Author's Note

General Warnings and Stuff:

Spoilers for:
World of Warcraft: Shadowlands lore (nothing too specific for now aside from references and the whole 'plane of existence separate from the land of the living' thing),
Fringe (mostly just references to Tabetha's and Tobias' past),
RWBY (mostly just for the alternate history of Earth mirroring the history of Remnant... somewhat)

Content Warning for this chapter and the following few:
Narcissistic characters trying to do better and kinda maybe failing at it
Characters being stupid, assuming a lot of stuff about their biology and so on
A whole heap of denial, stuttering, overuse of triple dots, and some "well-meant" bullying
Technically incest, more like selfcest (it will make more sense during the second half of this chapter)

Chapter 001 - A glorious new life.

Every story begins with the introduction of a character, does it not? Well, most of them, at least.

Sometimes those introductions are simple, sometimes they are not. Sometimes they are even sad. Just look at those Disney movies. Some of them begin with the brutal murder of a loved one. Poor Bambi, poor Simba, poor Elsa and Anna. Oh, the poor audience of little kids that have to watch that tragic loss on a cinema screen or at home on their parent's laptop... the sheer horror! Truly a disaster, is it not? One has to wonder if Disney will ever stop with that trend. Then again, it's by far preferable that those poor, poor kids use their parent's credit card for Netflix and Co. without their permission in comparison to using it to pump ungodly amounts of money into some crappy casino app that should have been banned a long time ago from the App Store.

Anyway, back to the important stuff. Introductions are in order, and, just like those movies that surely traumatized every child with the horrors of death, my own story begins just like that. With a horrific death that shall go down in the annals of horrific deaths as the most terrifying one to date. Nay, for all time! After all, it was my death, it deserved to be remembered as that and nothing less! Unlike those 'mundane' deaths, my death was... not exactly normal, in a sense. One could, in fact, say that even the best fringe scientists would never be able to explain it. Heck, I only remember flashes of what had happened that led to my own death and the machine that was responsible for my current predicament, it was that horrific. But I was getting slightly ahead of myself here, I should probably start with my name, shouldn't I? Every great protagonist has a glorious name befitting of their true magnificence, don't they? Just like me... surely... no doubt about it...

If only... if only I could answer that accurately. Everything of my past life was a bit hazy, broken even. Only because of what that machine did to me... to us. I remember... that there were other people with me as... someone... I don't know whether it was me or Tabetha or Tobias that was at fault for what happened, it was so very hard to even get a clear picture of who I previously was into my head. Anyway, that someone I can't exactly recall which one of us it was that strapped us into... some sort of machine that was supposed to make... I think it was our souls? It was supposed to visualize our souls on a computer. Something ridiculous along those lines, anyway.

What it did instead, though, was to rip us from our bodies and fling us through the multiverse to who knows where. To understand why I can't just introduce myself, I would also have to explain the other things that that machine did to us.

I never thought the existence of the soul was something that actually existed. I always assumed there was nothing to it because science couldn't prove its existence until that damn machine sucked mine right out of my body like a wet noodle. It didn't do that in a gentle fashion, either. No... it practically shredded our souls into hundreds of tiny little pieces barely hanging together by loose threads, and, if it hadn't been for that glowy light appearing out of nowhere, that machine might have ripped the metaphorical seams of our very beings completely apart.

Without that light saving us from utter annihilation, we might have ceased to exist entirely. Cease to exist as in 'soul gone forever, no refund allowed', as if they had never existed in the first place.

It truly was a horrific death, wasn't it?

Maybe... maybe that light came from a deity, willing to save us from being erased out of their own benevolent goodwill (as ridiculous as that thought sounded to me... I couldn't discount it entirely after what I had learned here in death).

Aside from the mystery of the light, there was another thing worth mentioning. And it had nothing to do with outside interference and everything with my own foolish fear.

I can't tell whether it was because of the nature of the soul or something else, but... something happened right there in the damn machine as we were dying. The part of the memories within each of our souls was... too damaged... I think. Each of our souls tried to get those missing parts from the others in order to repair the damage it had done to us and the resulting mess... it wasn't pretty.

My fear of death and... greed... was the very reason why I ended up with the majority of those broken memories, hence my current predicament. It was my own damn fault that I couldn't tell whether I was Tabetha, Tobias, or... I think it was something with an 'S'... Sarah? No... Samantha? No, that wasn't it, either... Damnit! I felt like I was so close with that one but it felt... wrong... for some reason.

It had to be something like that, though. Samuel, maybe? No, that sounded even more wrong... I wasn't even able to tell which gender it was supposed to be. For all I know, it could have simply been Sam and I wouldn't know for certain. It was incredibly frustrating and if I had a corporeal body, I'm sure I would have already vented my discontent at this lack of memory out on something. Anything, really.

While I did get most of those damaged memories, they weren't very helpful. Most of them were simply too fragmented, too blurry, and too disorganized to make any sense out of them, and, judging by how disgustingly greedy my soul was in getting those memories... I could guess I was neither Tabetha nor Tobias. All of those memories felt sort of foreign to me, like... it was like I was looking at them as if I would look at them in a photo album. None of them felt like... me.

I didn't even know who I was supposed to be anymore. That's perhaps just as tragic a start into the story as one of those movies, isn't it? Here I am with no idea of who I am beyond some sort of amalgamation of the people that went into that machine that ripped our souls to shreds. What was left of them, that is...

I was neither Tabetha, Tobias, or Tobias' child (...I think) whose name starts... started with an 'S'. I'm still trying to figure that part out and I had no idea where to even begin in order to find an answer to that. I don't even know whether I had been his daughter or his son for fuck's sake! Or, you know, whatever our actual fucking relationship to each other was. For all I know, I could have been his damn wife and I wouldn't even know!

But... considering I was currently a massless entity floating in a weird greyscale world, having gotten separated from the other two souls that went through this hell with me as soon as that light saved our metaphorical butts from total and utter annihilation... was gender even an important thing to me right now?

Who cares if I'm some genderless, sexless blob floating through a world that doesn't take notice of me? I'm sure someone could write a great story about a ghost with an identity crisis! Give all of those ghosts some love, too. They died, they need all the love they could get.

Me especially, I totally could use some love right now instead of this sad... lonely... depressing... dark... gloomy world I have been floating aimlessly around in. I had seen some weird blue angel-y thing ferrying lost souls away to who knows where and they didn't strike me as the gentle and loving type.

Maybe I had trust issues. Wouldn't surprise me, considering one-third of what I could remember of that machine told me that I hated the other two-thirds of the memories floating around in my 'head' that told me I was the one that created that damn thing. Or the one that I stole those memories from, same thing.

If I could travel back in time, I would tell my past self to run like Satan himself was chasing me so he could make me his breakfast snack. To run and never look back as those other two got shredded to pieces instead of all three of us. But that wasn't possible now, was it? I couldn't go back, ever. And, instead of confessing to my sins, I hid away from those blue ladies with wings and white robes like the coward that I truly was deep, deep down in my shriveled nonexistent heart.

I don't trust those beings. They looked... too good to be true. Too nice. Nothing... absolutely nothing... that looks this inviting and kind and approachable and 'friendly' was ever safe to trust. Nature was the perfect teacher in that regard. If it looked too beautiful to be true, then it was out to kill you. Thus, the blue angels (hah, a pun... how droll of me...) had to be some evil ploy to get me to lower my guard into trusting them.

Fat chance I would ever go within their eyesight. If they even had eyes under those eerie hoods. They would probably do unspeakable things to... my soul or something. Nothing is ever free and the supernatural just loves to get paid in souls, right? I'm pretty attached to mine since finding out that I actually have a soul, so I won't go anywhere near those dastardly things. I could smell a trap from a mile away and they smelled like 'It's a trap! Run you fool!'. I'm sure they had some sort of nefarious plan for all of those poor souls that they tricked into following them.

Wherever they actually led them to, I'm pretty sure it ain't Heaven. They took every soul that they came across, and I'm a hundred percent certain they didn't make the distinction between good and bad. They just grabbed a soul, left, and returned to repeat the process all over again.

I wasn't in the mood to ask them to 'Bring me to your leader!' and find out what they did with those souls that they ferried off to some sort of afterlife or something. For all I knew, I would end up in some kind of hell after committing the crime of... something that was appropriately 'crime-y' that would fit with what I did to the other two in my fear of trying to stay 'alive' (as much as one could stay alive while already past the point of dying, I suppose). I'm sure my little memory theft would land me a nice crispy cell in Hell or whatever they actually called Hell here.

All the more reason to stay the fuck away from those winged avatar rejects. I'll take my chances in this dark... gloomy... lonely... shadowy world and hope for the best. It was surprisingly empty in some parts, but I guess there weren't that many lost souls in the middle of nowhere that needed guiding, huh? Who in their right state of mind would willingly stay in an inky black forest?

...me, apparently.

I really need to give myself a name, these days. I can't just refer to myself as 'me' all the time. I was rather averse to the idea of taking on one of those three-ish names of my... past lives? Past life? Ugh, this was only causing me more headaches and I don't even have a head anymore! Was this what it must feel like to have multiple personalities? Well... as far as I could tell, I was pretty much alone in my 'head' (...I think), I just had... more memories... of different people. That's totally normal, right?

I wish I could actually get a headache, it would be a welcome distraction from this perplexing conundrum.

A new name it has to be. I'm pretty sure Tabetha was the one that built that machine, so that name was definitely out of the equation. I'm sure she meant well, but... she can kindly rot in Hell for killing all of us with her mad science schemes. As does Tobias, he just went along with it out of curiosity as far as I could tell. Sam... or Samuel? Samantha? Whoever I was, I was the only one that didn't want any of this to happen and I certainly didn't deserve to be in... whatever this place was actually called.

Ghostlands sounded really unimaginative, as did Shadowlands. Those are the only two descriptions that fit this weird environment I found myself in, though. I stayed as far away as I possibly could from those medieval-ish-looking cities since those were like a hot spot for the blue angel chicks. Wherever I was, I clearly wasn't on Earth anymore.

