Gorgon's Wrestling Radroaches!
The radroach leads a very simple life. It has eyes and antennae that tell its pea-sized brain if it is looking at something it could eat or something that could eat it. If it is not looking at food, the radroach moves on. If it is looking at food, the radroach eats it. But the real complicated thinking comes when the radroach meets something that could be considered either food or a thing that makes food out of the radroach. Then the radroach will stop, flutter its elytron, and chitter incessantly as it tries to intimidate the maybe-food-maybe-not to stop whatever it was doing so the radroach’s brain can take the time to process a fight-or-flight response. This is usually when the radroach is squished.
In terms of brainpower, mother nature and father fallout have been grievously unkind to the radroach.
It’s not easy to remember things when all you notice is ‘food,’ ‘not food,’ ‘maybe food,’ and ‘squish.’ It all blends together in a smudgy haze, right up until that last part which is usually crystal clear because that’s the last thing you ever see. So most of the past is all smeared windows and murky screens until day one. That’s when some kind of window cleaner began to set up shop in my mind, and the days stopped blending together in a haze. Metaphorically. My head wasn’t big enough to hold a large scone, let alone anything big enough to clean a window. But that’s beside the point.
My name is Skitters. I know three friends in this world, and we’re all looking for somebuggy we lost.
It started just after the windows in my head started to clear.
Day 1
I was fighting Jitters.
Fluffy had already pinned Clyde (again), so the two of us had taken centre stage. Our hairy little legs groped for purchase on each other’s slippery carapaces. We moved into each other, both slowly raising our front ends up at an increasing angle. Jitters ducked deftly and knocked me over with his head, sending me splashing onto my back. Jitters made the leap to pin me, but I got all six of my legs raised, catching and throwing him behind me to collide with the wall. Righting myself with a flip, I chattered and charged right at Jitters. Before I could react, he lowered himself, tucked neatly under my abdomen and, with a move that no doubt left our Coach with a tear of pride, flipped me back onto my back while swiveling himself to pin me to the ground. I struggled to break free.
A massive thud rumbled through the ground. One.
It happened again. I could feel it from my setae right up to my antennae. Two.
And a third time. Three. A piercing whistle followed the third thud, and at its command Jitters scuttled off of me and the two of us stood at attention. Clyde and Fluffy did the same. We all turned our attention to Coach.
Towering above, this mountain of a monster beamed at us proudly. A small, silver whistle dropped from his grinning, fanged mouth. The slits in his golden eyes smiled at us. He turned and stomped through the sludge on the ground to open up our cages with a membranous wingtip. He blew sharply on his whistle, and the lot of us marched obediently inside. He gripped the top of the cage that Jitters and I shared, hoisting us to the lone desk in the room and the only spot that wasn’t littered with garbage. He brought Clyde and Fluffy’s cage right on top of ours.
Coach paced in the small room for a few laps, rainbow sludge coating his hooves. He looked at the assortment of mementos collected on his desk, gazing at each of them funny. He stared long and hard at a figurine. Then he turned to us, and his guttural throat tried its best to form something vaguely in the same regional area as words.
“Night, Skitters. Night, Jitters. Night, Fluffy. Night, Clyde.”
Then Coach hopped into the torn, beaten, and worn nest he called a bed. He spun himself around seven times and dropped down so heavily that everything not nailed to the floor did a little jump. Then he started snoring and we all drifted off to sleep.
Day 2
I woke up the next morning feeling as if something was off. Like I was too big for my exoskeleton, or there was a humming just outside my range of detection. I couldn’t quite place my leg on it, but I just knew it was there. Maybe Jitters felt it, too. He was up early as well, and I could hear Fluffy and Clyde scampering about in the cage above us.
Our restless scuttling and chittering must have woken up Coach. He yawned a wide, fangy yawn and dragged himself off of his bed. His head and chest landed in the rainbow goop, and he slowly pushed himself forward with his hind legs, serpentine tail waving in the air. When he had cleared a swath of goop all the way to the door and bumped his muzzle on the wood, Coach finally lifted himself up and pressed something on a white box in the wall.
“B-be right there, Gorgon,” said the box.
“Nguh…” said Coach to the box.
This is when it first started happening.
As a radroach, I’m well aware that I have a pretty limited frame of reference. There are a few reasons radroaches are never seen as traveling wordsmiths, playwrights, bards or other masters of the tongue-waggle. And it isn’t just because we have no tongues. So it is difficult to describe what it felt like. You could call it a word, but that would be an oversimplification. A word was in there, certainly, and the concept of words and sentences and phrases would make me giddy at a later date. But this… thing that I heard was much more. This aberration snuck into my head and delivered more than communication. As Coach planted himself in front of the door, again shaking everything not nailed to the floor, I didn’t just hear something. I felt it. I consumed it. It rang in my head, more visceral than anything I could hear with my setae or feel with my antennae or taste with my mouth. And it all came in one word.
