hee hee).

Evelyn Naptime is my newest body, and it's very boring. It's an almost-entirely autonomous body designed to inflate and block off tunnels when I sleep. It's not really that difficult for a Sthrenslian to get through, but the hope is that it'll wake me up if one of them tries. I haven't tested it yet. Big Dig Evelyn, meanwhile, is a body designed for major excavations, such as cavern creation. I got a lot of advice from Worker Rshult about digging before designing the body, so I think it turned out really well.

“If I could choose from where I produced my acid, I would choose two places," he told me. "One: from my claws."

“Um, what? I mean, really?" I asked hesitantly. "The claws already touch a lot of acid when they dig. Won’t it eventually start eating through them?”

"You fear your own acid too much. It may be painful, but our people’s acid wants the stone, not the body. Spit it on the stone, and it will devour both only if you are slow. The acid softens the stone. That is the first purpose of acid.”

“And the second?”

“To clear the tunnel,” he said simply. “This is the other place I would leave acid, if I could: behind me, where I fling the dirt. It would save much time.”

Now that one immediately made sense. Every digging species I know of from Earth piles their dirt up outside their burrows, since it has to go somewhere. But Sthrenslians often never have anyone in the colony go to the surface at all, let alone pile dirt up there. So where does it all go? It’s dissolved, apparently, and either sinks into the surrounding dirt (when they’re digging through dirt) or becomes part of the surrounding rock (when they’re digging through stone). This dissolution-and-precipitation process is what makes sthrensian tunnels and caverns so sturdy and unlikely to collapse: they reform the rock rather than just move it. Once it sets, their tunnels are like a concrete tube. Maybe even stronger than concrete. What is it, I wonder? All the rock around the mountains is pretty pale. Limestone, maybe?

Doesn't matter. The point is, Big Dig Evelyn has Big Dig Energy. A prehensile tail and rear-facing claws enable me to do initial and follow-up tunnel work at the same time. While the front-facing claws spray acid dig out fresh rock, the rear-facing claws can pack it in to properly set, the tail providing extra acidic support wherever needed. BDE is a chonky girl, capable of carving out tunnels with a diameter of nearly four feet in the time it would take a Sthrenslian to go the same distance with less than a foot of diameter. I keep BDE in hibernation most of the time because there just isn't much demand for big tunnels or new caverns, but the body is handy to have around and I'm very happy with the design.

Other things I'm happy with: non-Sthrenslian-driven food production. The issue of making them independent from me is still a difficult one, but my fields of Ivylyn and various other crops have been working out extremely well. I'm working my way up to growing an OMNIDOME solely to work as a granary, partly so that I don't get fucked if winter happens and turns out to be really bad, but mostly so I can try to open up relations with another colony of Sthrenslians, of which I know at least two exist. I figure the best way to assuage my worries about war is to make enough allies to cleanly win any war before it can start. If I just make enough friends, nobody will want to be my enemy… and if nobody wants to be my enemy, they're certainly not going to want to make an enemy of my friends!

And speaking of my friends, well… I've conspicuously been missing memories (or updates?) on one of them. Throughout most of the past month, I haven't spent much time having all my bodies sleep simultaneously. I decided to test it since I felt safe, and… yeah, it just doesn't really seem to negatively impact me to have at least some of my bodies awake at all times, which is good because having all of me shut down simultaneously is inefficient and dangerous. But the consequence of that, I've noticed, is that I don't get the dreams anymore. And that's about to change. I want to know what happened. I want to know how I got here. So… it's back to sleep for me.

"You ready, Hsthressis?" I ask. "I can still shut you off rather than bring you along."

"Yeah, fuck that," she answers predictably. "Actually, I guess I should say thanks for being willing to have me along. I know this is personal stuff for you."

"Yeah, kinda," I admit. "I don't even know how personal they're going to be. But… well, you want to see them, and I owe you."

"Damn straight you do!"

"Good night, Hsthressis."

"Good night, Evelyn."

And so… we pass out. Hopefully what we see won't be horribly embarrassing.

I have never been more embarrassed than I am right now.

"I still can't believe how much blood that was," Tara says again, hovering protectively behind me as if I might fall over at any second. "You're absolutely positive that it's okay for you to be out and about, right?"

"Yes, same as the last five times," I whine quietly, my face rapidly morphing from pink to beet red. "It's perfectly normal."

"But how can that be normal!?" Tara hisses back. "Evelyn, I thought you were dying! You lose that much blood every month?"

"I have plenty of blood!" I insist. "How do you not know about this? Don't you have a… you know?"

