Laying on the rock, Pinkie Pie peered down the ridge. Fluttershy, who was good at stalking but didn’t like to be good at stalking was hidden under a bit of sweet smelling sage brush just behind her.
What are they looking at, or if we are to be specific, what is it that Pinkie is looking at and Fluttershy is hearing about in loud, reedy whispers?
“It’s a base! And the hatchery is going Woohoohooh, so I think that means it’s becoming a lair! And look, all the little drones are harvesting, and that one’s turning into an evolution chamber!”
Fluttershy crawled forwards and peeked down. Indeed, such was as had been said. A bustling little zerg haven in the waste, little more than a nest hidden away in a nook in the rock.
She could see that. She could hear it and smell it too. But being zergified had given Pinkie and her more senses than that. Cladenstine, tickly feelings that lurked at the edge of conscious thought. “Like another sort of Pinkie Sense,” Pinkie had tried and failed to explain. If Pinkie had it, she didn’t notice.
There wasn’t room in her bright, musical mind for this kind of quiet, oily suggestion, like a memory or a thought that came from somewhere else. It spoke to Fluttershy now, and it warned her. Something was wrong, it said. Wrong here, and wrong with these zerg, but for the life of her she couldn’t discern what it was.
Their small band of zerg waited further down the trail, their uncomplicated minds forwards and efficient. They waited with only passing curiosity about the scent in the wind. Where Pinkie and Flutters lead, they’d follow.
The age old adage about being told to jump and asking how high works to express this sort of loyalty, but completely misses the oppurtunity to go into detail about bulging tendons, muscles that make bioartificing an artform, and the teeth. Oh, the teeth. Lots of teeth. Pointy teeth.
Except for Big Bertha, the infertile Swarm Host who acted as their travelling cottage and even sometimes got a passable wifi signal going. She had big elphantine molars, because she was a grazer through and through. And Silky Wriggles, the larva, asleep or at least lurking in his cot inside her.
Fluttershy could touch their minds. It was a sensation that grew stronger as she grew into her new form, carapace and slither-wings and all. Pinkie could to, and it seemed to come easier to her, perhaps because she accepted it without doubt. But Fluttershy could feel enough to know where they were, know the budding personalities of each.
There wasn’t much personality to any given zerg, she knew. It seemed to be something the two ponies had brought with them. Small qualities, tiny impressions of Fluttershyness and Pinkie Pieness that struggled to sprout from the tiny alien minds.
It added a strange familiarity to them all. All zerg carried a sort of token sensation, a marker to declare who lead them. It was then that Fluttershy realized what was wrong with the zerg below.
“Pinkie,” she began worriedly, and only became worriedly-er when she realized that Pinkie was not here. She was down there, in amidst the drones. The feral drones. “Oh dear,” Fluttershy whispered and hurried after her.
“Hello my dronies!”
This, Pinkie reflected, had been a bad opener. Oh, it’d gotten their attention all right, yes it had. But it had gotten the attention of their heavy claws, too. Drones aren’t known for speed, but they chase with a dogged persistence. What they lack in killing power they make up for with bloody minded purpose.
It wasn’t hard to keep pace and lead a merry game around the twitching, pulsing hatchery, but she was aware that it had to end sometime. There were funnier things to do than to play the game of drones, after all.
“Oh my, oh dear, oh my.” This was Fluttershy, who looked like a hellish spectre of angelic badassery of vaguely Diablo Two Tyraelish proprotions with her flickering wing tendril-feathers, but sounded like a Fluttershy. Her hooves were over her mouth in distress as she fluttered fitfully above them. “Pinkie, watch out!” she cried.
Three drones had circled around the other way, cutting Pinkie off. She ducked into the mineral line only to find another two coming up through the gaps, cutting off her escape.
She was surrounded. The first claw hit scraped her like the Wrath of Crabs. The ocean going kind mind you, not...the other kind. Five damage. Five damage, Five damage, five five five.
Then, Pinkie Pie walked through the drones, out into freedom. No, seriously, through. Not pushing aside, no. Through as in one definite bit of matter moving in exactly the same space as another, seperate bit of matter. Fluttershy gawked. Pinkie Pie stuck her tongue out and bolted away.
“How...how did...went right through...”
“I was raised a rock farmer!” the zerg mare cried as she bounced off a drones head and scrambled up the hatchery’s side. “I just decided I was going to go mine the mineral patch over there, and suddenly the universe allows you to do that sort of thing.”
She caught Fluttershy’s slightly concussed look. “I wasn’t actually going to go mine it, silly! But don’t go telling the universe that, okay? Our secret,” she said with a wink. “Now brohoof the hatchery with me.”
Too stunned and baffled to object, Fluttershy did as requested. They bumped it in synch, to a sensation like a door being flung open, with all the stirring of air that entails.
Yellow and pink, Fluttershy saw. The buildings, the drones, maybe even the creep itself took on the hues. They had assumed direct control.
Pinkie leapt, punched the air, then fell like a rock star into the waiting sea of claws of what could now be appropriately called her ‘dronies’. “We’re in business, baby! Wooo!”
Fluttershy sent out the call, and soon the rest of their own band descended on the nest, making themselves at home. The zerglings took up burrows near the extractor, their exact places a private and complicated affair of internal politics and ever-shifting status. Big Bertha was getting comfortable near the drones and leant them the shade of her bulk.
The hydralisk curled up to nap atop the budding evolution chamber. How easily it all fits in, Fluttershy mused. Maybe wondering how a few feral stragglers came to be out here in the first place was a pointless, fretful thing, like wondering just how the zergy senses worked.
But she couldn’t the nagging worry, a discomfort of suspicion she could not place nor could evict from her thoughts.
She wondered how her friends were doing, so far away.
Then she shooed the drones back to work and dragged Pinkie into their Swarm Host cabin, to give those gashes a good warm soapy wash, then dose them with iodine and ointment. The recuperative powers of zerg anatomy was one thing, but Fluttershy in one of these nursing sorts of moods was quite another and against this no wonder of regeneration could compare, or would even dare to.