Elektron

“I want a damn bed!”.

The phrase echoed in the silent passages of the system of limestone caves that Alice Desare had only recently started calling home.

The Italian girl had once again been woken by the horridly cold and hard stone on which she had been resting for more than two weeks.

“You’d think that after god-only-knows-how-many days it would become easier to sleep on the damn ground! My kingdom for a mattress”.

She glumly got up and stretched her sore body. Thankfully, the temperature underground had always kept a stable ‘too chilly to be comfortable but at least it’s not hypothermia’ level and her body had managed to keep up by simply increasing her already messed up metabolism.

While performing all the duties put upon an up-and-coming cavegirl, like washing herself and eating chunks of raw meat she had caught the previous day, Alice kept loudly complaining of her fate, if only to keep herself company.

“Also I’m really damn tired of meat, and raw meat in particular. I want a damned salad, and I hate salad. I miss pasta, and pizza, and every damn thing that cannot be found inside of a butchery. Also I need some sunlight. Only I can be transported away from a worldwide quarantine only to be put into a natural underground prison… and forced to eat damned bats! There is some irony somewhere in this situation”.

She had just finished gearing up for the second day of in-depth exploration, when Fate and Time decided to mess a bit more with her.

A familiar and dreadful sensation presented itself in the pants she had recently worked really hard to clean, the horrid feeling of wet fabric clinging to her nether regions.

She didn’t even have to look down to know what that meant.

“Oh FUCK YOU! I really hate you. When I find out who in particular you are you will regret it. I’ll make you cry”.

She kept swearing for a long time, her bad mood only worsening.

After taking off her ruined pants, she decided to jump into the fresh water of the pool to clean herself up. Once floating in there, cool water lapping at her limbs, she started thinking aloud.

“A period at this time and in my current situation is absolutely unacceptable. I’m a Biomancer and I’ll behave like one, for fudge sake”.

She started searching in her body for the culprits, starting from her reproductive organs and, from there, following the hormone trail like a hound, finally finding the source in a small, pea-sized gland at the bottom of the brain, just underneath a portion she was quite sure was the hypothalamus. She had found her pituitary gland.

I’m already in really scary territory. Is it worth it to mess with an extremely complex gland that I know has far more functions than simply making me cranky once a month?

She started to reconsider, her mental self retreating from the organ.

That is, until she thought of all the years of agony since her ‘ascent to womanhood’, all the money she had had to spend on expensive products and all the embarrassing situations she had been in because of a very solvable design glitch of the human body.

A righteous rage filled her with resolve as she dove straight into one of the most important hormonal engines of her system, focusing on the large amount of progesterone it produced and ordering to lower its production back to values the Biomagical Instincts skill told her were normal for a young woman.

Once she finished fine tuning her hormones, a strange calm suffused her. At last, something had somehow gone smoothly today.

While I’m here, let’s go over all the other useless things my body is producing. If I can adjust my period over the course of one hour why not do so for everything else?

Over the course of a few more hours, she travelled all around her body while using her Instincts at full swing.

In a few places, she quickly stopped the renewal of hair follicles, knowing that over time they would fall off and never grow again. Unless she wanted it, obviously.

All over her scalp, the keratin production was increased as she simply ordered her hair to grow stronger and silkier.

Muahaha! No more nutritive shampoo? Just tell your hair to improve themselves! I know a few girls back home that would sell their mothers for something like this.

Looking at her nails with her in-body view, she made it so they grew far slower, if stronger, over time, knowing that she wouldn’t have access to the tools able to cut them.

Once done with all her changes, she emerged from the pool dripping water and confidence, a new woman, one without the need of damned pads. Or at least she wouldn’t need them as soon as her body started adjusting to her subtle modifications.

Sometimes you just need a makeover. Now back to being the nightmare of any cave diver.

When she finally reached the main cave, she had decided to take it easy for the day.

Alice calmly walked towards the cave wall extending to the left of her opening and lit up the colony of larvae that constellated the vertical stone.

Each one of the grubs was busy munching through the wall itself, using its round mouth filled with squat teeth to break down the hard calcite, leaving rounded divots wherever they passed.

I wonder if they are responsible for the caves themselves. Do they really eat limestone?

She kept watching the feasting animals, until, for a second, something shiny caught her eye.