Or in my original home universe, I'm pretty sure. Not that I would ever be able to find out the answer to that particular question, for that matter. What with my current state of not exactly being alive in the conventional sense of the word. Clearly, I wasn't dead dead, as that would imply ceasing to exist entirely, but... who knows what was possible? I couldn't even begin to understand the true nature of death despite being... well... dead.

Anyways, sometimes I had a weird feeling of being in the vicinity of... something. Souls, I would say. That's the only thing I can actually still feel considering my... 'condition'. Those other presences also sometimes reacted to me. It was like... I could tell something was trying to look at me even though I never found anything that indicated as such. I would have assumed those were just animals, but... I wasn't so sure about that, feeling like I was being... shadowed from afar. There were a few animals in the forest that did react somewhat to my presence, fleeing as soon as they noticed something was right there with them that they couldn't see, but those that 'watched' me in a sense had an entirely different feeling to them.

It probably was just the curiosity of those that were still alive, now that I actually thought about it. That's basically what ghost stories were all about, right? People or... other creatures (I wasn't sure what those presences were, they could be all kinds of creatures I have never even heard of before on Earth)... sensing the lost souls wandering in this otherworldly plane. These Shadowlands, for a lack of a better term. I still felt like there had to be a better way to describe this shadowy world aside from my shitty attempts to come up with fitting names for it.

The Afterlife is the thing you end up in after being carted off by those blue ladies (are there also blue men? Hah, another one... I'm so funny lately, aren't I?), or so I assume. Which would make this place kinda the... waiting room? 'The Waiting Room of the Afterlife', sounds like some stupid book title, doesn't it? I could make a living selling my experience here... if I was actually a living being right now.

Who am I kidding? No one would buy a crappy retelling of my cowardly self as I hid away from those things that are in no way angels. If I somehow find my way back into life, I'd rather not tell anyone that I found out how to revive myself. It would cause chaos, of that much I was certain. Not that anyone would believe me in the first place, I suppose.

Who would believe a nutjob like me, someone who doesn't even know whether they are female or male? For all I care, I could be both and be perfectly happy with that. I mean... being both was better than only being one, so I didn't see any problem with that train of thought. Why limit yourself like that when all doors could be open to you?

My past self would probably cry in a corner, shouting 'Heathen! Filthy heathen!' to the heavens if it could hear my 'blasphemous' thoughts right now. But was it really that much of a blasphemous thing? I mean... the Bible says God created mankind in His image, so... it doesn't really make sense in the way that there are more genders than one. I haven't really thought about it too much, but shouldn't there be only a single gender, a single unified biological sex, in that case?

For all I know, the one true gender, or sex rather, combined the best of... well, everything. Male and female, man and woman, and... everything in between. Whatever that would end up looking like, I felt like it was the preferable option to choose from in contrast to 'choose one and live with it for the rest of your however long life, you won't get a second chance if you happen to choose wrong'. The thing is, I didn't want to be locked into something without 'a way out', so to speak. I want to be able to be myself (whoever that is going to be) and that means being able to be any of those 'roles' whenever I feel the desire for it. If it wasn't possible to have it, then I don't want to put up with the alternative, either. End of story.

That... sounded better in my head. Less... greedy and perverted, I guess. But who cares, I'm already dead and probably died a virgin, I'm allowed to be a bit greedy. After all, both female and male anatomy would mean double the fun, and who wouldn't say no to that? Besides, I wouldn't have to worry about any type of dysphoria if I didn't have to worry about being locked into one option, right?

I promise... I'm not a nymphomaniac. I think. Maybe? I mean... I'm not the type that would actually 'fuck myself' even if I could (at least, I believe so... probably... most likely... uh... definitely... yep), so I don't think it would be a bad thing to have both parts. It only... would allow me to have more options with what kind of partner I could choose from...

If I don't get run out of town for being a freak, I guess. But still... both or nothing, that's what I'm going to stick with. It's by far the superior option and no one could tell me otherwise.

So, back to the question of my new name in my 'sorta' afterlife waiting room party. Not that I had any intention to leave the safety of these woods that I took refuge in. While it was a little bit darker and gloomier in here than, say, those 'cities' in the distance, it was by far comfier in the way that I was perfectly hidden from those monsters posing as innocent angels.

I could call myself 'Scaredy Cat' because that was pretty much accurate, wasn't it? But that would be really degrading and not to mention self-depreciating. Perhaps I should just give up and call myself 'Me' for the next few years, as stupid as that sounded. Or for however long I will continue with this miserable existence, I guess. I didn't have to decide right now, after all. I could name myself whatever I wanted whenever I wanted... there was no rush. I could take all the time in the world to think of something, eventually. Something else than 'Me' (or any other anonymous bullshit like that), that is.

Besides... I was way too narcissistic to give myself anything but a glorious name that would tell everyone around me how great I am. Or... was.

Then again, I wasn't really all that 'great', was I? I wasn't exactly the nicest person... that much I could tell. Could it be that this was my own personal punishment for what I did? While in life and in death? I can't exactly recall what kind of person I was while I was alive, since I could barely remember anything of my previous life, and what I did after I died wasn't really something a good person would do.

It was... kinda scummy, actually.

That was a very humbling thought, wasn't it? I probably deserved whatever hell those angels would drag me off to, that much was clear to me. Considering the way I thought of others and myself up until this point, I wasn't... a good person. I wasn't kind. I wasn't generous. I wasn't anything but a narcissistic asshole that hurt those close to me in my last moments by ripping most of their memories away from them. What was left of them, I guess.

If I wasn't already dead, I would tell myself to take a jump off a bridge because of how... disgusting... I was. I was a despicable and vile being and I... I didn't like that. All I wanted was to be loved and here I am, stuck in a land filled with dark looming shadows... completely alone. Feeling miserable for myself.

Do I even deserve a second chance? Even if I tried to be a better... being. Whatever I would end up as, I guess. I was rather doubtful I would... reincarnate? That was what I was thinking of, wasn't it? Well... if I was lucky enough to get a second shot at life and reincarnate in this world, I doubt I would end up as a human.

I probably had a lot of bad karma, so I would most likely end up as some kind of rodent, wouldn't I? It was all I deserved, to end up as a bug and getting squished as soon as I even got close to civilization because of my bad karma. Maybe I should try my chances with the sparsely clothed angel ladies, despite how bad that idea sounded to me.

Every time I glanced up at one of those things leaving through some sort of swirly portal vortex thingy in the sky, I felt dread. Like my very existence would cease to exist if I would go with one of them. I'd rather stay here where I would stay as myself than let them erase 'me'. Whatever I wanted to call myself, I didn't want that freedom of deciding a name for myself to be taken away from me.

I wasn't a good person... but I could be. I could try and do better if only I had a second chance. If miracles were real, I would ask whoever granted me the chance to 'live on' to also give me the chance at a second life. A better life. Perhaps even a grander, more glorious one of doing something that was actually... worthwhile. Something that wouldn't lead to another pointless death. If I had to dedicate my new life to being of service to those around me for the betterment of their lives instead of mine, I would take that over lamenting my (admittedly obscure) past. Anything was better than drowning in depression and self-pity.

Someone had to have saved me from being completely destroyed by that machine, right? I don't know who it was that had helped me, but I beg you with my whole ghostly heart... give me that chance, please. I know I cannot really offer you anything in return, but... I will do my best to be a better version of myself, I promise. To be someone that people would be proud of to honestly call me their friend. To be someone that others could love without... without seeing the monster underneath.

That's all I ever wanted... to be loved. Tobias didn't seem like the loving kind, considering our murky relationship with one another, and Tabetha... she had lost her parents early on in her life, her aunt disappeared to who knows where, and her sister... died shortly after, leaving her as alone as I felt right now. I don't know what kind of life I specifically had, but I could tell that I craved to be loved just as much as Tabetha and Tobias had. I think... I think Tobias might have been my father? It was hard to say for certain since the memory was a little bit fuzzy, but I could tell that he wasn't really... there for me. From what I could tell from both his and my fragmented memories, things were kind of 'complicated'.

I knew Tobias felt some sort of... regret? I don't quite know whether that was the best word to describe this feeling I had, but it does fit the best in regards to how he viewed me. Tobias felt like he constantly wanted to confess something to me and... it was so very hard to focus on the thought, the memory... I wasn't entirely certain I even wanted to know what it was that he kept from me for so long. It felt like the part of me that was Tobias was actively hiding the information from me to avoid further heartache. The other part, probably the part of me that was Tabetha, felt immensely curious about what it was that would be so world-shattering, but I suppressed that curiosity out of fear. It was probably for the best that some things about our past stayed forgotten for the rest of my... existence, I suppose.

Maybe I should have paid more attention to where I was aimlessly floating, because, while I was contemplating how miserable my past life must have been like to never know love, I 'fell' through a gap in the ground. By 'fell' I meant 'floated slowly down' into some sort of underground cavern with a strangely glowing lake.

And, of course, there was no way out. This was just perfect. Absolutely. Perfect.

While I could kinda float, it didn't mean I could actually fly. That would have been great, wouldn't it? Being able to fly was something humanity had always dreamed of, but even in death, it seemed like it was an impossible dream. At least, soar under one's own power instead of using machines for that purpose.

Heck, reincarnating as a bird or even an insect didn't sound so bad if I was able to fly because of that. Soaring through the skies... it must be really relaxing, right? To be free, being able to go anywhere I wanted to go... it sounds so great and exciting! To have no limitations, no restrictions, no restraints... it would be a dream come true, wouldn't it?

Only now, I won't ever see the admittedly weird sky again. I should have gone with those angels because then I wouldn't have ended up here, trapped in a cavern halfway submerged in this pool of... whatever. Can't be healthy if it glows, but luckily... I'm already dead! What a joy...

Now I had all the time in the world to contemplate everything I ever did that was wrong. There was nothing else I could do, which was... even more depressing than being dead already was. The cavernous walls were too steep and far too high for me to try and climb out through the hole that I fell through (if I could escape this damn lake in the first place, that is).

It really didn't feel great to swim around in this liquid as a ghost. Maybe it was some sort of mineral in it that caused me that discomfort, I couldn't tell. Perhaps all of those crazy people saying salt keeps ghosts away were right, after all. Even though it makes absolutely no sense at all.

