Game 1Game 1 Outline| Game 1 |
Game 1 Outline |
It takes hours before you grow used to your strange new form. The sheer number of arms you now control is confusing, and you end up folding the lower two pair against your chitinous belly to get them out of the way for now. You'll get used to them eventually, you suppose, assuming you stay in this body long enough.
Walking on four legs proves nearly as baffling, but after an hour or two of stumbling failure you feel steady enough to continue your journey. Surprisingly, these additions prove beneficial -- even with two lengthy tails curled behind you, your former balance problems are largely solved, and movement is fairly comfortable even across the scorching sand. Still, walking with four legs instead of two is nearly the strangest part of this whole trip, and even after a few hours you have to consciously think about it in the back of your mind. Left-front right-back, right-front left-back, left-front right-back...
Suddenly you feel a slight twitching in your righthand pair of antennae. Vibration.
By this point you've largely forgotten your second pair of eyes. While strange initially, they still focus to one image, thankfully. You peer to your right, and notice a shift in the otherwise smooth sand. As you watch, it slips again, and the size of the disturbance tells you whatever's moving underneath is of a reasonable size. Your mandibles quiver as some instinctive voice in the back of your mind tells you you're looking at dinner... and it's been quite some time since you had a meal.
Moving as smoothly and silently as your awkward body allows, you unfold all eight arms and raise both tails to a striking position, and carefully tread towards your target on your four feet. You can feel that both your tails' venom sacs are stretched full, and something deep inside you yearns to empty them into prey.
As you progress, you find yourself leaning more and more forward, stretching both pairs of mandibles towards your target. Suddenly you stop, realizing something. You no longer feel awkward!
You stop and think about your new posture -- Your bottom two pairs of arms are now on the ground, supporting your body in much the same way your four legs are. Something about this feels much more natural... of course! Scorpions are arachnids! Of course you'd feel more natural moving about on eight limbs instead of four!
Elated, you forget all about the movement under the sand and experimentally move about on eight legs. Your every step feels smoother, more steady, and you find no need to think about your every motion like you were before. You obviously can still straighten up and use all eight arms if you wish to, but with this new discovery you expect you'll make do with just the top four most of the time.
Suddenly there's motion again, strong enough that all four antennae twitch, and you focus all your eyes on your prey. You smoothly move into position with your new coordinated posture and wait for your prey to reveal itself.
You find yourself almost content, resting on eight chitinous legs with four pincers raised and ready to fight, with your two enormous segmented tails curving high up behind you, their stingers quivering in nervous anticipation of striking, and your sacs distended with poison ready to be injected when they do. You work your two pairs of mandibles excitedly, and all four of your antennae sweep in search of the slightest signs of vibration. Riding on the wave of your newly discovered scorpion instincts, this feels very right.
Written by fish
(This page has not yet been checked by the maintainers of this site.)