Foalgers…
At first I panicked. I ran straight into the bars at the strange feelings and sounds that seemed to come from nowhere. When I hit the mesh I tried to fight, biting it with all of my strength. When fight and flight failed me, I lay as still as a giant brown pebble, and waited for the ‘squish’ that usually caps a radroach’s simple response system.
There was a soft tapping on the door. Coach swung it open, and a shivering earth mare was framed in the entryway with a steaming mug in her hooves. A rhythm began to play inside me, matching her terrified shudders.
Please don’t eat me Please don’t eat me Please don’t eat me Please don’t eat me-
The sound cut out as Coach snatched the mug and slammed the door in this poor mare’s face. He sauntered nearer the bed and lifted a syringe from the ground. It was filled with the same rainbow-coloured sludge that spilled over most of the floor. That was easy to recognize- we usually finished training covered in the stuff. Coach squeezed the needle empty into his hot mug of brown liquid.
The best part of waking up… I shuddered as things that weren’t me sang in my head, Is putting taint in cup.
Then Coach drank his tainted cup of coffee.
Then I asked myself what coffee was.
Then I told myself it was a musky brown drink that gave you energy and was made from beans.
Then I asked myself what a bean was.
I told myself it was a little pod that came from plants.
I asked myself what a plant was.
It was incredible. Mind blowing. Perhaps literally! One moment I had only thoughts of running or eating, and the next there was coffee and beans and plants and dirt and raiders and clothing and socks! It was magical. I ran through every word I could think of, checking them off in a list in my head. As I chittered and chattered in excitement, Coach paced around the room. He lifted things and looked at them in that slow way that you just can’t pull off with compound eyes. He passed his weird eyes over everything that lay on his desk, and I tried to find a word for the strange way that he looked at his assembled treasures. I didn't quite know what the word was.
He looked at pictures. Pictures of ponies. He lifted each of them, staring so intensely it almost seemed like he wanted something to happen. Coach’s words drifted through my head as he sifted through them.
Sorry, Macintosh. Sorry Vanity. Sorry Echo. Sorry Psalm. Sorry Applesnack. Sorry Jetstream.
He put down the photos and lifted a thin wooden thing in his mouth. A pencil, I thought with a hint of smugness. Coach spread a sheet of paper and drew the pencil across it in thick, broad strokes. When he was finished he folded the paper and held it down with one hoof, scrawling one final line on the top. He picked up a figurine that sat on his desk, putting it on the paper to hold it down. He looked into the figure’s magenta eyes.
Sorry I not awesome, Rainbow Dash.
Coach got still for a real long time until he noticed that we were practically flying around in our cages. He slowly rose to all four hooves and sauntered to the shelf where he kept our food in a big bag with a smiling cartoon dog. He slid his wing under the bag and brought it to us, throwing hooffulls of kibble through the mesh.
“Bye, Skitters. Bye, Jitters. Bye, Fluffy. Bye, Clyde.”
Once the giant, talking bat/pony/snake monster had finished feeding the mind-reading wrestling cockroach, something weird happened.
This wasn’t a cage. This was… well, I didn’t really know. I wasn’t focusing on where I was at the time. But I knew it sure wasn’t a cage! My focus was instead on a thing before me. It looked like the attendant that brought Coach his coffee; a pony. But it looked much more dead. And pink. And it was talking to me.
“And that is why I’ll be sending you to… encourage production. The only ponies at Brimstone Falls not working their hardest will be the stone ones. Understand?”
“Nguh,” I slurred through my fangs.
“A ‘yes’ will suffice, Gorgon.”
“Nguh.”
“I swear, the cockatrice I fused you with was more responsive. Now get going. I know you don’t have anything to pack, so I want you gone by tomorrow morning.”
“Nguh.”
The next thing I saw was Coach’s serpentine tail out the door.
-
The door opened one more time that day. I perked up, hoping that Coach had finally come back to let us out for training. Instead it was Coach’s attendant, the mousy mare that brought him his cup of coffee. That word still gave me an exciting chill of novelty. ‘Coffee.’ The mare gulped before she stepped into our room, and…
And I was looking at four radroaches in two cages on a desk at the other end of the room? I stretched a hoof out in front of me before pulling it back, scanning the floor for rainbow goop.
