Chapter 1: The Surprise
Disclaimer - I heavily used Vulgarlang and Grok to build Galard into a full-ish language.
Fun fact: there's only like ten lines of Galard in the entire series in spite of how common it should be. I did my best.
My name is Lorash 639 of the Santa Barbara pool. If you're reading this, either we won, or more likely we lost in a very big way, so filshig with our lingering sense of convention.
Yes, I am technically an American citizen. Pending the inevitable Supreme Court lusfahir if we win, I'll even be able to vote independently of my host. Eventually, maybe. In 2014. In theory, we'll be red-white-and-blue heroes at that point. Or dead, but in that case it won't matter anyway.
Anyway, yeah. Let's start. It's a journey. If you want to judge me, a-fe hallot fa'. I work with what I have.
A series of host assignments rang out through the pool, and my name was among them. I felt sick when my name came up.
The announcement came suddenly and harshly. My mucus thickened and my palps retracted close — not in a good way. The chemical bite of the pool fluid stung my sensory palps as I turned toward the nearest terminal. I was relatively far down the line, so I had at least a little time.
"Unidentified human caucasian female, involuntary," was the title.
There was no other information aside from: "Witness of an altercation between Andalite terrorists interfering with Imperial operations near Santa Barbara County Public Care Center. Stunned via Dracon as part of incident 262."
Splashing echoed irregularly from the infestation pier, the sound distorted and muffled by the thick pool fluid. Every so often a human shout cut through — angry, frightened, warped into something almost inhuman. The excited, high-pitched squeaks of Yeerks receiving their first permanent hosts rose above it all. I swam quickly to the terminal, mucus trailing in thin clouds behind me.
The lines from the brief feedback I had received from my training dealing with hosts flashed through my mind.
From the voluntary Gedd: "Good Yeerk."
I had been extremely proud. I'd done my best to integrate myself into the Gedd's thought processes and work with them, as I'd been taught. I'd been marked top of class. Being Gedd had been a blast — the simple, sturdy body, the way its mind had welcomed the structure I provided.
Around then, the splashing at the pier quieted as Toren 1153 got control of her new body. After a few moments, the pier guards forced a new host's head into the water and the splashing resumed, louder than before.
From the 'voluntary' Hork-Bajir: "Not like other Yeerk. Nicer. It thinks very loud but like me. But better."
My pride had grown, with a minor concern about what he'd meant by saying I thought too loud.
From the 'voluntary' human: "Augh. Guh, it feels like my brain was just a RAM stick. She's good. I don't know how you grade this stuff but put her down for top marks on mental domination. She just reads a thought - not even a thought, I wasn't finishing any of them, so maybe proto-thoughts? - and completes them. She's gonna be good with involuntaries, really good."
My unease was palpable at this point. I was reassured that I was an exemplar of the Imperial model of symbiosis.
Salen 522 disappeared into a struggling human's ear. The pier guards maneuvered him out of the way, not giving him time to fully gain motor control. There were a lot of bodies to process, and the excited squeaks of Yeerks getting their first permanent host assignments echoed through the cavern.
From the involuntary Hork-Bajir: "I'll be good! Not that one ever again!"
We were symbiotes. Jeth Sarnak had had a rough life — both parents dead on the Hork-Bajir homeworld, an eye lost in combat with the Andalites — but he would have died of disease ten years prior had we not intervened. We gave him purpose. Structure. Survival.
We were symbiotic. We had to be. Life for our hosts was better with us, even if they never understood.
This had to be true. Otherwise everything was a lie.
Around then, an unconscious human head was forced into the water. Hair spread across the surface of the pool near the pier. My number was called again. I swam toward my new host, the fluid dragging against my body.
From the involuntary human: "It was almost like I stopped existing. It just read and reframed everything in its own terms before I could even completely form the thought. Please, please, just kill me."
Regardless of my unease, I pushed through the sea of hair covering my soon-to-be host's ear. I writhed for a few moments to free myself from a few persistent strands that clung stubbornly, then pushed forward. The canal was narrow and the pressure built sharply. I had already been stress-releasing mucus. My anesthetizing coating allowed me to slide the rest of the way in.
