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Wild Iris Bud
58c621
>...so Dastrica, would you mind telling us about yourself?
Right yes, hello! I'm Dastrica, I'm 29 years old, I work as one of Polokoa's personal assistants and I'm the first neumono/predator hybrid to have ever existed! Some people say neumedator and some people say predamono, but either way I was the first one. Er
I mean, there could theoretically have been others, especially hundreds of thousands of years ago when the two species hadn't diverged as much, but it'd be like a million to one to get the individuals with the right genes and then another million to one for them to survive just until birth and then
What I mean is, I was made in a lab. Yes. That's the first thing I try to make clear to people. I mean, I have parents! And my mother was even nice enough to carry me for a while, for which she had the trouble of needing surgery to get me out, but I have about .6% artificial genes or something and they were also moved around in the sequence, I think. Something like that. Closing the gaps, basically, to make me possible. I needed other help too, like I had to get braces for my ribs and hips to grow right and I needed speech therapy to make sure I actually did learn to talk instead of just being lazy and shooting my thoughts at people, which I really didn't like at the time because bending air around your throat and tongue and things is so weird but if I didn't learn then I would never have been able to learn properly! And I was almost a bit of a disappointment anyway because the only special thing I could do was imitate neumono empathy so I could feel like a hive member, but then they figured out that if they put these implants in me to make some more connections in my brain I would get a lot of much cooler powers, which is nice, though now I've grown up and I'm not horribly disabled they're making more of us and they think they've improved things so they won't have the same issues I did.
Excuse me, sorry! When you use your brain to talk you don't need to breathe, so sometimes you start using really long run-on sentences. I was concentrating on not talking about myself in the third person, sometimes I do that if I forget. Sometimes you just hang around hearing people think about you as another person so much that you start doing it yourself! It's like living in a hall of mirrors.
So, right, ok. With my augmentations, I can do mostly anything a predator could do, just not as strong. Like, if I wanted to really change a neumono, they'd have to let me, or be vulnerable in some other way, and it'd take longer and there are some thing I can't do at all. And of course I can go silent, or I can even put out false moods, though if someone knows me they can tell because I can't put out fake moods as strongly as real ones. More often I just partially silence myself, so I can keep bad or rude thoughts to myself while letting the others out. But more! Because of the blend of predator powers with some neumono brain bits, I can put out much more specific and complicated thoughts than a predator could, like actual words or even pictures and sounds and hallucinations and things like that. I'm telepathic! Oh, and I've learned to use my implants to turn my thoughts into a wireless signal, so I can talk with computers, too. For actual work, like earning my food work, one thing I do is, I can put neumono into a sort of trance, where it's like I take away all their distractions and tiredness and that sort of thing, and they can work really efficiently and they don't get as tired and afterwards they say it feels like it didn't take long at all. So that's really popular and Dastrica gets asked for that a lot. And I work as a counsellor, too, I've actually got training and everything, so it's not just mind powers all the time. And I help with diplomacy and making sure people get their problems out and are happy and honest and everything. And recently I've tried to get involved with all my new little fellow hybrids! Because they're trying to go for more genetic diversity, but I'm not sure their parents will be so good with them as mine were with me, but I'll be here. And they're really adorable and when you pick them up they just start beaming lovely baby happiness at you, it's really nice and it's funny to see the neumono scientists walking around carrying them.
We'd have a lot more fuss made over us if it wasn't for Polokoa, I think. She's sort of overloaded everyone's weirdness sense, so we don't seem so odd. Some neumono are still kind of superstitious about us, like the Dustwalker hive, but then a lot of them are superstitious about Polokoa, too. I think sometimes she encourages a lot of weird things like us so that she doesn't seem so odd. Getting scientists to rebuild species that were extinct, for example, but whose genes were still bouncing around, our home planet had a lot of strange stuff that was gone by the time aliens turned up. And then there's all the cyborgs and the time travel experiments and the CAI village and all the crazy scientists and the clones and, just, everything.
It all seems normal to me by now, but I'm part of it, so I understand.
>To all quest characters: What is best in life (aside from sex and/or 'To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women')?
When people are happy to have you around!
>Again, to all: What do you dream about?
Ah, my dreams are kind of scary. Sometimes I have dreams about eating neumono, or sometimes the neumono are the ones eating me. So most nights I sleep with neumono and I visit their dreams! Usually Polokoa, actually. She likes to have me help keep her dreams nice. She used to get upset every time she was Polokoa in her dreams, instead of being Polo or Rokoa, but she was getting used to that by the time she had me around. Now though, she gets upset when either of them aren't in her dreams, or especially when they're both missing. She wouldn't ever admit it but I think it frightens her a bit, and makes her sad.
Oh, um, don't tell anyone I said any of that.
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