"Well, yes, but mine lays eggs."

"Okay, valid point," I sigh. "But seriously, did you not pick this up from your bio-template? Or your digested memories? Or like, the internet?"

"My bio-template automatically replaces your reproductive parts with mine, delving into stolen memories feels incredibly disrespectful, and you're the one always telling me not to look up genitalia on the internet."

"Wh… that is way different!"

"How is that different?"

"It's—"

I cut myself off, sighing.

"I guess it's not. You win. But can we please stop talking about this? I'm fine. Seriously."

"All right, all right," Tara concedes, chuckling. Ugh, I swear, if she was just messing with me… eh, nah, probably not. She looked genuinely scared before. I've noticed Tara just has a really quick emotional turnaround.

The two of us are, to my extreme bewilderment, out in public. Tara doesn't seem to care if we talk about her abilities where other people can hear, assuming (likely correctly) that no one around us cares enough to listen to what we're talking about and they wouldn't assume it was non-fiction if they did. It's been a few days since our break-in fiasco, and everything already seems back to normal. I have classes, then I hang out with Tara after classes. She even somehow convinced me to go out to lunch today, and after a bit of hedging on my end we managed to make it to the mall food court. Being out together is equal parts exciting and terrifying, but I have to admit… the chinese food really is way better than it has any right to be.

Even better, Tara is paying. She has money now, apparently from selling spider silk on the street for a while before being politely informed that she needs a permit to do that. Still, silk sells well, and she got a decent sum of hard cash from the endeavor. I told her that it likely sold for so much because humans don't know how to mass-produce spider silk with any sort of cost-effectiveness, and she just responded with a knowing smile. So now the two of us are sipping Coca-Cola from actual real glass bottles which, while objectively not fancy at all, sure seems fancy as fuck to my broke college ass.

"In that case, which one of your bodily functions do you want to talk about?" Tara teases, watching my expression with a smarmy grin.

"None of them!" I protest, provoking a small, tight-lipped laugh from her as she tries to take a drink. "Come on, Tara! Conversation shift! Let's talk about… oh! What have you been reading lately?"

"Dystopian fiction, mostly," she answers. "Feed, Brave New World, The Giver. Very cautionary, very insightful. Frighteningly relevant. Good gods, was I wrong about fiction. Blah blah blah, it's not real, blah. Completely missing the point. ‘Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can.’”

“That’s a Terry Pratchett quote, isn’t it?”

“It is!” Tara confirms happily. “Frankly, I don’t like his stories at all. But I do like that quote.”

“What!” I say in only partially-mock outrage. “How can you not like Terry Pratchett!?”

“He’s… too unreal. The characters are all so absurd!”

“That’s the point! It’s a satire! He plays up overdone tropes to logical, comical extremes.”

“I’m not sure I get tropes, really,” Tara grumbles. “I browsed that website you sent me but they all just seemed… silly.”

“Hmm…” I mutter. “Maybe you just haven’t yet read enough to understand what’s being sati—”

A loud shattering sound interrupts my sentence as soda splatters across Tara’s side of the table. Panic spikes through me and I bolt up out of my chair, but Tara is motionless. Shards of glass jut out of her clenched fist, face twisted by fury. There's no blood. She shattered the bottle bare-handed, without a scratch.

“Evelyn,” my friend says evenly, icy enough to make me freeze. “What... is bail?”

“Um,” I stammer, swallowing hard. Oh no no no. Did the man—

“Never mind, looked it up,” Tara continues. “Talking to… yes. Okay. So he’s out then. His trial will be… and… a year? A year! Whereas I am in administrative detention for an undetermined and possibly indefinite amount of time. Fascinating.”

Tara takes a deep breath through her nose, unclenching her fist to let what was left of her coke bottle clatter onto the table. Immediately afterwards, a familiar voice calls out to me, because the universe apparently decided that this still wasn’t quite enough chaos.

“Evelyn!”

I turn my head to spot Samantha rushing towards me, trailed by her usual posse of Sasha, Alex, and Thomas.

“Are you alright? What’s happening? I…” she glances sideways at Tara, swallowing saliva. “I didn’t think you’d be out today.”

My mind races as I stammer to find an excuse, something that seems normal.

“Sam! Hi! It’s fine, it’s fine! I didn’t think I’d be out today either, haha! But Tara dragged me out here, and we were just hanging out, and, you know, dropped her bottle, so, it’s a bit of a mess I guess…”

Thomas nods with understanding. Ah, what a saint! He bought it! It was a good excuse, I think, right? He gets it. We're good, right? I look to the others, but they’re staring at me with a mixture of surprise and concern.