The floor is covered in taint guck! I seemed to be thinking, Better not step in any. I sure don’t want to end up like… ugh… Gorgon…
I stepped carefully on the patches of floor not bathed in sludge, avoiding anything with an even remotely rainbow hue. I finally made my way over to the desk that bore Coach’s pictures, figurine, and us. My eyes caught something new; there was a letter weighed down by his Rainbow Dash figurine. There was sloppy, blocky writing on it that read: To ta ponee tha killed me.
As if anypony could take down Gorgon.
I ignored the letter and looked through the junk on the desk, pointedly not paying attention to the skittering and chattering in the two stacked cages beside me.
Where does he even leave the food? And how am I supposed to give it to them? My eyes caught a bag of kibble on the shelf. It was on the wall on the other side of his bed. Unfortunately, this brought my eyes to the radroaches I was here to feed. Disgusting. Those things were creepier than Gorgon, and they always looked ready to jump out and eat me! It was ridiculous… I worked for a monsterpony and I lived with the toughest fighters this side of the Hoof, but those beady little eyes always terrified me. Was one of them dead? It was lying in the bottom cage, just looking straight at me…
And then I was looking right at the attendant from inside my cage.
The change of scenery and scale shocked me so much that it kicked my flight response again, sending me running at the cage and, I suppose, at the mare outside. She let loose a shriek more piercing than Coach’s whistle and turned right around, galloping out of the room and slamming its door behind her.
What was her problem?
Day 3
Hunger.
That’s what I was feeling. It began with a ‘huh’ sound, like you would say if you were confused. Then it made a ‘ng’ like when Coach talked. Then it went ‘urrr’ like when Coach stubbed his hoof on something. I couldn’t say any of these sounds, but I knew what they meant when you put them together. Hunger. I did not like hunger.
It took all of the wonderful things I was thinking right into the back of my mind. It made me stop thinking about things that weren’t happening right now and focus on my rumbling stomach. One moment I was marveling at my newfound imagination, pretending that Coach was here when he really wasn’t and picturing us all training in the rainbow muck, and the next moment the only thing in my head was a single, solitary thought:
Hungry.
Hungry.
Hungry.
Hungry.
Four single, solitary thoughts? Was this part of thinking? Did you grow new parts that thought next to the thinking parts you already had?
Food, one of the other thinking parts thought.
Food! I agreed.
Food! agreed another.
Cage, argued a separate one.
That was a good point. Everybug was locked inside a cage and I couldn’t see any way to open it from the inside. Now, if Fluffy and Clyde could think, they’d start hopping around in their cage. They might be able to tip it off of the cage Jitters and me were inside, and the latch could open when it-
CRASH!
I barely noticed when the cage flew past my own. It only really hit me when the prison crashed into the ground below with a smash. There were scuttling sounds somewhere beneath the desk. After what sounded like some considerable effort, a pair of waving antennae poked up from the edge of the desk, followed by a chattering head.
Fluffy? I thought.
Fluffy. She confirmed.
-
Food.
Food.
Food.
Food.
Food. It was so close, and yet so far. The four of us stared longingly up the wall to where the bag of kibble sat, leaning off of a shelf maybe five-or-so lengthwise radroaches off of the ground.
Or four, Thought Jitters.
Four radroaches long. I pondered something. I checked with the others. They, too, pondered something. I had reason to believe that they pondered what I pondered, and indeed they did. Except Jitters, who was considering cannibalism.
Still, he was willing to give our idea a shot.
Eventually I managed to clamber onto Fluffy’s back and steady myself against the wall. Beneath me, Fluffy almost tipped but flailed to regain her balance. I looked up. The bag was so close I could almost taste it. Jitters was at the bottom of our little totem pole, leaning on the wall for some height. Fluffy was on him, I on Fluffy, and Clyde was just climbing off of Jitters to Fluffy. We almost started to tilt when he finally reached my back.
I could see him slowly close the gap on our prize as six pairs of legs carefully crawled past my head. I saw his mandibles fervently snapping at the bag, and I didn’t need to be psychic to feel his desperate hunger as he climbed. I also didn’t need to be psychic to feel the pain as Clyde stepped on one of my sensitive antennae.
PAIN, I transmitted, losing my grip on the wall. Our little tower of roaches slowly began to tilt and sway, a grand total of twenty four legs to wave helplessly as we rocked back, then forth, then back and backer and we came apart. The lot of us came tumbling to the ground, Clyde landing in a dense concentration of the rainbow muck.
We were splayed across the floor. Each of us was bruised, and Clyde was covered in the goop that Coach usually wiped off after practice. There was a word for this. I had picked this up yesterday.