With nothing better to do, I started on the arduous task of organizing my broken memories as best as I could. I don't exactly know how long it took me to go through 'just' the disjointed childhood memories of three different people, but I would wager it took me probably longer than I cared to admit.

It was sort of easy to see which ones weren't mine and which of those memories belonged to Tabetha or even Tobias. Tabetha had a nice childhood with loving parents... until those parents were gone, that is. Both of them somehow fell into a coma at the same time, nobody could actually explain how and the government tried to cover it up as some sort of 'fringe event' (inexplicable, nature-defying events that only nutjobs found an explanation for). Tobias had been one of the few people that actually knew they weren't 'dead dead' whereas Tabetha was left in the dark for quite some time until she found out the truth behind the cover-up as she became an adult, working as a consultant for fringe science events for the very government that tried to keep the circumstances behind her parents' 'deaths' a secret in the first place.

Tobias... something about 'his' early childhood memories struck me as odd. They didn't feel like they belonged to a boy, to be honest. Even his younger brother, Tabetha's father, didn't feel like... something didn't feel right about both of them, it was like... like they were trying to fit into a mold that wasn't made to fit them. There probably was a name for that, but it eluded me the more I tried to think of it. A feeling of fear, shame, perhaps even terror welled up from within me. Or from the part of me that was Tobias, I suppose. Although... this time it didn't feel like it was something that Tobias tried to desperately hide from me but more like... from himself?

I don't know... the best I could come up with to accurately describe this would be that my 'father' (it sounded wrong, for some reason, but that was what Tobias was to me, I'm sure of it) tried to hide away from the one thing he wanted most. Constantly lying about who they wanted to be... at one point, differentiating between the mask and the face beneath would become a thing of impossibility, wouldn't it? A lie so deep-rooted was hardly ever unraveled. At one point, one even forgets that there ever was a mask in the first place, I thought while... pity... began to well up from within me for Tobias. What a strange feeling...

My own memories of my early years, on the other ethereal 'blob of a hand', were... they were lonely, there was no other word for it. My 'father' was pretty much always absent, trying to drown in their work... and, well... I never knew my mother. There weren't even any memories of her in Tobias' memories, which was... odd. Something like that should have been a major memory, right? So... why was it missing? Or... were there simply no memories of her, either because of what that machine did to us or because she never existed in the first place? But... that's ridiculous, isn't it?

I suppose Tabetha got to know what it felt like to not have any parents there for her just as much as I did as she grew older. She secluded herself in books and the internet, pretty much soaking up every little tidbit of knowledge she could get her hands on in her pursuit to understand the world. And, after she learned the truth behind her parents' deaths, she had been getting increasingly more convinced that someone... or something... had 'stolen' the souls of her parents, which kinda led her down a spiral to crazy, trying to get them back. That was what the machine was meant to do once she found out what had happened to them, find the souls of her parents and force them back into their respective bodies, no matter the cost.

She had proven the existence of the soul with her machine and it ultimately cost us our own lives in the process, only because she couldn't let go of her parents. I... I don't think I could really blame her, not after seeing how happy she had been with them and what that loss had caused. It was like the light in her life was suddenly gone, a light I never truly had, and, knowing what she had felt like from the sheer unconditional love that her parents had shown her... I felt so very jealous of her.

I wanted what she had for so long, to have my own parent be there for me, have them stop being so distant to me... but I also felt sympathy for her. Her pain was perhaps even worse than my own. She had to live with the nagging feeling that someone or something had taken her parents from her and later did so as well with her sister. She was convinced that the failed surgery of her sister wasn't the actual cause of her death and... I suppose she was right with that, wasn't she?

That light I saw, saving us from her machine... whatever it was, it was behind her parent's and sister's death, too, wasn't it? For some reason, it also came for us, but... why did it leave me here? Why did they get the chance to be reborn and not I? It couldn't be anything but some sort of force that guided them to their next life, I was convinced of it.

Why else would it take the souls of those that had once been my family with it?

Why... why didn't it take me with it?

Was I... could it be that I had been adopted? That I wasn't actually... the child of Tobias Baker? It... it would explain why he was never there for me, why I never knew my own mother... I was... I was a charity case, wasn't I?

I felt numb as I drifted aimlessly through that glowy water. Time just flew by and I didn't care. All my life I craved the love of a parent, of someone... anyone, really... that understood me. And now? Now I would never get to feel that. I had, in my own stupid carelessness, managed to trap myself for pretty much forever in an underground cavern within a lake that refused to let go of me and could do nothing but think.

I should have gone to those angels and let them do with me whatever they wanted. I didn't want to think about my so-called 'family' ever again, lest I be reminded that I never belonged with them... that I wasn't actually wanted.

Was it too much to ask for a second chance where I could have what Tabetha had? To have loving parents? Tobias couldn't have just... not loved me, right? I couldn't think like that... it would be too painful if it were actually true.

Sure, he was kind of married to his job, but... he did look after me whenever he actually could, right? That had to count for something... right? Looking through his memories... as difficult as it was to get a clear picture of them... I could tell he wasn't exactly a good person, either, but he tried to be there for me as much as he possibly could (which wasn't a lot, I practically raised myself with occasional adult 'supervision'). He had to have at least felt something for me or he wouldn't have bothered with me in the first place. I had to believe that that was the case, I just... had to.

Perhaps I was just reading too much into this. Maybe that light wasn't strong enough to take all three of us and left the one with the greatest 'weight' behind. That's what I got for being greedy, wasn't it? Lucky me.

That was all the more reason for me to try and be better than what I had been like in my previous life. It was my own folly that caused me to drift away and be forgotten, trapped in a place from which there was no escape. It was my own fault for trying to survive and being unable to keep ahold of my only lifeline.

At least Tabetha and Tobias could have a better life now, as much as it pains me to let go of my misgivings... they didn't deserve me faulting them for something that I did. Maybe it was even a good thing, taking their memories from them so they could both be saved by the mysterious light. With all three of us, it was possible we would have all been lost as the light couldn't ferry all of us to our next life.

I could live with that thought, even if it might not be the truth. It would mean I did something good, unwittingly as it was. Besides, without some of these memories (there were some truly horrific, nightmarish ones in here), they could start out their new lives without any kind of burden holding them down and live their lives to the fullest. They would get to relive all of that wonder and excitement, free to explore and discover all that life had to offer.

I wasn't all bad, right? I could be redeemed from my sins. At least, that's what I told myself as time just cruelly ticked away and no salvation came.

I resigned myself to my lonely existence in this ghostly world of shadows and... more shadows. I suppose it wasn't as empty within this cavern as I had first feared, seeing that I had at least a little bit of company. That company being the totally healthily glowing water, the odd few spiders crawling around on the ceiling, the poor... I think they were bees, it was kinda hard to tell without being able to see colors (or, you know... not seeing them from up close)... anyway, the maybe-bees were quite unfortunate as they didn't know any better than to fly right into the spider's webs, which usually led to a small war between them every once in a while when that happened. And then there was my new bestest of best friend, Mr. Hornhead the Dead, and... an acorn?

I watched in fascination as the very much alive squirrel threw that acorn away in disgust, right through the hole that I fell through. Goodbye, little squirrel. It was a nice distraction to have seen you for that one tiny little fragment of a moment. I hope you find better nuts in these woods, you totally deserve all the best nuts in the world. Not like me. You don't even know I'm here, unable to escape. But that's okay. Nuts are more important, anyway. Don't bother with little ol' me.

I still had my trusty skeleton friend to keep me company, after all, despite him being a really weird fellow. Mr. Hornhead had a horn, good for him. Whatever caused his death, I didn't want to know. Probably the fall through that hole in the ceiling into the shallow water below. If I didn't know any better, I would assume he was a unicorn once upon a time. Or a narwhal...

Nah. Definitely a unicorn, I could see the equine resemblance more.

It was an interesting thought, wasn't it? Being trapped in a world where mythological creatures were a thing. That was kinda exciting, not gonna lie. Besides, it would probably also explain the weird architecture I saw before I hid away in the forest. They certainly liked the depiction of horses, but I guess that would be normal if they were horses themselves.

Too bad I couldn't ask Mr. Hornhead, his soul was nowhere to be seen. I would wager he was taken by some of those blue angel ladies at some point. What would be the odds they would find me here as well? To be honest, I still don't think I would actually go with them.

I'd rather keep my bee and spider friends company. And Mr. Hornhead. As well as the acorn that... was gone. Typical. Even in death, all my loved ones leave me. We had such little time with each other, Miss Acorn. I hope you end up in acorn heaven, you deserve it...

I might be going crazy the longer I stay here, I mused. How long has it been already? A few years? Maybe a decade or two? A century? A thousand years? It did feel like it, to be honest. Maybe a little bit of sleep couldn't hurt in that case.

Could ghosts sleep? I... I don't know. I just kept floating around in this creepy underground lake, trying to somehow go to rest, but nothing really happened. Or... maybe something did happen?

I'm pretty sure that sapling wasn't there before. How that sapling even survived in this dark cave was a miracle to me. Out of curiosity, I kept watching the little tree grow as time went on. It was strangely fascinating, observing it become taller and taller over the years, sort of like a time-lapse movie. Only in real-time.

To be honest... it probably wasn't the greatest idea of the squirrel to throw that acorn in here. That tree... it kept getting bigger and its roots soon ensnared my dear old friend Mr. Hornhead.

Haah... our time together with each other was truly a good one, we really had a blast reminiscing about life and death and all that crap. You won't be forgotten, friend, I will make sure of it. Rest in peace.

If I could cry and sniffle, I would totally do so, but... yeah, no. We didn't know each other 'that' well for me to be all devastated and stuff. Sorry, buddy.

Anyway! It didn't take long after that for the tree to start blooming and for the true horror to show its face. Or 'leaves', rather. Those things were by no means actual tree leaves, they were little monsters, each and every one of them.

One by one, needle-like, salivating monstrosities spread their maws wide open, waiting for the unfortunate to stray into them and find themselves unable to escape, reminding me of those abominable flesh-eating plants I had been scared of as a kid...