“Evelyn…” Sasha said quietly, with that careful slowness of someone questioning my sanity, “that’s not Tara.”

I look back. Of course it's Tara?

The woman with me has Tara’s laugh, Tara’s wit, Tara’s impeccable insight. She walks like Tara, talks like Tara, reads the same books as Tara, because she is Tara, wholly and completely. But I still swallow in horror as I realize my mistake: she doesn't have Tara's face. At least, not the face that Sasha and Alex knew. That body is still stuck in jail.

Shit.

"It's, uh… it's… a family name!" I blurt. "She and her sister both go by Tara. Um, y'know, like Japanese?"

No, that excuse is stupid! Distract them! Distract!

"Anyway we were just, um, talking ab-b-bout how Tara, um, I mean the other Tara, is still stuck in jail even though the other guy got out on bail—"

"He WHAT!?" Sasha roars, startling half the food court.

"Right?" I agree, momentum building. Distraction successful! We're good, things are good! Well, actually, things are terrible. This is such a mess, aaaaaah!

"It's complete bullshit!" I continue.

"It's a lot more than that!" Sasha growls furiously.

"It's more or less what I expected," Alex sighs.

“Wait, I feel like I’m out of the loop here,” Thomas butts in. “Is this the thing you guys were freaking out about the other night? Like, the sexual assault thing?”

“Alleged sexual assault,” Alex murmurs. “Innocent until proven guilty, and all that. He’s not legally a criminal until after the trial, so they can’t deny him bail unless a judge decides there’s overwhelming evidence in the initial case. The main witness isn’t an American citizen, and...”

“You're an American citizen! You saw what that rat did to her!” Sasha hisses back. Alex only shrugs.

“And if you put him in front of me I’d probably strangle him. I dunno, it’s just how it is sometimes, if you have the money for it. He might even get convicted when his actual trial happens, but his lawyers are gonna delay that trial as much as they can, then if they lose they’re going to appeal, which technically needs a basis but I don’t doubt they’ll find one, and then they’ll fight to get him out on bail during that appeal, probably bribe someone along the way, and… yeah. A year, minimum.”

Sasha smolders so furiously I'm pretty sure the ice on the table starts melting faster. Thomas looks shocked and confused, Samantha looks grim, and Tara… Tara looks calculating. The girl from another world glares icily at nothing, chewing on a thought complex enough to halt a hundred brains.

“I promise, I will do everything in my power to get your sister out of jail,” Sasha says, stepping forward. “I will not let this—”

"Don't bother," Tara grunts. "She's not my sister."

Sasha clears her throat.

"Pardon?"

"I'm done breaking my principles over petty paranoia," Tara continues, standing up. "I'm prepared now. Would any of you be opposed to a short hike? I would like to explain some things about the situation."

I stare at her, mouth agape. She catches my eyes and gives me a nod. She's… going to tell them?

Thomas, Sasha, Alex, and Samantha look between each other. Of the four of them, I only really know Samantha well. Alex is kind of cool, Sasha is intense but well-meaning, and I know basically nothing about Thomas other than that he's hot and often nearby.

I want to tell Tara to lie for me.

I do. I hate myself for it, but I do. I want this to be just the two of us, our special secret, my own beautiful bug friend. I'm utterly terrified that when she gets other friends she’ll realize what a hopeless loser I am and the two of us will drift apart. We already are drifting a little, after all. The larger she gets, the faster she changes, the less I know of her. But I won’t even be her best friend anymore, when I stop being her only friend. Still… if I try to stop her from making more, I don’t deserve to be her friend at all. So I nod back, and voice none of the selfish screams that roil inside me.

“I like hikes,” Thomas eventually ventures.

“I as well,” Tara says with a smile. “Follow me.”

From the mall back to the campus, we walk past the house Tara broke into, past the dorms, and into a very familiar forest. The forest where I found a little blue bug who changed my life. Deeper and deeper, away from the watchful eyes and ears of civilization… and towards more watchful eyes and ears of something else.

“So, uh,” Alex ventures conversationally, “you’re not like, taking us to the cabin you murder people in, right?”

Tara freezes, turning around with a look of abject terror on her face.

“H-how—”

“I-I-It’s a horror movie trope!” I blurt out, walking between her and Alex. “Cabin in the woods! It’s like a setting thing! It’s a joke!”

“Oh,” Tara says, relaxing. “Alright, then.”

“Well, it was a joke,” Alex exclaims, blinking with surprise.