Slowly scanning the entire wall, her light finally reflected on the smooth and polished surface of something laying embedded into the sedimentary rock, surrounded by a large group of the fat creatures.

She squinted her eyes in the dim light, risking a few steps closer to get a glimpse of the object. It turned out to be some kind of crystal or transparent rock that was being gradually exposed and consumed by the grubs around it, their mandibles crunching on the hard material.

If everything didn’t look so green I’d have more information, I wonder what that is.

Once she discovered the first nodule of crystal, it was easy for her to locate more of them, dispersed all over the wall and almost always surrounded by the insects.

Alright. I’m quite sure they eat away the rock to get to whatever that is. Cool. But now I’m curious.

She bit her lip a couple of times as her hand slowly travelled towards the rope coiled on her side. After a few torn minutes, she suddenly sighed while unhooking it from her belt and painstakingly tying a noose on one end of the silk.

She ignored the larger clusters of grubs, trying to find one of the lonelier members of the colony. It didn’t take long for her to find one such specimen, its fat body clinging to the stone a few meters on top of her while it nibbled on a small vein of the translucent material.

She started throwing the makeshift lazzo in a clumsy effort to catch it, the rope mainly falling short or missing the target altogether; then, as her arm was growing tired and her bad mood coming back, the thread latched onto the creature’s head.

Alice instantly pulled, ripping the animal away from the stone. Her eyes widened as the creature went sailing through the air in a path of direct collision with her own body.

She shielded her head as the animal smashed on her chest, taking her breath and causing her to fall on her butt.

She had just started trying to pry the thing off of her when its body began squirming and trembling under her fingers. Then, without any more warnings, it released a sudden surge of electricity which coursed through her body, causing her muscles to lock up and shake uncontrollably.

The electric charge the creature had produced was strong enough to send a wave of excruciating pain all over her body, her residual arm in particular seemed to have been dipped in burning oil and she puked when she somehow felt her right hand starting to spasm together with the left one.

Only after many long seconds did the effect lessen enough for her to grab the larvae and fling it away from her chest, sending it bouncing a few meters to the side.

She took deep breaths while her muscles kept spasming uncontrollably, a few burns and cuts had appeared where the insect had latched itself with its pointed legs on her bare skin.

Alice slowly got up, brushing away from her chin the remains of her meal, her hazel hair floating in the air as residual static electricity still coated her figure; she stumbled towards the grub which had somehow decided that the best course of action was to start eating again.

With extreme care, she trapped it with one of the emptied crayfish legs and then wrapped the container in silk, forming something close to a handbag.

She brought the thing back into her home and just dropped it after the entrance, not even putting back up the palisade as she curled up and slept.

When she got up, many hours later, everything hurt like that time she had gone to the gym to “exercise away the holiday food” and had had to ask her mum to help her to the bathroom the next day. She shied away from any thoughts about home as she got up on her feet, ignoring the spikes of pain coming from her legs and back.

She quickly washed herself in the pool before stumbling towards the larvae which had over time managed to escape her cage and was now intent on eating through the wall of the cave.

“You little fuck” she murmured while watching the grub happily eat away, probably searching for more of the crystalline material.

Alice quickly decided not to kill it outright, if at all, as it probably had far more uses alive than dead.

First of all, she went back and grabbed her old limestone club, probably the only non-conductive tool she had at her disposal, and lightly prodded the worm which instantly reacted sending another surge of electricity at the thing touching it.

Alice waited around a minute before touching it again, this time finding no reaction but a few squirms from the plump creature.

“Knew it. You need to recharge. Now it’s only a matter of knowing how long it takes”.

She kept prodding it, counting the seconds between each prod and honestly enjoying how seemingly annoyed the creature got after the tenth or so prodding.

“Yeah this is payback”.

In the end, it took more than one hour for the creature to send out a far smaller bolt of electricity. Once satisfied with her experiment, she created an ugly harness out of silk and put it around the body of the larvae, letting it hang like a leash.

“This way you can go wherever you want. I won’t kill you and in exchange I might make you my new kitchen appliance. Damn, I feel like a character of the Flintstones using an animal as a stove”.

She let it do its thing as she went back to the pool, swimming around as she hastened her own healing and let more specks fuse with her flesh. “I wonder what would happen if I were to accept the specks all over my body, and in my brain most of all…” she kept musing while she splashed around her water, letting the organisms consume her blood as it went.

Today had been a bad day.