Look, it was a totally reasonable fear, okay? Those things are very, very scary. Plants have no right to be all 'teeth-y' and monstrous.

And... they are eating my spider friends now, too. Great. That wasn't... nice. Spiders were misunderstood and innocent creatures, they didn't deserve to be eaten like flies in a fucking flytrap. Oh, and the weird bees were also eaten by those little monster leaves. It was sad seeing them get eaten as they tried to scout it out for a possible new location for a hive, but... it was either that or becoming food for my little spider friends. I'd rather they get along with each other, but such was the way of nature, as sad as it was.

Before I knew what happened, floating listlessly around in the lake lamenting life and... not life, one of the roots of that tree grabbed me. It fucking grabbed me as if it was completely normal! I struggled futilely as my soul was slowly absorbed into the tree and I swore at every possible deity in existence for abandoning me to a friggin' soul-eating tree!

I would take Hell over this. Anything but soul-eating trees, please! I didn't deserve to die after dying! I was too young for that! I had so much to look forward to! Like... 'living' another thousand years and finally getting a new name! I still needed to decide what to call myself, I didn't want to die being called 'Me'!

I didn't even get to write my book about the afterlife! It would have been a best-selling book and I would have become the most famous ghost in the Ghostlands or whatever this fucking shit place was called.

The tree showed no mercy.

While my world got even darker to the point of being pitch black, I... didn't cease to exist? Whatever that tree did to me... I was... was that? I think... I think I heard a heartbeat. That can't be, right?

Was I... was I alive? Just like that? But... I don't want to be a tree, damnit! I want to be something that could actually talk! Something that could feel love, for fuck's sake! Was this some cruel joke?

Wait... wait, wait, wait. Trees don't have heartbeats (at least, not any that I know of that are real). For that matter, they do not have legs they could move around, either. Or ears, you know. Ears that I could also move. As in, rotate them around and... they were on the top of my head... not on the side like I was used to. That was slightly weird, all things considered.

I want to see you not make weird observations like that after a friggin' tree devours your soul and stuffs it who knows where, I dare you. Moving ears on top of my head was the least abnormal part of this situation that it totally became something strange and fascinating, it's as simple as that!

And... I have a head, now that I think about it with a clear and calm head (hah hah, what a great joke that was... I really do deserve Hell for that one). Although that, too, felt incredibly different from what I had before. It felt like my face was somewhat... elongated, I suppose. My tongue felt nothing but sharp teeth in my... was it a muzzle now? I think I had fangs? I don't know... they felt kind of weird, actually. When I prodded them with my tongue, they felt like they could... extend? It was hard to describe, but for some reason, I knew I couldn't accidentally bite myself with them (at least, not if I wasn't doing something dumb, to begin with).

Aside from my sharp, pointy teeth, my tongue itself felt quite a lot thinner and rounder than what I was used to. Not to mention longer. A lot longer, at that. That... that might become a problem if I ever want to speak coherently, right? Damnit. I'll have to learn to speak all over again...

Just... what was I? My limbs felt strange and even my eyes were most certainly not in the right shape. And the position wasn't exactly what I would have expected, either. Horses had their eyes on the side of their heads for a wider range of vision, right? So why were mine positioned more like that of a predator's? Were horses in this world omnivorous?

Something told me that that wasn't quite as accurate as I had believed previously. Unbidden memories flashed through my mind of Tabetha, reading through a thick stack of textbooks while her laptop was open next to her, displaying the front page of Wikipedia and an open document of notes. No doubt that was a memory of a typical session of research à la Tabetha-style, looking up just about every topic one could possibly imagine. And, as was the case for this memory, Tabetha had also somewhat researched the nature of equines out of morbid curiosity. While horses were very much herbivorous in nature, there existed cases of them eating fish and other meats of easy prey like birds on Earth.

It left me a bit queasy as I remembered one of her memories where she saw a horse eat a little birdy without any kind of warning on the internet, thoroughly disturbed by the image of a horse mercilessly crunching through bones and flesh like it was nothing new to it. Tabetha never saw horses in the same light again for years afterward and only managed to get over it as she decided to sate her curiosity since her grandparents had decided to retire on a small farm with a few horses.

Still... it felt kinda wrong to me that I was some sort of predatory horse thing. Horses were majestic and innocent creatures, especially unicorns from what I remembered of equine mythology, I'd rather avoid going against that picture. But... the thought of food, whether it was meat or not, was an important aspect of my new life, I couldn't just subsist on air and love. I had to eat something at some point, right?

So... why did it make me feel nauseous, thinking about eating anything that I had been accustomed to as a human, regardless of what it was? Maybe... maybe there was something even more different to me than I first assumed...

I mean... if I was something similar to what Mr. Hornhead had been while he was alive, I couldn't just assume that everything would be exactly like what I had previously known in my past life as a human, right? Whether or not I was actually a unicorn or not (I couldn't tell for certain with these confusing similarities to horses on Earth), nothing about that mattered for as long as I was in need of more information.

Information like where I was and what the flying pig I was supposed to eat for survival. Even though survival was pretty high on the list, that didn't make knowing where I was and which creatures inhabited this place any less important. A completely different world could run on completely different rules and I wouldn't know the first thing about that! My only experience in this world was limited to what it looked like while dead and that was hardly helpful.

While I was about... eighty percent sure Mr. Hornhead had been a unicorn, he still could have been something completely different. He could have been some kind of soul-eating monster for all I know. I didn't want to be a soul-eating monster, for fuck's sake! I'd rather live off of air, sunlight, and love if at all possible. It's too bad none of those things were actually possible.

I mean... it wasn't possible on Earth and this was a different world, so I couldn't possibly know for certain. Regretfully, I was unable to ask Mr. Hornhead anything in regards to my new species, so I would have to learn everything by myself for now. The skeleton definitely looked equine-ish in nature, and, so far, that was the only thing that made sense to me in this world that refused to make sense. A world in which unicorns apparently existed... and trees that could snack on souls, for some reason.

Seriously, in which world do trees eat people?! That was absolutely ridiculous.

Maybe I should try to do something to actually get my answers instead of speculating like an idiot. In a sense, I was like a pioneer, wasn't I? I could explore the unknown and experience a whole new world, who else could claim to have done so? Only an explorer, that's who.

So, that's what I did. I decided to stop thinking so much about this and do something productive. The first thing I tried to do was to move around a little so I could actually feel my body structure a bit more accurately but everything was... I dunno, a bit stiffer, I guess? It wasn't like I couldn't move around at all, it was simply... too tight in here. Besides me having very little room to maneuver around in, I also had completely new limbs that I had never used before that I needed to get used to... so that might have also played a big part in the stiffness.

While I could remember Tobias having had a severe case of claustrophobia (it had been a miracle that he could even get into a car, to be honest), I was infinitely glad that I, myself, didn't have a fear of tight spaces or I would have been panicking a lot more than I currently was inclined to do.

You get eaten by a tree and not panic, seriously.

Aside from trying to touch myself (that sounded better in my head), I tried out another one of my 'new' senses. Smell. My nose... ugh, I have no idea whether the nose of a horse was called a nose since my brain was still like a badly pureed mush of incoherent memories of random facts and half-remembered knowledge, so I'll just say nostrils... My nostrils tried to breathe in the scent of wherever I was, but that quickly proved itself to be a very bad idea, indeed. While I did smell something, it smelled really foul to me.

It had a slightly wooden quality to its scent, but that's it. It smelled sort of like eggs that had gone bad which were then thrown into a mixer until they were unrecognizable. Then, the resulting mess was placed into the oven until it started to burn upon which it was doused with spoiled milk until the result looked like the unholy spawn of an eldritch horror. And then, to make matters even worse than the massive pile of wrong that it already was, someone threw that disgusting cocktail of death and despair up after forcing it down their throat because of a stupid drunken dare by teenagers to earn a few bucks. If I had anything in my new stomach, I'm sure I would have emptied it all over myself. As it was, I was trying to not breathe in through my nostrils. So much so even that I thought I was going to pass out from the lack of oxygen.

While I tried to stop my body from doing what it needed to do most (like the moron that I was), I felt something... strange on my back. Two sets of little somethings, I should say. In my agitation to find out what it was, I felt something twitch and... was that a chirp? Did I just do that?

How did I even do that? The only creatures that do that are insects, right? Was I... was I some kind of insect horse thing? As weird as it sounded, I... I didn't even have a problem with that. I could still think clearly, and once I was finally out of this damn soul-eating tree... I might even be able to fly!

Insects stridulate by rubbing their wings against their shell, right? That could only mean that I had wings of my own and that that was what caused me to... well... chirp. It sounded kind of cute, actually.

I really need to find out what my new sex was, too. If I was already thinking that chirping was a cute thing to do, that could mean all kinds of things. I could be a... mare or stallion, right? Well... only one way to find out, I thought with apprehension and a little bit of excitement.

I'm not a pervert, okay?! This was... vitally important. Totally.

I, uh... okay, maybe I was a little bit. From what can I tell, the memories I had of Tabetha were... really explicit in the things that she liked doing behind closed doors. Like... I don't know where she got that thing from, but holy fucking flying pigs! That was a very thick dildo hiding underneath her bed in a “secret” box. The thought alone made me blush heavily as blood rushed to my head and my erogenous zones.

And, oh boy... I liked what I felt. Very much so. For once, I did get my one wish granted and I couldn't have been happier about it. Superior sex hereby confirmed! It's both. Definitely both. Oh, fuck yes! I feel like I could do a giddy dance and the sweet smell of my own arousal only excited me more (at least it was powerful enough to drown out the foul smell of my soul-eating mother of a tree). Now then, if only I could get out of here so I could get a proper look at myself!

Well... I could relieve some stress while I was already 'standing at attention', couldn't I? It was a bit awkward moving my hoof (it definitely was a hoof and 'little me' didn't like it one bit), especially with how little room I had to maneuver here in my improvised 'tree-womb', but I made it work. Somehow.

This definitely wasn't degenerate in any way... at all...

