Post by Rooks on Sept 12, 2016 19:40:24 GMT
I am not sure if this counts as OC story or fanfic, but feel free to comment either via PM or a separete thread if you'd like. Updates will be in new posts, so I would like to keep this one clean.
Chapter 1: Birth
From the very first moment of her consciousness and even before that, long before that, Lume had been changing. Growing. Learning. She had become aware of herself, of this very fact hours before the light of day first touched her thin, leathery, unfinished carapace. Tumbling onto the ground had been an unpleasant shock, and the instinctual panic when she'd realized that there was no meal waiting for her, no soft, slimy bed of webbing for her to preserve her moistness and molt within had been replaced by a calm sense of purpose once she'd found herself below ground from her disoriented flailing.
She had found worms and small mammals to make up for the lack of provisions until her first shell, a reddish-brown, almost mechanical-looking thing, had hardened around her and she'd cut her way out of the skin of infancy, but as she tasted her first meal there was a... wrongness to it, something she could feel in the first returns of life-sustaining energy from digestion. The food was good, yes, and it would keep her alive and growing, but she felt it was not what she was supposed to eat. Not clean enough- not pure enough for one such as herself. She was able to identify a loss of some kind. Of a limb? Of an opportunity? Never mind any of that, she needed much more food if she were to grow, and for that she needed to learn how to get food in the first place. With this in mind, she set forth, up and out of the burrow.
Lume bore four sets of limbs, but only the first and last pairs were suited to walking. Reddish-brown plates flexed outwards as she took her first steps raised up off of the dirt, surfacing for the first time. She stood not unlike a maned wolf, and with her limbs at the moment far too long and spindly for her body, her first time on legs was a clumsy, short expedition that brought her towards a lake, and a calm curiosity helped her along. She was not much bigger than and a bit lighter than a wolf, much of her weight resting in her ceratopsoid head and the muscular tail that hovered behind her, easily one and a half times her body's length. At her back were two misshapen, long-fingered limbs for purposes her instinct did not prepare her to discern, and so she kept those tucked around the dorsal tubes that spread broadly behind them, and a similar, tiny, folded-in set of arms sat unmoving and unmovable against her ridged, double-braced chest. spreading her forelegs and dipping her near-featureless face towards the water, Lume drank deeply, not even paying mind to the fact that soon the water took on an acidic taste, and the algae against her bare, grey gums was quickly withering and dying. At first she scooped water into a large, toothless maw, then as she found she could not hold it there long enough to swallow properly, spat it back out again. Her next attempt was to plunge the end of her muzzle beneath the gentle ripples, and to try and lick the surface- with what? A tongue, her mind explained, but the xenomorph had nothing of the sort, and so to improvise, she ejected her very throat from it's confines, and found that she could suck the water into the toothy, extendable tube it formed, an unexpected but helpful ability.
The once simple and barren jaw emerged out of the water adorned with the tips of tiny, silvery daggers and oozing strong acid. Lume did not consciously notice this fact, for she had had a set of tiny, hooked incisors before her arrival into the world, and had not noticed when she had lost them. She had been too busy satisfying her thirst to notice the pain, and the bleeding was not a noteworthy loss. She begun wondering about the sounds around her, having inherited her predecessor's curiosity, and though she did not yet have the knowledge that this was unusual, she felt as if both her host and 'father', and to the lesser degree the arachnoid capsule that had carried her from the latter to the former were still guiding her with snippets of memories and musings. Now that she had drank, her stomach was better prepared for a meal, and she knew that the woods about her were very alive. She also acknowledged that she was quite out in the open, and that it was well time to do something about that.
A dark form slipped easily away into the tall reeds, moving with the wind and navigating by scent, sound, and a sense far less understood, either by herself or by the other few of her kind that possessed it.
Chapter 1: Birth
From the very first moment of her consciousness and even before that, long before that, Lume had been changing. Growing. Learning. She had become aware of herself, of this very fact hours before the light of day first touched her thin, leathery, unfinished carapace. Tumbling onto the ground had been an unpleasant shock, and the instinctual panic when she'd realized that there was no meal waiting for her, no soft, slimy bed of webbing for her to preserve her moistness and molt within had been replaced by a calm sense of purpose once she'd found herself below ground from her disoriented flailing.
She had found worms and small mammals to make up for the lack of provisions until her first shell, a reddish-brown, almost mechanical-looking thing, had hardened around her and she'd cut her way out of the skin of infancy, but as she tasted her first meal there was a... wrongness to it, something she could feel in the first returns of life-sustaining energy from digestion. The food was good, yes, and it would keep her alive and growing, but she felt it was not what she was supposed to eat. Not clean enough- not pure enough for one such as herself. She was able to identify a loss of some kind. Of a limb? Of an opportunity? Never mind any of that, she needed much more food if she were to grow, and for that she needed to learn how to get food in the first place. With this in mind, she set forth, up and out of the burrow.
Lume bore four sets of limbs, but only the first and last pairs were suited to walking. Reddish-brown plates flexed outwards as she took her first steps raised up off of the dirt, surfacing for the first time. She stood not unlike a maned wolf, and with her limbs at the moment far too long and spindly for her body, her first time on legs was a clumsy, short expedition that brought her towards a lake, and a calm curiosity helped her along. She was not much bigger than and a bit lighter than a wolf, much of her weight resting in her ceratopsoid head and the muscular tail that hovered behind her, easily one and a half times her body's length. At her back were two misshapen, long-fingered limbs for purposes her instinct did not prepare her to discern, and so she kept those tucked around the dorsal tubes that spread broadly behind them, and a similar, tiny, folded-in set of arms sat unmoving and unmovable against her ridged, double-braced chest. spreading her forelegs and dipping her near-featureless face towards the water, Lume drank deeply, not even paying mind to the fact that soon the water took on an acidic taste, and the algae against her bare, grey gums was quickly withering and dying. At first she scooped water into a large, toothless maw, then as she found she could not hold it there long enough to swallow properly, spat it back out again. Her next attempt was to plunge the end of her muzzle beneath the gentle ripples, and to try and lick the surface- with what? A tongue, her mind explained, but the xenomorph had nothing of the sort, and so to improvise, she ejected her very throat from it's confines, and found that she could suck the water into the toothy, extendable tube it formed, an unexpected but helpful ability.
The once simple and barren jaw emerged out of the water adorned with the tips of tiny, silvery daggers and oozing strong acid. Lume did not consciously notice this fact, for she had had a set of tiny, hooked incisors before her arrival into the world, and had not noticed when she had lost them. She had been too busy satisfying her thirst to notice the pain, and the bleeding was not a noteworthy loss. She begun wondering about the sounds around her, having inherited her predecessor's curiosity, and though she did not yet have the knowledge that this was unusual, she felt as if both her host and 'father', and to the lesser degree the arachnoid capsule that had carried her from the latter to the former were still guiding her with snippets of memories and musings. Now that she had drank, her stomach was better prepared for a meal, and she knew that the woods about her were very alive. She also acknowledged that she was quite out in the open, and that it was well time to do something about that.
A dark form slipped easily away into the tall reeds, moving with the wind and navigating by scent, sound, and a sense far less understood, either by herself or by the other few of her kind that possessed it.