Insect Broodmother (Patreon)

Sarah continued to panic, flying through the night sky over the woods, trying to find a safe place to land and deal with the very, very big problem developing behind her. Her wings struggled to keep her afloat thanks to the increasingly enormous abdomen swelling out from her backside. She could feel the little grubs within growing impatient to be birthed into the world, and the tip of her thorax was becoming increasingly tinged with a slight pain.

“I wish I’d never agreed to that experiment!”

Only a couple of weeks ago - when she still had only two arms, and certainly no wings, insectoid abdomen, or antennae - Sarah had been down on her luck and greatly in need of cash. A strange organisation she’d never heard of called Genexpansehad put an ad in the paper for applicants willing to test a new skin compound. It paid very handsomely, and she was just desperate enough to go for it.

She wished she hadn’t now; Genexpanse turned out to be less a real business than a collection of unethical scientists keeping test subjects in illegal captivity. Some of her fellow prisoners developed harsh rashes, others grew whiskers or tails, but with Sarah they’d hit a real success: her body twisted and changed to turn into a real, living insect queen. Her eyes turned utterly black, she sprouted long ethereal wings from her back, and her arms and legs became plated, another pair of arms sprouting from her waist, full functional. She developed tuffs of soft, downy insect fur, and sensitive antennae grew painfully from her scalp. But the biggest of all the changes was behind her, as day by day a gigantic and heavy abdomen swelled out behind her. Things got even worse when one of the scientist let slip one of the reasons she was considered such a success; her body was self-fertilising, meaning she was swelling up with larva that she would soon lay, becoming the first of a huge colony she would have to continually birth for the reminder of her life as an insect brood mother.

Sarah didn’t like this future one bit, but something to do with her new body and antennae was driving her to protect her new children. If she was going to be forced into this role, she was determined her colony would be free, and her children would not become the slaves the scientists wanted them to be. While complaining of pains in her abdomen and needing a larger cell, Sarah escaped during transfer, taking off into the sky and out of sight.

In the present, Sarah spotted using her antennae and altered eyes a nice cave she could set down in, her wings tired from all the flying and keeping her gravid form afloat. Her abdomen twitched, the urged to push the first of her many, manyyoung into the world.

“J-just be p-patient little ones. I – ugh! – promise I’ll get you out s-soon. And then . . . and then I can try to s-settle into this crazy new life of m-mine.”

Sarah knew it was wrong, but some part of her was becoming excited at starting her colony.