Chapter 11: Chapter 10: By Any Other Name…

The nameless foot soldier sat in a corner in the burrow, slowly making sense of her life. Everything before just a few minutes prior was so…hazy and indistinct. She was a rat, doing…whatever rats did, eating and running and hiding and then she was caught by some giant creature and then she had been transported to here, where she met the Queen.

The sight of the Queen had filled her with terror for a reason she just…couldn’t understand. The Queen was…the most important thing in the world, so why had she been so scared? Fortunately, the Queen had caught her before she could run away, and had shown her the true meaning of her life. She had been converted into something stronger, faster, better. She had fought with her sisters against the terrible green things the Queen called goblins, and had emerged victorious again and again.

They had even managed to make the green things into new sisters, at the cost of a few of their own. That fact didn’t bother the foot soldier; her sisters had given their lives for the greater good, and they lived on as the substance the Queen called modeling wax, allowing them to continue to serve even past the time they stopped living.

And then…then the Queen had asked her a question. You there, the Queen had asked, are you able to evolve?

That question pierced the fog that had been over the foot soldier’s mind. The concept of being…individual had never occurred to her before. She had just…been. She struggled over that for a moment before finally pointing to herself, and the Queen confirmed it; she was her own being, not just part of the swarm.

And then she felt something fill her, and she was…more. She hadn’t had a true sense of self until that moment, she was just a bundle of…impulses, telling her to do things. She couldn’t think like she was now, she was just one of the swarm, doing her duty as well as she could. But now everything was so…crisp and clear.

It was disquieting in a way, knowing she was not the same as she once was, not the same as the rest of her sisters. But that was a minor thing; what was important was that the Queen wanted her to be individual, and that overrode any doubts.

And she knew this individuality would lead to greater production for the whole. Being able to think for herself would allow her to better perform the Queen’s will, and that would only bring about good.

The Queen had asked her questions about evolution, which she had dutifully answered. She had even asked permission to see the foot soldier’s evolutions, something that the foot soldier was stumped by. She was the Queen, she didn’t need permission for anything. It was her right to take whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted, however she wanted.

But the Queen had asked, so the foot soldier gave permission, pointless as such a task was. And then the Queen had given the foot soldier her first task as a truly sapient being – she was to pick her own evolution.

The Queen had made it clear that the foot soldier was to pick whatever the foot soldier thought would be best to evolve into, not to just evolve into the next tier of foot soldier because that was what she had been originally. And that was a task that was surprisingly difficult for the foot soldier; she had only just gained the ability to think rationally, so she was still just trying to…figure everything out.

Which had led to her desperate little recollection of her life. And, now that she had considered everything in her rather short existence, she had to make a choice. So, she opened up her menu once again, just to double-check her options.

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