Okay, maybe I was dry humping my dick in between my foreleg and my stomach, and maybe... just maybe... it was totally degenerate to do this as my very first act after getting a new lease on life, so sue me! I don't care, I needed it so fucking much. The stimulation was at least enough to make me bite my lip softly, suppressing a kind of very feminine moan with a grunt or two. My own voice sounded... quite a bit strange, vibrating in just the right way to create the illusion of two voices speaking at once, one a lighter one in contrast to the other, slightly deeper, one. I could probably make them work really well together in an alto singing voice if I wanted. If I knew how to sing, that is.

Just hearing it made my pussy even wetter than before and I felt like it almost helped things along with my needy rod. My panting breaths started to hasten as I tried my best to reach my peak with what little room I had available to me to move around in. Maybe that wasn't really a detriment, though. It just made this feel... tighter. Wasn't really what I imagined it would be like, but it didn't feel too bad.

I miss my hands, to be honest. Those would have made this a whole lot easier and more pleasurable. Alas, I had to live with these hooves now.

As I started to increase my pace in a desperate bid to get myself to orgasm as fast as I could, I felt the wings on my back buzz every once in a while, making vibrations run through my body in the most wondrous ways. I let out a squeaky moan as it stimulated my other sex at the same time and I was almost overwhelmed by the flood of sensations.

Honestly? If I had a way to fuck myself right now, I wouldn't have said no to that. I wanted to know what it felt like to have something stuffed into my brand-new pussy as well instead of only getting to learn how good my new dick felt like. I could have cared less whether that dick belonged to someone else or if it was my own (although I would prefer someone else's dick, fucking myself was still kind of a weird idea). Sadly, even if I could have stuffed my snatch full with my own cock, there was far too little room to fuck myself into a blissful state of happiness and contentment.

Perhaps I should have also thought this whole 'masturbating in tight confines' thing a bit more through while I was at it. As soon as my movements started to get more erratic, eager to finally relieve my centuries-old pent-up sexual frustration (I have been floating around as a ghost for far too long, it's no wonder the first thing I did with my new body was to satisfy my needs and I most definitely didn't care if it was depraved of me to do it in a 'tree-womb' or not... totally), I felt... a bit embarrassed as I shot a few sticky strands of my juices all over my lower half.

I really should have thought this more through, I berated myself as I tried to not let it bother me too much. It wasn't like it made me feel uncomfortable, no... it mainly bothered me because it turned me on even more than I had been before. My vagina was aching fiercely for some action and it almost felt like all of my blood tried to go solely to my clit, making me even more frustrated that I had not enough room to reach my hoof over to it.

As I unintentionally pressed my 'forehead' against the inside of the tree during my shuddering orgasm with perhaps a little bit too much force, I let out a pained gasp as I felt like I had just stabbed my own brain because, before my head could press itself against the edge of my confines, something else hit it first. A loud crack greeted my ears and I whimpered as all I knew after that was pure agony.

My previous activities were all but forgotten as I felt like I wanted to start sobbing heavily. Scratch that, I did start to sob as the throbbing wound only started to feel worse and worse as I tried to get my horn free from the blasted tree. It could only be a horn and I cursed my inability to get it free without hurting myself further.

It didn't feel like I had broken it off, though. That was at least something, right? Okay, I thought to myself as I took in an unsteady breath, trying to bite back another sob as I steeled myself for what I needed to do next. I could do this. It's... only going to h-hurt for a meager second, Me, y-you can do this.

I really need a better name for myself...

Another loud crack (...or two) greeted my ears and I shrieked out in agony, crying and whimpering profoundly. That was by far the stupidest idea I've ever had in my quite short new life. At least... at least I was free from the damn tree bark. As soon as I was out of here, I was going to set this damn thing on fire and cackle madly in glee (after figuring out how to set it on fire in the first place, I guess).

My heart was hammering erratically in my chest and it only managed to make the horn injury I inflicted upon myself throb even harder with torturous amounts of pain. My wings were also buzzing angrily on my back, putting my own distress of my suffering quite loudly on display.

I channeled that anger at the tree and did what I had seen horses do when they felt threatened. I bucked the damn tree a new one. If I still had hands and feet, I'm sure I would have earned myself even more bruises for that.

And I didn't stop with one angry buck, I went absolutely crazy trying to earn myself my freedom, snorting wildly as my pain only fueled my rage.

Soon enough, one hoof broke through the bark and I used that opening to create an even bigger one. I needed to get out of here and find a place where I could hopefully treat my horn. I most definitely did not want to cripple myself so early on in my new life and I felt like the horn on my head was even more important than my wings for reasons that I couldn't quite explain with my own words.

It was just a feeling that I had, but my instincts told me that my horn would be my greatest tool. Unicorns were said to be magical beings, right? The horn must serve some purpose beyond looking beautiful, even if it only serves as a pretty night light and shoots rainbow sparkles from the tip.

Once I had the opening large enough for me to fit through, I breathed in with deep gasps, the somewhat fresh air doing wonders on my body. It didn't soothe my pain, but everything was better than smelling the mix of disgusting tree rot or whatever it was and my drying arousal on myself.

The glowing pink water around the tree didn't strike me as 'safe to bathe in', so I would have to go on a little bit longer until I could wash myself off and get a good glimpse at just how badly mutilated my horn must have looked like right now.

I dragged myself completely out of my dear 'mother', cursing the damn tree all the while, almost slipping in my... hoofing? I almost slipped and fell right into the questionable liquid, cautiously dipping a hoof into the unhealthily glowing lake. Thankfully, whatever killed Mr. Hornhead, it wasn't the water.

Or he might have drunk from the water and died because of that if the fall from the hole wasn't the cause of death, who knows. Thankfully, it wasn't corrosive to the point of melting my limbs, it just felt like I was touching thick gelatinous liquid, trying to drag me further into the muddy ground beneath the surface of the lake.

Yeah... Mr. Hornhead might have slowly but surely drowned in this stuff, always being dragged down just enough below the surface to prolong his suffering as he struggled to escape the clutches of this lake. What a horrifying way to die, truly.

With a small grimace on my muzzle, I gave the transparent wings on my back a wary glance, debating whether or not I could trust myself to fly without immediately crashing afterward. I didn't even know how to move them beyond what it felt like when they showed my mood by buzzing and chirping in various ways.

Aside from that, I didn't have the necessary focus to keep flapping them fast enough to stay afloat in midair, my injury almost demanded all of my attention. Through the water it was, I decided with a frown and a pathetic moan, trying to ignore my shifting vision as best as I could.

I'm pretty sure I had a concussion right now. I should find a place where I could rest safely and have easy access to (drinkable) water. I probably should also not try to think too hard, so that meant no trying to organize my (admittedly slightly less) broken memories to repair... well... myself.

Thankfully, I don't think (almost) breaking one's own horn leads to a serious concussion. I wasn't feeling nearly drowsy enough for that and neither did I experience any kind of seizures. At most, the pain level felt like I had broken a bone and not my skull. I wasn't even sure if I had bones anymore, for that matter.

Considering I had chitin, the chances of that were pretty much non-existent. But... you never know. For all I know, some life forms had more than one type of skeleton.

Anyway, the 'shore' of this underground lake wasn't too far off from my dear 'mother', and if I was careful enough, I could probably avoid getting stuck in the muddy ground like poor Mr. Hornhead did with his fall. I'd rather not add drowning to my quickly growing list of 'dumb things I have done since reincarnating'. I was already off to a good start with that one, wasn't I?

For once, I was glad my wings kept showing off what I was feeling. It did help to keep me from sinking further than I would have liked, and, before long, I was walking on the smooth stone floor of the cavern, dragging some of the mud from the lakebed after me as I searched for anything, anything at all, that was helpful to my current situation.

My eyesight was a lot better in the dark than I expected, being able to see even further into the cavernous depths than I had been capable of as a ghost. Although, it wasn't that much of a help to me. The lake was the only thing in here, aside from all of the spider webs, the old abandoned beehive within a crack in the cave wall, and the hole up above that was currently letting in what little moonlight was able to make it through the canopy of the trees. And the mangled corpse of my mother, of course.

I bit my chitinous lip (something that felt a lot softer to me than I imagined it would feel like, to be honest), trying to come up with a plan to escape my prison. So far, it seemed like my wings were the only way out for me. My own freedom seemed so close, and yet, it was so far away from here.

I was gonna die again down here, wasn't I? There was no way that I would be able to learn how to fly within three days (if exhaustion wouldn't kill me first, that is). But I had to try, I told myself with determination, there was no way I would just give up and return to… that… place. Anything but that.

I could still feel its icy touch upon my soul... the loneliness, never to be noticed by another mortal soul in any meaningful way... the silence seemingly stretching on forever, imagining phantom sounds when there were none... the total lack of taste, creating an endless feeling of numbness, of despair... the incoherence of touch, creating a contradicting feeling of being stretched apart while at the same time tightening around my soul like a coil, viciously burrowing into me... and lastly, the things lurking within the shadows, watching at all times... laughing... sneering... whispering...

I was thrown out of my terror-induced thoughts as I saw a spider enter my fuzzy vision, hanging on to a thread of silk from the ceiling. I reached a hoof slowly out to it, smiling gently despite the pain trying to make me sob again. Fortunately, I didn't have any more tears to spend right now, so I didn't scare my little friend away from me. I was so very grateful for the well-timed interruption, I had been far too close from curling up into a shivering ball of fear.

I smiled in amusement as little Spidey crawled onto my hoof, skittering around all over my foreleg until it settled on my shoulder and I decided to ignore it in favor of looking back up at the ceiling. Insects like flies or spiders could quite easily crawl on walls but when it came to whatever I was, I didn't think I would be able to do so as well. I was pretty sure I was far too heavy to stick to any upright surface, much less so to an upside-down surface. Short of manipulating gravity in my favor, I doubt I could crawl my way out of here (as much as my inner Spider-Man fan wished for it to be possible).

I really do have to fly up there, don't I? Learning to fly could take me weeks, if not months, though. Time that I didn't have. Not without a clean source of water to avoid dehydration. Already I was feeling like I could use some water and I had at most three days to find myself a source that would provide enough for me so that I wouldn't die.