Stupid.
Stupid.
Hurt.
Eat?
It took some persuasion, but we convinced Jitters to put off the cannibalism for one more day.
Day 3
For just a little while, I was able to forget my hunger long enough to question something. Why was I thinking? What had caused my sudden rise above my skittering brown brethren? I had somehow come into contact with an agent of change in my life, and I had no way to confirm what exactly it was. There was no way to tell for certain, but I’ll always be a bit suspicious of that shimmering rainbow muck. Clyde still had a few splotches of it when we gathered around him the next morning. It was hard to tell our thoughts apart, since they were pretty much the same thing.
Clyde big.
Clyde looked down at us as a giant among insects, a little longer as a pony and almost as tall.. He had taken the development surprisingly well. Fluffy hadn’t- I was thankful Jitters was my wrestling partner and not the mega-roach. We had yet to coax Fluffy out from under the bed.
The only one not thinking about how big Clyde had grown was the roach himself. Clyde hungry.
Jitters and I looked from Clyde to the shelf. Clyde tall, we suggested.
Yes, confirmed Clyde.
Shelf tall, we pressed.
Yes, confirmed Clyde.
It took ten minutes and the most ridiculous pantomime ever performed by mutated insects, but Clyde eventually took the hint. When the bag of kibble came tumbling down, Fluffy finally poked out of her hiding spot and started gorging. Clyde took a quarter of the bag in one bite and Jitters stopped suggesting cannibalism for a minute. We had triumphed over hunger, and conquered an all-consuming need for consumption. Its distracting influence pushed to the back of our mind, we could finally once again focus on important, intellectual matters. We split up into our two wrestling teams.
I was just working Jitters into an improvised half nelson when the sad sight caught my eyes. Fluffy was trying with all of her strength to pull one of Clyde’s legs out from under him. Clyde shifted awkwardly, not sure if pinning Fluffy would be the same as crushing her. Jitters and I stopped slamming each other into the floor. I was positive we were thinking almost the same thing.
Eat Clyde? Suggested Jitters. Not quite the same thing.
…Help Fluffy, I asserted.
Help Fluffy, he amended quickly.
We charged. We both darted right under Clyde and rammed into his two forward legs on the right side. Fluffy renewed her efforts to pull out his front left leg and Clyde’s thorax crashed into the ground. Clyde tried to scrabble upright with his three remaining limbs; he shoved me away with a kick and began to rise. Before he could lift out of our reach, Jitters scampered onto his thorax and put a pair of legs around the bottom of his head and pulled. Clyde began to rear and buck, trying to shake off his cannibalistic rider.
Tip? asked Fluffy.
Tip, I agreed.
When Clyde reared up, the two of us jumped right at his underside. Jitters leapt off as Clyde’s forelegs flailed and he slowly tipped over. Fluffy leapt across his midsection, grabbing hold of one of his legs and pulling it taught over his abdomen. Jitters and I followed suit, the three of us struggling to keep Clyde on his back. I threw one of my legs onto Clyde’s underside.
One! I counted.
Two! Tapped Jitters.
Three! Finished Fluffy.
Clyde stopped struggling and resigned himself to defeat while the three of us chattered victoriously over him. We had wrestled many times in the past, but it never felt so good to be victorious! Was this a thing that thinking things felt? It was glorious! Still… I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was missing. It seemed so quiet, and it felt so lonely. Where was the piercing whistle? What happened to the beaming pair of yellow eyes?
Day 4
Coach.
Coach.
Coach.
Coach.
Coach was gone. We were all so wrapped up in our little genesis that nobuggy took the time to notice. Ever since he left two days prior we hadn’t seen head nor hoof of him. Where could he have gone? The room only had so many dimensions, and he was too big to squeeze under the bed. We asked Clyde for some taller perspective, but he had nothing useful to offer. Coach wasn’t in the room. He wasn’t in the bathroom. That was all of the rooms! Where else could he be?
I pushed open the swinging door to the bathroom for what must have been the seventieth time. Still no Coach. I joined Jitters in running back and forth in panic and worry until I ran into the door. As I shook my head to clear out the pain, I found something else rattling around inside it.
I can’t wait for the fight tonight.
I was walking down a hallway, somehow not marveling at the dimensions of it. The place was longer than our room could ever dream of being! The sound of my hooves reverberated off of the walls and rang in my ears with a steady clip-clop. Something caught my eye as I passed it, something that looked very familiar to me.
A door. But I was looking at it from the wrong side. This was the door in Coach’s room.
Wonder when Gorgon’s getting back… sure hope it’s not too soon.
