X00CHIMERA_noveladaptation_october23.avi

#1

Continued From Man Proposes, God Disposes

The second sunset led to a dissolution.

Wounds, not just more than it could adapt to. Signs of faulty adaptation. The trail of iridescent blood led into the squat concrete building, painting a grisly picture.

In the cold, rot had yet to set in. The material was still usable, still more than sustenance. Chimera had arranged the gore into a nest, and forced the heavy steel door of the building shut with what strength it had. It could afford no interruption.

Inside its chest, it could feel stirring. The depths of its being knew it could not persist in its current state. New changes were coming, and it could afford the vulnerabilities of its form no longer. The fresh thoughts, brought to understanding in the language it had taken from its prey, now raced between fear and excitement.

Instinct had dictated its evolution before, it had never understood itself in these moments. It had never thought to fear the changes - it had never thought, not really. The thoughts racing through its mind did not resist the instincts that directed it to crawl atop of the mound of flesh. It could identify a feeling of wonder, and resignation. It wished to know itself.

It laid its head down, and closed its three sets of eyes as it fell into a deep slumber. The new thoughts seemed to melt away, as its breathing slowed.

And then stopped.

Skin sloughed away, fur matting and dissolving as enzymes erupted from the creature's pores. Nerve bundles and veins repurposed themselves into root-like tendrils, which drank heartily from the spilled blood on the ground. Bones rapidly split and reformed into a slowly advancing shell of needle-like filaments, wrapping themselves around the corpses. The abdominal sac that once contained the creature's vital organs split into petals, accepting the gathered biomass and wrapping back into the rapidly calcifying cocoon.

It took much of the evening to rebuild itself. Although the room was silent, inside of the cocoon a violent and chaotic transformation was taking place.

The Chimera regained awareness as a brain re-emerged. It felt the fibrous material that the prey wore on their bodies dissolve and reconstitute into its being. It understood that it was being rebuilt from what was left of itself, and them, and something else entirely.

There were pieces it could not consume, strange objects that had been affixed to the prey by the others who built this place. Temporary appendages inside of the cocoon attempted to tear them apart, to understand and repurpose the material. It could not.

Burning liquid had been used to destroy its skin, to fend it off. It grew organs to synthesize a defense of its own, and to generate heat in the hostile environment it found itself in.

It had been unable to chase prey through tight spaces. An overabundance of limbs, and size ill-suited to this environment. Its skeleton reformed, leaner and more akin to the creatures it needed to understand and consume.

Metal had been used to tear it apart, to pierce its flesh. Thick scales took the place of hide. Fur reformed only where necessary.

There were others. They smelled dead, yet moved. Something inside of them stirred. Language began to take a greater role in its assessment of its surroundings, as the larval form inside of the Chimera wrapped itself in increasingly dense cerebral tissue.

The eyes it had seen through before had not been a hindrance, nor had its teeth or claws. It did not do away with the things that had found it prey in the past. While it had shed the toxic quills that felled the third human it encountered, it knew its new adaptation would prove more than adequate.

It retained the blade at the end of its tail. While effective, the true reason it retained the form was that it had grown accustomed to feeling it occasionally scrape against the ground. Familiarity. Yes, this was something it desired.

Before long, the transformation had stopped. Rest, if it could be called that, was what the Chimera needed. It slept, and dreamed for the first time.

Old sense-memory. Older than the moss or fungi, the spiders, the flies, the wolves or the deer. Older than trees. Older than the first human.

Millions of waves of heat and cold, a great dying, and before that an eon of dormancy in dead vacuum.

There had been others like it. Once, they had roamed freely. Felt joy and hate and all of the emotions the humans understood. They felt things the humans did not understand, and so the Chimera could only faintly grasp them in its slumber. It yearned for that knowledge.

Their reality had been torn from them once before. An old pain that could not be fought against. A sudden change in circumstance that rendered every adaptation moot.

What were they to do? There had been no other choice. No option that felt acceptable, and yet they had to choose.

So it was.

The room had become stiflingly hot. The cocoon stirred, cracking open and flaking into thin shards as the Chimera emerged. It opened its sets of eyes, gazing down at its new form.

Standing on two limbs, as they had. The forelimbs functioned to manipulate, and as secondary locomotion. It stretched out the five digits on each hand, all tipped with claws. Useful.

Clearing its throat, the Chimera spat on the ground nearby. The glob of iridescent orange material landed on the bare concrete, bubbling for a moment before bursting into a bright, short-lived blue flame. Its single, forked tongue licked the chemical from its mouth.

The lizard-like skull it had reshaped for itself was not adapted to speech, but it was more effective in its given circumstance. Other adaptations managed to improve its capacity for communication.

"Fire. I will keep myself warm. I will burn them."

Simple statements. Spoken in a voice well-suited to more than mimicry.

It remembered something, something taken from one of those it had consumed.

"Fire is an achievement to them, isn't it? Stolen from their gods."

Gods. It didn't know what they were, but that turn of phrase was now known to it. Language. Truly their most potent adaptation. The Chimera did not know if it belonged to its own kind, as well.

It would use this to learn what it could from them.

Three devices all sat at the bottom of the cocoon, covered in fluid but otherwise undamaged. It recognized them now - all of the humans wore these. They knew they contained information.

It needed what was inside.

Picking up the first device, the Chimera attempted to operate it. The screen briefly flashed, characters appearing, before it fell dormant again. The second device was the same, and the third.

"Parti-ci-pant. De-ceased."

Participant. Is that what they called themselves, or what the others called these humans?

Deceased. Inactive, consumed. Unable to adapt further.

In frustration, it cast the device aside, shattering it against a concrete wall. There was nothing more to be gained here.

Forcing the door to the Armory back open, the Chimera was met with a wave of cold. Its eyes narrowed as it stepped out onto the Island once more.

It wished to know itself. It needed one of them alive.

((Chimera continued elsewhere))