No licking the bark of a tree while it rains, I thought with a shudder. The thought was far too disgusting and I now had an aversion to trees in general. While a koala could get away with that, I would rather not debase myself like that. I'd sooner drink straight from a river like a proper... well, I wasn't a mammal anymore (I think... am I insect enough or still too horsey to count as a mammal?)... Anyway, I'd rather drink from a river, thank you very much!

First, I would have to find one after getting out of this cave, though.

Alrighty, then, Spidey... I hope you don't mind me crashing a lot as I try to figure out how to fly with a less-than-perfect sense of balance. Maybe I should give you a name at some point, too. Spidey sounds way too much like Spider-Man.

Ah, well... let's just say that the first hundred (or five hundred) attempts didn't count and act like I was a prodigy as I managed to actually lift off without immediately planting my face in the dirty (and very, very hard) ground.

And let's also pretend I didn't keep going in the wrong direction for what felt like days. Once I actually figured out how to lean myself in the correct way for me to go where I wanted to go, it was (somewhat) smooth sailing from there on out.

Mhn... okay, okay! Maybe I lied a little bit there. It was anything but smooth sailing and I didn't get anywhere near high enough to reach that fucking fuck of a fucking shit damn crap fuck of a hole in the fucking shit fucktard of a ceiling.

I was only mildly angry. Just the slightest teeniest tiniest bit. I was too exhausted after my failed attempts to reach freedom to vent my anger out on the world, so I really was only slightly angry. I'm being honest here, truly.

At least my little spider friend cheered me silently on as I failed time after time. I don't think I'm going to last the full three days without water, to be honest. Not with how bad I was at this flying thing. And definitely not with how much I kept exhausting myself as soon as I felt my strength returning to me after taking breaks that started to get longer and longer.

As the first day of my new life dawned in the sky up above, I decided that I had enough for now and let my eyes fall shut as my exhaustion caught up with me. Not the smartest idea, I'll admit that, but concussion or not, injured horn or not... I couldn't keep on going forever even with the threat of dehydration hanging over my head.

Although, one thing did surprise me as I 'awoke' right after I fell asleep. I never had lucid dreams before in my life (technically lives, but whatever), so I was admittedly hesitant to think it to be as such as I walked around in an empty city of skyscrapers.

“Peculiar,” I muttered, feeling strangely awake but at the same time like... I wasn't actually awake. It was a very strange feeling, I had to say. Whatever this was, it most assuredly was not an ordinary dream.

Not only did it feel remarkably real to my senses, but I could also actually talk without a second thought. My body just did it on auto-pilot as I felt like pointing out how unusual this dream was. Then, as my eyes wandered to the glassy surface of one of those skyscrapers, I had to marvel at how it was possible that I could take in my appearance. Something that shouldn't have been possible in the first place because I hadn't seen my own reflection yet (the underground lake had, at best, given me a fuzzy and quite muddy image).

I wasn't complaining about the oddity of being able to see what I looked like, though. I chalked those illogical things up to 'Weird dream logic that doesn't need to make any sense' and instead decided to study myself in the reflecting surface of the building in front of me. And what I saw was definitely not too bad.

A semi-long white silk-like mane and tail, smooth and soft (almost black) chitin covering (nearly) every inch of my body, the dark magenta wings that refused to do as I told them to, a shimmery dark magenta shell on my back, and a lighter segmented magenta abdominal shell. Not to forget, the startling bright magenta eyes staring back at me. They were almost glowing even.

My voice, of course, was the most memorable thing about me. The multilayered voice was even making my breathing sound like it was coming from two people (which might actually mean I had two different sets of vocal cords, now that I was thinking about it).

It did sound quite pleasing to my chitinous pony-like ears, I had to admit, though.

Idly, I began humming the melody of Summertime Sadness (I think) as I took in the 'mangled' form of my horn poking out from my magnificently (almost) snow-white mane. I could already tell that it wasn't supposed to look so... crooked? Twisted, maybe? It didn't look like the chitin was broken in any way, but whatever I did to it, it left it quite thoroughly disfigured. It looked almost cruelly jagged and sharp now, to be honest. Thankfully still in a symmetrical way, I would have hated it if it curved to the side, instead.

I mean... I liked my new body too much to let such a thing bother me, but I was glad that that wasn't the case. As it was, it only curved backward. Something I could actually (reluctantly) live with.

My chitin, from what I could make out with the better lighting of this place, looked more like skin if it was... more rigid, I suppose. Perhaps a little bit softer than what I vaguely remember my nails to have felt like. It was definitely bendy enough that I could move my limbs without any problems or discomfort. The four little nubs my wings were attached to, one set being rather tiny in comparison to the actual flight wings they 'hooked' into (probably there to help with the strength of the primary wings and steer in midflight, now that I was thinking about it, but I wasn't entirely certain about that), were a lot softer and way too sensitive for me to just try to touch them willy-nilly with the cheek of my muzzle (not that that stopped my curiosity).

The dark magenta shell on my back and the abdominal one were probably as hard as my hooves felt like, feeling almost like natural armor to me. I wouldn't want to test the protective properties with actual weaponry, though. I was sure arrows could still penetrate my shell with enough speed and force. And since I was in the dark about my anatomy right now, I'd like to avoid (further) injuring myself, especially my internal organs. Something like that would, no doubt, lead to my second death and I wouldn't be able to do anything about it.

Out of curiosity, I looked down in between my legs, wanting to know what both of my sexes looked like. I was slightly surprised by what I found, though. Instead of a sheath, I found two chitinous plates in between my hindlegs that were completely flush with the rest of my body, covering little me protectively. They opened up after only a little bit of prodding from me, revealing quite proudly what was hidden beneath.

I really was hung like a horse now, I thought with a bright blush as the blood started to rush towards my dick. In contrast to my softish dark gray chitin, my dick was a mottled light grayish color, as was the flesh behind the chitinous plates that had previously hidden my penis from sight.

There were no visible testicles anywhere that I could make out, but that didn't have to mean anything in regards to my ability to, well... reproduce... with another of my kind. As far as I knew, insects didn't have external testes, so I wasn't worried in the slightest to not see any 'dangling' between my hind legs. Whether or not I did actually have internal ones remained to be seen, though.

The penis in itself looked almost like a sharp spear, being incredibly smooth in texture. It was hard to even spot the arteries and veins circulating the blood to and from it, blending in with the rest of the meaty flesh colorlessly (which kind of clued me in as to which color my blood now had). The tip took me a bit of time to get used to, unfamiliar with the shape. It pretty much looked like it was the long and narrow cap of a mushroom. The little hole on the very top of it looked almost... cute. All in all, my new dick looked very much alien to me but still kind of cute.

Next, I turned around and looked at the reflection in the glass as I raised my tail to the side (after a trial and error approach in order to get a feel for how to move it in the way that I wanted it to, that is). My marehood was the same mottled gray color which had, unlike my penis, no plates to protect it from unwanted attention and... actually didn't look too extravagant, to be honest. Kind of simple, really. Like my dick, I suppose. The flesh was of a smooth glistening quality, already seeping wet with my juices and 'quivering' with excitement while I could just barely make out where my clitoris hid away. Oddly enough, my vagina was the only thing that I could make out back there, leaving me thoroughly confused about how my digestive tract worked.

I shoved the multitude of questions popping up at the impossibility that was my body to the back of my mind as my eyes wandered back to my throbbing length and I began to fidget with my hind legs, biting my lip with desire. My first experience with my hoof wasn't the best kind of experience and seeing that this little dream world of mine was completely empty of anyone else, I was once more lamenting my loss of digits and thumbs to masturbate with.

“I could help with that,” a slightly raunchy voice next to me whispered sensually and I let out a shriek, whirling around in shock. Before me stood... well... me. Sort of. She (or was it he? ...they?) had darker purple colors instead of my dark magenta ones and was slightly less tall than me.

“Who are you?!” I asked, my heart hammering wildly in my... chest, I think? It was somewhere in that general area in between my forelegs or so.

“You?” my doppelganger replied with a raised eyebrow, coming uncomfortably close to me as, well... they studied me like a lab rat, licking their lips with a hungry expression in their eyes. “Only... not quite you. I think I'm the part of you that represents the majority of those memories we have of Tabetha. I still have some of 'your' memories, too, though. And a few of 'Tobias', now that I think about it. They don't quite feel like they are supposed to be in 'my' head...”

“What?” I mumbled, stumbling back from her, confused. That was... kind of like a split personality, right? Just... “How did that happen?!”

“When you... we? When you sorted your memories in categories based on which ones belonged to whom,” she replied matter-of-factly, tapping her chin thoughtfully. The change from hungry predator to... whatever that was... was quite jarring, to be honest. My doppelganger was kind of a handful to be around and I kept getting strange feelings around her. Almost like... no, that couldn't be it. There was no way, right? “I couldn't communicate with you before you went to sleep, but now we can! Isn't this the perfect opportunity to test some things out?”

“Right...” I muttered slowly, feeling like right now was the perfect time to get goosebumps if I could, slightly put off by her excitement to experiment. I didn't know what to make of her (she seems pretty feminine to me, but... I'd hate to assume...) telling me that she had some of my memories. Apparently, I might have sorted them wrongly, which... didn't bother me as much as I thought it would. According to her, she was still me in a sense and I felt like it didn't really matter all that much to me if I had them or she did.

“Did you know we have spinnerets in our hooves?” Tabetha-Me grinned, showing me the underside of her hooves, and, where the frog usually was (it was called a frog, right? I really need to refresh my memory and study horse anatomy again... this time more thoroughly... definitely more thoroughly~), there was instead an indent where I could see said spinnerets. I assumed somewhere within our hooves (or even possibly within our forelegs) were glands that would produce silk. How much, though, I couldn't tell.

“So... we are some sort of mix of different insects and a mythological horse?” I hummed, ignoring my erection for the moment in favor of satisfying my... well, more like our curiosity. One thing we had in common, I guess. “At least, so far we seem to have the wings of... I think those were from the bees the tree ate and then we also have the spinnerets from the spiders it ate as well...”