I began to walk away, and my thoughts and senses snapped back to my own head. Shaking it, I turned it towards the obstructive plank of wood that had unknowingly been keeping my entire world confined to a small rectangle of several feet. I gave it what may have been the first ever example of an insect narrowing its eyes in recorded history, assuming I was ever to record this of course. Pawing the ground once, I rammed it with all of my insect might and nearly got my head crushed for my trouble.
Skitters stupid, thought Jitters helpfully.
Skitters hurt? asked Clyde.
Door Coach! I pressed, eager to share my revelation.
Door not Coach, chided Fluffy, Coach move, door not move.
I struggled with the words I knew, trying to come up with something that could explain the novel concept I had come across. What did you call something that was not a part of the room? Out of it? How could you convey the idea of ‘not inside?’ Was there a word for it? A polar opposite, something that was out of inside instead of in of inside?
Coach notside! Outdoor! Unside! Out! Coach out!
My ramblings met with a chorus of tilted heads. How could I explain this to them? They didn’t share the vision I had of the pony outside. They had never seen anything beyond that door- But they had. We all had. We were still a little fuzzy at the time, but surely we could remember an occasion as momentous as the first word! Assuming that they had heard it as well, of course. There was only one way to find out. I pushed up my thorax with my middle legs and swept the forward pair dramatically over everybuggy.
Foalgers.
Foalgers?
Coffee?
Coffee!
My hopes came to fruition as recognition flared in everybuggy’s mind. That shuddering mare had to have come from somewhere. Somewhere with coffee. And the beans that made coffee. And the plants that made beans! A steady buzz in the room grew to a cacophony of insects clamoring at the possibilities of a world outside their tiny little room. No wonder Coach had left- the world outside must have been fantastic! We couldn’t wait to join him in the marvelous wonderland that he must have been in!
Jitters charged at the door excitedly, nearly crushing his head.
Jitters stupid, I thought smugly.
Door open? asked Clyde.
Coffee open door, reasoned Fluffy.
Get Coffee? suggested Clyde.
How? countered Fluffy.
We all took a moment to scratch our metaphorical chins. Then we noticed Jitters scrabbling up the wall beside the door, reaching for something. At first I thought he had damaged something when he ran into the door, but my attention caught on the small white box that was a little too far out of his reach.
Push button, explained Jitters, Get Coffee.
Clyde sauntered over to the box. I quickly scuttled in front of him.
Coffee scared of roaches! I remembered her visit earlier, and how kindly she had taken to the sight of us.
We roaches, Fluffy pointed out.
Eat Coffee? Asked Jitters.
We ignored him while we once again put our heads together.
-
When the attendant came close, I could feel myself being pulled into her head again.
I thought Gorgon had gone to Brimstone Falls already? But who else could have gotten in after I locked it tight? They didn’t say anything, and that sounds a lot like Gorgon…
I transferred my mug of coffee to my hoof as I fumbled with the keys.
Maybe he’s back for a fight. I’d love to see him duke it out in the arena… or maybe somepony really did kill him, and they got his room? I think I woulda heard about that.
The door creaked open. Maybe it wasn’t Gorgon; the mutated bastard usually just grabbed the Joe and slammed the door in my face. When the door had opened fully, the pony I got an eyeful of certainly wasn’t Gorgon. I had no idea who they might have been; they had a cloak or a blanket draped all over them.
“Uh, excuse me? You’re not supposed to be in here. This room is reserved for Gorgon. Who are you?”
The cloaked figure said nothing. They just shifted awkwardly, and I’m pretty sure I could hear them mumbling.
“Alright, that’s it pal! You’re coming with me-” My words got clogged somewhere in my esophagus when I lifted the hood up to get a look at the pony underneath.
There wasn’t one.
A beady set of revolting bug-eyes stared at me from under the cloak. Underneath it was a second set.
“R-R-R-R-RADROACHES!” I screamed, tossing the coffee and running for my life.
The shriek tore me out of her head and back into mine, where I was in the bottom of the roach stack that made our pony head. There wasn’t any way to see from in here, but Clyde, the pony body, was happy to give me his running commentary.
COFFEE HOT! COFFEE HOT!
It seemed that Clyde was feeling another sensation that was wholly new to any of us. Lucky bug. It excited him so much that he ran down the hall, carrying us with him as he screamed in our heads. By the sounds of her shouting, we were right behind the attendant.
Plan is stupid, muttered Jitters.
Plan is fun! cheered Fluffy.
COFFEE HOT! complained Clyde.
We come, Coach! I championed.
“AAAAAAAAAH!” screeched the attendant.
