*H*U*N*T*I*N*G*
The world twisted, the white trees warping into horrific, clawed shapes. The flowers sprouted teeth and snapped at her. Houtu ran, but something slimy tangled around her ankle and she fell.
"Volos, help!" she screamed, fingernails breaking as she scrabbled at the dirt. Something pulled her backwards. She looked over her shoulder and shrieked in terror.
Volos's head and face leered above her on a long, purple-red-gray stalk, eyes burning red, the rest of his body a mass of writhing tentacles and giant, barbed spider legs, all glistening with mucous and surrounding a central, gaping mouth lined with rows and rows of brown spikes.
The monster drew her closer.
"No! No—Volos, no!" She screamed again in mindless fear, while all around her the trees chittered and laughed and warped, reality skewing into a phantasmagoric nightmare.
Around her legs she felt slime, and hot, humid air, and the last vestiges of rational thought fled. She screamed again as the toothed maw closed around her waist and ripped her in half.
Hallucinations. Death throes. Pain. Struggle. Denial of cessation.
Houtu. Female. Female. Female. Mother? Friend? Friend of Losna-Mother-Cetra.
Female? Male? Binary? Differences? Identities?
More female perspective was required. The One Self tapped the newly absorbed memories.
Near the edge of the city, Houtu smiled at her best friend's son. "Volos, what are you doing out this evening? You just got back from your scouting mission. You must be tired." It wasn't late at all, barely an hour after sunset, but Volos seemed a little off, like he might be coming down with a cold and needed some rest.
"I just came out to enjoy the moon," he replied. "Just for a little while."
"It is beautiful," she agreed. Moon-gazing was a favorite activity among the Cetra. She found it especially relaxing during the current crisis that had drawn her clan to the capital. "I came out for the same reason. The Moogle in the Moon is particularly clear and visible tonight."
"I wanted to go find a better spot," Volos said. "Someplace with less light to interfere with the view. There's too much light from the city right now."
The capital city's lights were also beautiful, but Houtu agreed that they interfered with the lovely sights in the night sky. "Come with me, child," she said, taking his arm. She'd known Volos since he was a baby and had even helped raise him. She could share an evening of moon-gazing with him. "I have just the spot in mind."
They took a moderately long walk to a nice, secluded location outside the city, surrounded by sweet-scented blooms, low shrubs, and scattered trees. The sky arched overhead, black velvet jeweled with stars, and the moon glowed, dominating the firmament.
"It's very private here," said Volos. "No one's around."
"It's my favorite moon-gazing area," Houtu said.
"It's mine now, too. I hope to come here often," Volos said, and something in his voice made Houtu frown at him.
"Volos?" she queried. He looked so strange. Almost... Soulless... His movements were sinuous, like his bones were dissolving, and his eyes glittered in a way she'd never seen before in any other Cetra. She rubbed her face. Her vision swam, distorting the trees into wavy claws, reminding her of that time in her adolescence when she'd inhaled hallucinogenic mushroom spores on a dare. "Volos? Are you—? Something—something's wrong?"
"Is it?" he asked, and his voice sounded gravelly and hoarse.
The Cetra brain appeared quite susceptible to external stimuli and manipulation. The One Self had only tried a whisper of limited aetheric communion with Houtu-Cetra. It had merely touched a memory center, and its prey had created her own imagery. A hallucination, based on a previous life experience, and distorted further by the One Self's greater will. The entrapment process had succeeded well beyond its expectations. This prey species could be easily manipulated and lured into traps.
The experiment had been brief, ending when, through Volos, the One Self consumed its meal. It would need to experiment further with other Cetra this night. Now that it possessed the design, structure, and biochemistry of a Cetra brain, it could influence many of their minds, perhaps all but those with the strongest wills. The idea was promising. It wasn't true control, but even a small amount of manipulation and distraction could be useful. Direct mental pressure could be instantaneous and make hunting less of a chore.
The One Self had often been able to affect minds of other beings on other worlds. It was a great deal easier with these Cetra: The same features that gave them sensitivity to the Lifestream worked against them. Lifestream was quintessence, and the One Self utilized quintessence as easily as the Cetra breathed. Still, caution was required. The connection these Cetra shared with their Lifestream might cause surprising problems.
The One Self now had genetic and phenotypic information for both male and female Cetra. A female Cetra differed subtly from a male Cetra. Not much, as far as it was concerned. They seemed very much alike, though not quite clones of one another. The Cetra themselves found the differences significant, with differing social and reproductive behaviors and purposes, so the One Self took careful note. A mistake could create suspicion.
Such peculiar behavior. So much energy devoted to those processes. So much biological waste over slightly differing genetics, hormones, phenotypic expression, pheromones, social and instinctive behaviors. So much, and so much more.
Not as significant as on other worlds, though. The One Self had encountered one planet where seventeen different organisms had needed to participate in successful reproduction. That wasteful process had produced a large swarm of independent offspring—thousands at a time.
True Life required no such interplay or dynamics. True Life simply existed and reproduced across the universe, spreading to worlds with lesser life for feeding and growth.
The One Self processed and internalized the differences. Houtu-Cetra had noticed that Volos behaved abnormally by Cetra standards, even for a male. That behavior could now be corrected. It was pleased by the latest addition to its collective gestalt. Without the new female perspective, all interactions of Volos and Napir with ordinary Cetra females might have been atypical enough to be suspect. Now, though, all duplicates would pass undetected.
Volos's body mass had increased slightly with the meals it had taken with other Cetra. Now it had increased significantly more from consuming the biological material of Houtu-Cetra. The size difference would be noticeable.
Volos pinched off almost half its mass. The lump of tissue immediately formed into a duplicate of Houtu-Cetra. Both avatar-scouts retained half the quintessence—Lifestream—that had originally circulated within the singular body of Houtu-Cetra. It was sufficient for further mobility and growth of these extensions of the One Self.
The two copies turned without speaking and walked off, each heading in a different direction to locate more prey, to experiment with influencing Cetra minds, and to infect those Cetra they didn't consume.