“Right,” she said and nodded in agreement. “And we obviously have a horn jutting out from our head, so that would make us into some sort of mix out of Mammalia of the family Equidae, specifically a member of the mythological species categorized as 'Unicorn-pony', for lack of a better term, Arachnida of the order Araneae, probably of the family Araneidae, and Insecta of the order Hymenoptera, specifically the family of Apidae, though one could argue those spiders and bees are entirely uncategorized species as well since we are not on Earth anymore! Eee! This is great! Don't you think so, too?”

“You like to hear your voice say sciency things, don't you?” I commented with a deadpan voice and saw her pout back at me. “Do you know how to use those, then?”

“Uh...” Tabetha-Me shrugged, looking at her own spinnerets thoughtfully. “I was a bit too preoccupied to actually test them out, you know? This is just... so new and interesting and fascinating and... and I need to study absolutely everything about us and this strange new world! Oh, this is so exciting!”

“It kind of is, isn't it?” I mused out loud in agreement, still thinking that this whole experience was quite out of the ordinary. In a good way. So far, that is. Then again, anything was better than the centuries I spent as a ghost. Aside from... you know... 'breaking' my horn multiple times within a few seconds, that wasn't quite as 'good' about our situation right now. Still a massive upgrade from not having a body, like... at all. “On another note, is there also a Tobias-Me running around in here?”

Tabetha-Me winced in front of me, biting her lip as she gave me a nod. “She... 'he' isn't really all that enthusiastic about this change...”

“Oh...” I sighed, shifting on my hooves awkwardly. “Where is... he, then?”

“Wandering around muttering to… well, 'himself', I guess... trying to deny everything?” she answered hesitantly. “...he was also blaming me for everything that has happened, so there is... that.”

“You did kinda cause this...” I muttered, making her wilt. “Although... I can't actually blame you specifically. You aren't actually her. The real Tabetha, I mean. It wasn't you, so don't you dare think otherwise, okay? Besides, you are me and... uh... I am you? If you did that then I kinda did that as well, didn't I? And we... I... did perhaps something even worse than causing our deaths...”

“The memory theft?” Tabetha-Me asked, and I nodded as I felt my ears splay back and a sad chirp escaping me. Great, even here my body decided to display my mood without any input on my part. “If it is any consolation, I don't fault you for that. I wouldn't be here without you doing that.”

“Thanks, I guess...” I smiled thinly, scuffing my hoof slightly over the paved ground. Maybe someday I could actually accept her forgiveness and forgive, truly forgive, the original Tabetha as well. I don't know whether it would mean all that much if Tabetha-Me forgave me since she's kinda me in the way that I am her.

I should probably stop with this before I confuse myself even further, shouldn't I?

“I think you are a good person, you know?” Tabetha-Me said, making me look up at her after my gaze had dropped to the ground, still feeling bad for what I did to her... I mean Tabetha... and Tobias, too, for that matter. I probably won't be able to get over that, ever, will I? “Both 'Tobias' and I remember you lamenting over this... I think it is admirable of you to try to be better than you were before.”

“You aren't as bad as I thought you were,” I said, another chirp escaping me as I felt more confused about having her here with me. She was me, right? And if she was me, shouldn't I hate her as much as I hate... myself, I guess? Or as much as I hated the one whose broken memories she currently possessed? That I gave to her because they were too much for me alone to handle and that I apparently didn't want?

Before I knew what happened, I had Tabetha-Me's arms wrapped around me and felt her awkwardly nuzzle me. My... heart, I think... gave a weird flutter at the show of... affection? It was affection, wasn't it? It felt weird to be on the receiving end of that, to be honest. Not only because she was sort of 'me' in the strictest sense, but also because... I never knew what it felt like to be loved by someone.

Was I... was I reading too much into this? This couldn't be what I thought it was, there was no way for it to be so. But... what if it was? What then?

She saw my confused and conflicted expression and let go of me, shuffling around on her hooves as she clearly didn't know what to say. She kind of looked like that typical nerdy girl that had no idea how to act around other people. Pretty much like me, if I were honest with myself. Not that I would ever admit to being an awkward nerdy girl around others. “I... you know, we never did these things with anyone after Mom and Dad... I mean Tabetha's parents... I... Was that too much?”

“No...” I whispered, grabbing her back into the embrace while giving her a (totally not) awkward nuzzle of my own, simply drifting in the moment. I didn't want it to end, it was addicting to be held and hold someone. The comfort of this heartfelt gesture felt like a balm on my soul, healing the worst of my scars with a soothing warmth. The feeling of loneliness... it had hurt me a lot. “It feels... kind of good. Really good. And you smell nice...”

“Thanks. Although... you do know that you still have that erection, right?” she whispered into my ear and I squeaked, blushing fiercely. I tried to move out of the embrace, but she kept me against herself, a totally 'evil' gleam in her eyes. “You know that I don't actually mind, right~?”

I actually did know that and she was very much aware of that fact, a mischievous little grin spreading on her muzzle. “Y-yeah...”

So much for not being into myself…

What does that actually say about me? My own damn split personality was hitting on me like there was no tomorrow and here I was, letting her do that. And, on top of that, I can't really say I was inclined to stop her, either. What the fuck was wrong with me? Was I… was I really that desperate for companionship?

“Did you know that we don't ejaculate sperm?” she asked me with a low hum, making me whimper against her. It was so close to my ear and I swear she made herself sound sultry on purpose with that heavenly voice of ours. “We ejaculate a clear fluid without any seeds...”

“W-why i-is that?” I asked back, slightly curious to know more about that particular oddity. My thirst for knowledge was rearing its ugly head and my clone smiled knowingly back at me.

“I think we are similar to a sexually mature virgin queen bee in that regard,” Tabetha-Me whispered, sounding thoughtful and so very sexy. “We haven't had our nuptial flight yet. We can't lay fertilized eggs with an empty spermatheca to make workers. We would only be able to lay regular unfertilized eggs for drones until then. Whether or not we could fertilize the eggs of other queens or workers by mating with them is still up for debate, though. It might be because we are a queen and simply can't because it isn't our purpose...”

“You mean like... what a new queen bee does? A mating flight to collect sperm to fill a sperm pouch? Do we have one of those? Or even more than one? D-Does this mean we will b-begin to lay eggs soon?” I asked, shuddering as she nipped my ear with a fang while letting out a somewhat confirming hum. “A-a-and w-why are y-you so bold right now?!”

“I was raised by a pervert,” she told me with a shrug, her tongue invading my ear with wet, slimy noises while I cringed inwardly as I was reminded of one particular memory of our... her... Tabetha's parents. One that was about her mother in particular. Tabetha was taught about the 'bees and the birds' at the same time as her older sister and their mother made it sound incredibly perverted because of how nervous she was.

"P-please, I-I-I..." I shuddered, desperately trying to keep my dick from throbbing needily and giving her more incentive to torture me like this. If this went on like this, I might just prostrate myself before her like a cat in heat, uncaring about the consequences of doing so. Already, I was tempted to do just that as my snatch cried out for attention while my dick felt like it was going to explode from all of the blood rushing towards it.

My doppelganger sucked her tongue back out of my ear, licking her lips with a small frown. “Do you not enjoy it? I mean... I could stop. I was just curious and you probably don't like me that way and I was probably a bit too forward and I probably...”

I interrupted her by placing a hoof over her muzzle, causing her to let out an embarrassed chirp with her wings. “Are you going to start rambling again if I remove my hoof?”

She shook her head, mumbling lowly against my hooves and I lifted my hoof away from her lips. Lips that looked strangely inviting for some reason. “I... uh... I... w-where were we?”

“Your lips...” I replied before my brain caught up with me and I let out a fake cough, trying to think of some believable lie that would explain why I just said that like an idiot.

“My lips?” she repeated, her cheek starting to lighten up in color, turning the almost black chitin into a grayish color. “I thought you weren't into yourself like that...”

“I'm not!” I said hastily, shaking my head in denial. “You're reading into... things...”

“Your little you is disagreeing~,” she teased me and I felt like my face was going to burn off any moment now. “Do you want help with that? You just have to... ask~.”

“I... I...” my voice failed me as I was left as a blubbering mess. Tabetha-Me grinned slightly, listening to my wings buzz furiously as my heart tried its best to grant me an early grave. I watched, unable to move in the slightest way, as she brought my head closer to hers, gulping in fearful anticipation as her muzzle approached mine.

Her lips brushed against my lips lightly and I was rigidly following her movements with my unblinking eyes, unsure what to do. Do I... do I kiss her back? I... I have never kissed anyone before! How... how do you move your mouth?! What... what do I do with my lips? Or how long is too long for a kiss? And what about my tongue? Do I use that?

I have no idea! For so long I craved exactly this... and now I didn't know what to do! The fact that I was technically kissing myself right now (more or less, I suppose) was almost forgotten entirely in my panic.

“Close your eyes,” she instructed me softly, cupping my cheek with a hoof and a kind smile. “Just follow what I do...”

I nodded stiffly and did what was asked of me. My eyelids fluttered closed and then I felt her hoof move over to my chin, guiding me slowly back to her lips. Once they touched, it felt like electricity ran through my body everywhere hers touched mine. Soon, I repeated her actions with my own and we picked up the pace from there.

Tabetha-Me hummed every once in a while and I opened my eyes slightly to take in the sight of my doppelganger. I don't know why, but... it didn't bother me at all that we were basically the same person. This was the weirdest moment in my life for like, probably... ever. This was selfcest, wasn't it? Or was it incest? Both? I'm so confused right now. I don't know, for some reason, it... it excited me, and, looking slightly down, I could tell that it excited my doppelganger as well.

But, at the same time, I knew that it was not because she was... Tabetha was my cousin in my previous life, I think... it wasn't because we had been family or because she was biologically 'me'. A remnant of my narcissistic old self that I tried to distance myself from couldn't help but enjoy it because she looked so much like me.

She was an aspect of me that I somehow gave Tabetha's old memories to so that I could make sense of which memories had originally been mine (as far as I could tell, that is). So, technically speaking, she wasn't even my cousin, to begin with. This mare before me was still very much me and could be classified as a separate personality based on another person's incomplete mess of memories. She was her own being... a clone of myself with slightly different memories, but her own being nonetheless.