“Yeah, what the fuck? That was crazy suspicious,” Samantha says. “This is all fuckin’ weird. Where are we going? Why can’t you explain whatever you’re explaining here?”

Tara scratches a cheek sheepishly.

“I suppose I can,” she admits. “I just wanted to impress Evelyn with my camp. It’s been a while since she’s seen it. I’ve spruced it up considerably! No longer just some murky, egg-filled hole in the ground.”

“Uh, what?” Thomas asks.

“Ah, and that’s the other thing, yes,” Tara says. “It will be easier to present a convincing case with… more obvious evidence. The downside to having so much fiction on your world is that everyone seems to be quite skeptical. This is mostly to my benefit, but here…” she shrugs. “I suppose I’ve gathered enough of myself to make due.”

“This is very exciting!” Sasha says, her grin showing she actually meant it. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, but you certainly have the same flair for the dramatic as your not-sister!”

"Of course I do," Tara intones. "She's me. And so is all of this."

With a rustle, three bears emerge from the brush around the forest, surrounding the group. Birds pause their song, settling en masse on the branches around us. A massive cloud of insects circle the perimeter wings thrumming almost silently. Rodents, deer, snakes… dozens and dozens of creatures surround the group of friends, huddling each other in terror. Each of them speaks together:

"I am Tleshkinat Tarakanora Se Ktahn-Hashlenesa."

She continues, alternating her speech between each of the larger bodies in sequence.

"I am the woman in front of you. I am the Tara in jail. I'm the creature on the wall Evelyn caught when you met her. I am all of these things, and I am not from your world."

"What the actual fuck is going on," Alex whispers tonelessly.

“I think your friend has super powers,” Thomas ventures.

“Super powers aren’t real!”

“I’m not so sure about that one, Alex!” Sasha hisses. “They’re looking pretty real right about now!”

I hop up onto the back of a bear-Tara, who turns her head to smirk at me with amusement. I smirk back. Okay, maybe this is worth it.

"And now you shall be assimilated!" I intone, raising my arms like a zombie. "Join the almighty hive! Your knowledge will be absorbed into the collective! One of uuuusss!"

A couple Tara bodies snort, and a bear breaks out into eerily humanoid laughter. She's been practicing better human-laughs lately, which are much easier on the ears. I do kind of miss the screechy Tara-laugh, though.

"One of us!" repeats a squirrel, and I fail to hold back a grin.

"One of us!" demands a bird.

"One of us!" a bear roars.

"One of us!"

"One of us!"

"One of us!"

Sasha’s terrified scream pierces the chanting, loud and high enough to seriously hurt. I stop chanting to cover my ears, and the others let out a series of foul explicatives, Alex and Sam smacking her lightly to make her stop. The ringing remains in everyone’s ears as Tara and I start to explain the situation more seriously. Through unspoken agreement we leave out the bits where she killed someone and gets new forms by eating them, but otherwise… we tell them everything.

“So, why us?” Thomas asks. “We’re the only ones who know, right?”

“As of right now, yes,” Tara confirms. “As for why, I trust Alex and Sasha. Samantha is Evelyn’s friend. And you… are a calculated risk.”

Thomas looks mildly offended, but doesn't comment.

“I still can’t believe this,” Alex breathes. “It just doesn’t feel real. If this is a secret, why tell us at all?”

“It’s a secret I’m keeping because I’m afraid to tell anyone,” Tara says softly. “Not because I don’t want people to know.”

“Oh,” Alex murmurs, frowning. “So you’re coming out. But rather than being gay or trans or whatever, you’re coming out as a fucking alien space monster.”

I snort, and Tara grimaces.

“I… suppose?” she hedges.

“Nah, you totally are," Alex insists. "It’s cool. As your friends, we openly accept your identity as a fucking alien space monster, even though it’s completely, one-hundred-percent super impossible.”

“I mean, I would have agreed with you half a year ago, but now it obviously isn’t,” the alien space monster grumbles.

“Yeah,” Alex agrees, eyes scanning the many Tara-bodies around the clearing. “Yeah, that’s fair.”

Silence stretches comfortably over me as I lounge on a Tara-bear. My friend is resting a bunch of butterfly bodies in my hair, which is awesome, and for once I'm generally not the most uncomfortable person nearby. All in all I'm having a great time, despite the large group.

“So you don’t even know how you became like this?" Samantha asks. "Or how you got here?”

“That’s right,” Tara confirms. “I’m not from Earth, and I was something else before I came here.”

“So… something else did this to you, and brought you here.”

“That seems likely,” Tara agrees.

“So are they here too?” Samantha asks.