Service

My first moments of freedom were hastily taken away. As I was almost immediately thrown into a deep pool of liquid. This place, I would learn to be the Spawning Pool. This is where my brothers and sisters were to gestate while in our pupa forms.

When tossed into the pool, my base instinct told me to panic. With my nubs still ingrown you could imagine my confusion and terror. To finally escape the wall, only to be drowned. I held my breath as long as I could and struggled in vain to push to the surface. I saw that my siblings did not struggle against the pool. And eventually, I had to inhale the liquid around me.

Quickly it filled my lungs and I accepted my fate. Only to find that whatever liquid the pool was would let me live. That is say that the substance did not drown me, I still do not understand why or how such a thing could happen. Yet it did. I soon found myself paralyzed, unable to move and overcome with a powerful urge to sleep. My eyes were heavy and body was stiff. I quickly drifted into slumber.

When I awoke for the first time after I was cast into the pool, I found myself wrapped in some kind of clear-ish cast. It wrapped my entire body. Holding me still. My cocoon was under construction. As soon as I realized that, I had somehow also attained a… better more mature way of thinking. Somehow I knew that I was cocooning, and I also knew that my understanding had changed, and that my mind had changed.

That worried me at first but I was not awake long enough to panic. As I found myself overcome with that urge to sleep yet again. I repeated this several times. It repeated for another unknown period of time. The mental battles of questioning why I was, while fighting a terrible and powerful want to sleep. My hunger growling at me to eat... Awakening only to find a thicker cast and an utter lack of answers to why I had so little control of my fate thus far. As well as growing pains in my deepest gut.

However, as time went on the sleeping dwindled into shorter periods. And so did my time awake become longer and more clear.

Unfortunately my gestating took longer than my siblings, another missed sign of my difference. I awoke one day to my brothers and sisters breaking free from their cocoons. I tried to break free from my cocoon, but was unable. Try as I might, will power alone could not set me free. Instead, I waited.

More time passed by, I was forced to wait and sleep alone in the pool. I believe it was truly long time that I sat in the pool alone. It was hard to tell with how much I slept. My hunger was painful. The Spawning Pool could not keep me.

But on one day, I finally broke free from my cocoon, and was able to swim to freedom. That day I left the spawning pool.

And became part of the Colony.