A nagging voice in the back of my mind still said that this was technically incest (or selfcest, whatever). Sex with your clone wasn't 'masturbating', after all. I told that part of my brain to shut the hell up because, quite frankly, this was still a dream (even if the person in front of me was as real as I was). I wasn't going to let that stop me from enjoying this.

Tabetha-Me broke our kiss first, trailing a few down my chin as she gradually moved closer to my throbbing length. I watched her with nervous panting breaths as she got ever closer to the tip of my member and gulped thickly as she looked up to me, smiling lecherously.

She kissed my tip and I almost felt like I was going to ejaculate all over her from that alone. With a shaking hoof, I awkwardly grabbed the back of her head and she took that as her cue to open her lips to allow me entrance to the warm and wet depth of her muzzle. I shuddered as her thin tongue already began to assault my tip with a vigorous fervor.

Suffice to say, I didn't last for long. Alone the noises she made sucking on my dick had me at the edge of my orgasm in no time. And it felt absolutely heavenly shooting the sticky strings of my cum into her mouth, watching her gulp down the fluid eagerly.

Before long, my dick receded back from where it came from, leaving me feeling fuzzy all over. Tabetha-Me came back up to give me a little nuzzle and I leaned into it with a smile on my own muzzle.

“How was that?” she asked me, and, instead of answering, I decided to simply give her a kiss. My own hoof began to stroke her own member, causing her to let out a delighted gasp and I felt my mouth dry up in heavy anticipation at what I wanted to do. She had helped me with mine so it was only fair that I help her with hers, right? I... I don't care if it was degenerate, the only thing on my mind was taking that dick as far as I could.

“Uh... what are...” she began as I slowly trailed kisses all over her body like she had done to me not a minute ago, unsure whether to say something or to just watch me like I had watched her. I gave her a little wink before taking in the sight of her majestic tool, licking my lips nervously.

The only thought on my mind was to not screw this up somehow as I gave her length an experimental lick, not tasting anything in particular. Her arousal (and mine, I suppose) was apparently near tasteless despite smelling so incredibly good. I didn't know whether to be disappointed by that or not.

With a mental shrug, I decided to just go for it and opened my mouth, taking in only her tip at first. I was careful not to let my teeth touch her cock in any way, and, as I slowly started to bob my head up and down, going further down her rod with each successive movement (while being careful with my horn, duh), I noticed that I didn't have a gag reflex. Like... at all.

That only made things easier for me, I noted happily. I hummed and increased my pace, listening to her moan cutely and to the wings buzzing on my back. Unlike me, she lasted for a few minutes longer and once she was at her peak, she let me know. So, curious as I was, I returned to licking her tip furiously, eager to find out what that cum of ours would taste like.

After she started to let loose, shooting her thick load into my mouth, I could tell that it was as tasteless as her pre-cum had been. I reasoned with myself that that might change once we had our 'nuptial flight' and ignored my slight disappointment, letting her dick leave my mouth as it started to recede back to where it had come from.

She let out a happy little hum, clearly enjoying the little nuzzle that I gave her and she hugged me gratefully. “That was amazing, My Queen... Far better than when I did that with my hooves...”

“Your... Queen?” I asked, fidgeting slightly. It sounded... kind of arrogant. A warm flutter raced through my body, though. I did like it, to be honest. In the nickname kind of way... but... I don't want to revert back to my self-absorbed, narcissistic self without having put in an actual effort to better myself. Besides... I don't know whether I would still like it as an actual title and position. That thought seemed like a scary prospect.

“You haven't decided on a name yet and since we are the only one of our kind the tree gave birth to, we can thus only be the virgin queen of a new hive,” Tabetha-Me explained, giving me a smile. “We should find someone to mate with soon or we will only be able to lay drones, dooming our hive.”

“You are strangely eager for that,” I pointed out, raising my eyebrow at her. “Why is that?”

“I don't know...” she mumbled, tapping her chin thoughtfully with a hoof. “Instinct, I suppose? Don't you feel that need to start your own hive?”

“I... do,” I admitted, nodding slightly. It wasn't overwhelming (at least, not yet), but, now that she had pointed it out to me, I could feel a slight pull to find a suitable donor for... well... sperm. Preferably multiple donors. Like... a lot. The thought alone was making me hornier than I had been a few moments ago and I had to consciously put in an effort to not exclusively think with my snatch. “How do you think we should do this? We are still trapped in that cavern.”

“First, we should figure out how to fly,” she said. “Then we can still worry about that. What do you think about going to that settlement we had seen in the Realm of Death?”

“That... that is a way better name than what I came up with,” I muttered, feeling slightly pouty. My doppelganger smiled comfortingly, rubbing my shoulder with her hoof slowly.

The contact with her was a welcome one and I had to wonder why that was. I went from absolutely hating Tabetha's guts to guilty about stealing her memories to trying to make amends with the representation of her memory and now to slight infatuation with someone that was basically myself! Somehow, I found it within myself to forgive her for building that machine, but... that's the thing, wasn't it? The 'Tabetha' in front of me wasn't the one that had built it. She was me, slightly different, but still me in a way. A mix of me and the broken memories of Tabetha.

The mare that was in front of me was likable, loving, and actually tried to be helpful. She wasn't the Tabetha that had no regard for whether or not I wanted to go into that damn machine, she wasn't the Tabetha that did anything to get at the knowledge that she wanted. She wasn't the type that actually would build a doomsday device just because she could. My 'Tabetha' wasn't obsessed with getting her old family back but wanted to have a new one instead. With me as her Queen.

She was... loyal. That's something I could very much appreciate. “So... what do you think I should name myself? You have the better ideas, clearly.”

“You seemed pretty fond of the spiders and the bees in the cave,” she hummed, starting to pace back and forth in front of me. Another thing that I liked about her were her flanks... they were gorgeous. Absolutely beautiful. Perfectly shaped, strong, swaying ever so slightly... How could I not stare at them all day long? “How about Araneae Apidae then? It is a very... majestic~... name and has a nice meaning to it. We could make Apidae into our new family name as well, sort of like a completely new start without the worries of our past life.”

“You really do love your sciency words,” I quipped, smirking back at her pout. “I like it, though. The Arachnid Bee... I agree that Apidae fits us far better than Baker, that's for sure.”

“I'm glad that it pleases you, My Queen,” she responded, giving me a half-lidded gaze. I bit my lip, trying to ignore the aching need of my marehood. “What about me then?”

“What do you mean?” I asked, fidgeting as she sashayed over to me with a little gleam in her eyes.

“A name,” she said, poking my chest with a hoof slightly as she looked up at me with those gorgeous slit purple eyes. “I don't enjoy being reminded of her misdeeds every time you say my name, thinking about her and what that machine did to us.”

“Oh... o-okay,” I agreed, shuddering as I was losing the battle with my needy snatch. Not that I ever stood a chance in the first place. “H-how about... uh... I... d-damnit, you're too sexy, I can't think straight. M-maybe Arachne?”

“Hmm... I do like the name. It reminds me of you, and, in a sense, it is even fitting, isn't it? In Greek and Roman mythology, Arachne was punished for her transgressions and turned into a spider. Her arrogance led to her downfall like it did to 'me'. I think... I think I will choose to take on the name, then. Besides, it will also serve as a reminder to never become so arrogant as to temper with souls again. Very well, I shall be your faithful Arachne, My Queen,” she said with a smile, giving me a deep bow.

“N-no need to bow. P-please?” I stammered and gulped thickly as she gave me a lustful smile before invading my personal space again. “I-I... I... uh...”

“Do I have you flustered, My Queen?” she whispered softly, a sly smile on her muzzle as she slowly traced circles over my chitin with her hoof. “Should I... stop?”

“N-no,” I whispered, desperately trying to get my mouth to move despite the sudden numbness.

“I... how did you do that?” she asked me, her previous seductive behavior gone completely. Instead, her excitement to learn new things returned and I suppressed the slightly disappointed feeling welling up within me. “Was that a mental message?”

“I... think so?” I responded unsurely. “My mouth started to feel too numb for some reason, I couldn't answer but... but I wanted you to keep going so much, it was frustrating me to no end. Somehow I was still able to 'say' something, it was... weird. I don't know how I did it...”

“Interesting,” Arachne muttered while a million thoughts were no doubt racing through that pretty little head of hers. It was honestly endearing in its own way. Her dedication to figuring out everything about us was admirable and it made me only... was it love? I couldn't tell for certain, but it felt right to call this feeling I had for her 'love' despite having no idea what love was actually supposed to feel like. Since meeting her, I have felt nothing but affection and companionship for her, so maybe it wasn't even that far of a stretch to say that I've been falling in love with her. And this feeling only got stronger the more time I spent around her. Besides, I sucked her dick and enjoyed it like nothing else, I was way past the point of no return with her, wasn't I?

Her message startled me out of my thoughts about my confused feelings for her and I nodded, causing her to dance giddily. If I wasn't so turned on right now, I would have called her 'artfully hopping around' cute. “How do we do that? Is it because of this dream?”

“I think I figured it out!” she said, ignoring my question as she rapidly started to ramble to herself. I was unable to make out a single coherent sentence, so I simply shoved my hoof in her muzzle.

“Explain,” I demanded, tired of being left out of her enlightenment. My command made her... did she actually just moan? Did she... Of course, she also had that kind of kink, why was I even surprised? I had her memories, I should have known that she really liked being both submissive and dominant.

What did that say about me?

she nodded and I lifted my hoof away from her. “I think it has to do with mutual consent. I couldn't communicate with you earlier in the waking world because I hadn't gotten your permission to do so yet. You were unaware of my existence and thus, I couldn't talk with you over the mental connection we share.”

“So, if I don't want to speak with you, you are unable to send messages to me?” I clarified and got her to nod hesitantly.

“We would have to test this, of course,” she admitted, rubbing her hooves awkwardly together. “Maybe if you tried to ignore me?”

“Okay, then,” I said, giving her the go-ahead to send me another mental message. I waited for a few moments while concentrating on keeping her 'out', so to speak, and, as she said, nothing happened. “Well, that could prove useful knowledge...”

“Right,” Arachne agreed, nodding quickly. “And I also have a theory about this place.”

“And what would that be?” I inquired, raising a brow.

she replied, an adorable little grin on her muzzle.