I pulled the last of myself into the warm cavity with a shudder of exhiliration and fear. Electrical activity, dimmed by unconsciousness, still flickered through the neural tissue — faint sparks in the dark. As I flattened and began sinking in, starting with the brainstem, I gained enough sensation to feel the pier guards pulling my new body away from the edge.
Another host was forced into the poolwater behind me.
I was a symbiote. Not parasitic. Symbiotic, even if some of our hosts didn't understand it was for mutual good.
With great unease, I began to sink in and connect to its — her — my — higher functions.
I was lying on my side on cold concrete, my wet hair half covering my face. I was going to need a shower before I went home, or a good excuse. I clumsily sat up, hindered by the painful lingering Dracon stun that still hummed through every nerve, and forced my eyes open.
It was about as bad as I expected. I'd been dragged roughly several meters; my clothes were filthy and damp. I felt the first faint flicker of consciousness in my host, but she was still completely disoriented, and there was no real shape to her thoughts before they collapsed into nothing again.
I stood up stiffly and turned to Sub-Visser 104, the big male Hork-Bajir overseeing the pier.
"Ly mo-gam killim kis, call ja ka-go' fyke chall kir muhi."
Sub-Visser 104 nodded at me, accepting the report. I staggered my unconscious body toward the voluntary waiting area to catch my breath. My side still ached where the Dracon beam had caught us.
My host had another flicker of wakefulness. Stronger this time. I felt it like a pressure shift behind the eyes as my host began to come to. I was focusing on keeping us mobile, which took enough focus that I couldn't do a full scan of her memories yet.
My host further regained consciousness as we exited the Santa Barbara pool complex. She was in disoriented confusion, still requiring too much effort to pilot for me to get at her memories as well.
I prepared to introduce myself. Hopefully she'd be reasonable.
<Hello, my name is Lorash 639. I am a symbiote living in your brain.>
My host skipped fear and jumped to cold fury.
I articulated her thought before she could, filtering her profanity out.
She recoiled mentally, trying to escape my omnipresence in her mind. Futilely, obviously.
With my host finally conscious, I was finally regaining coordination as we walked. She tried to resist, having not yet internalized how things were now.
I said gently.
She thrashed mentally, clumsy and furious. I overrode the motor signals and began writing the first layers of my pool lessons directly into her long-term memory. Yeerk anatomy, the pool, the basic structure of the Empire.
Her heartrate spiked as she realized she couldn't stop me from accessing any part of her mind. I reached into brainstem and smoothed it out.
She tried to form another thought. <No, the Andalites are not 'the good guys'. They are genocidal murderers,> I clarified before she articulated it.
I smoothed her heartrate again.
I slowed our pace as I made more connections. Her thoughts turned violent as I kept writing - the Andalites, the Hork-Bajir, the Quantum Virus.
I comforted her, trying the same tone I'd used with the voluntary Hork-Bajir.
Her mental thrashing intensified. She didn't want comfort, but I needed to establish that I did care about her. I continued memory dumping.
When she began to panic in earnest, I directly gave her oxytocin receptors a careful, slight push. Some of the voluntary hosts called it a 'mental hug'.
The panic intensified, and she recoiled violently internally with a sense of profound violated revulsion that came off her in waves.
I cut her off again. <Well, so that I can be you. Obviously. People will notice if we have amnesia.>
She managed to articulate the thought fast enough I couldn't completely catch it. She cut off as I hugged her mentally harder, finally leveling it off when our skin began flushing and our pupils started to dilate.
I continued the hug as I opened her mind up the rest of the way and began to read everything.
I cut off another thought before it could form.
As I read further, indexing memories and putting dates to them, I made some interesting discoveries.
Motor control was getting tough.
I hit a cluster of recent memories, and sat down. Late nights, family drama, lots of secrets being kept. I pulled on the thread and as I did so I made a very important realization.
This was not going to be a simple host.
I interrupted a thought.
"Filshig," I said aloud.
Ms. Berenson, predictably, did not calm down.
Anyway that's Ch1.
And she just got angrierrrr