The only straight man

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

Like okay you're a an alien virus, you just hop from planet to planet, eating whole population,s doing your thing, you're just chilling vibing, and then you get to another planet and you're gearing up to do your normal things and then this species of tiny soft single-formed bipeds who haven't even developed telepathy between themselves yet just intercept you and utterly rock your shit. Like 97% of your biomass destroyed levels of getting your ass beat. They literally put you in the ground and you're like "Ah well them's the breaks" except no not really because the ground itself is alive and it hates your fucking guts so you can't actually die (assuming you can be killed and don't have the single celll regeneration thing going on).

So you just sit frozen in a glacier for 2,000 years, possibly fossiziling alive, and Eventually you get pulled out and it's THE FUCKING GUYS AGAIN. except this time instead of killing you they put you in a tank and start stealing your cells and turning each other into vessels? and they're weird this time, because unlike your former vessels who you could basically just jump between controlling at will, these ones, unless they have a lot of your cells, just??? Do their own fuckass thing????? You have to focus really hard to make them do anything, and it's almost not even worth it because it puts so much strain on them they start straight up dying??????

So you're just sitting in a tank while this is happening and THEN the strongest and most fit of your new vessels shows up to the oldest piece of biomass you have and you're like "Oh finally we do a little reunion, start rebuilding the body" except this one doesn't seem to know what it's supposed to do and before you can get the ball rolling, he gets stabbed and dies and falls into the ground that hates you, at which point all you can do is try to maintain a connection with him, and this one is really weird because whatever they did to him made him like a perfect hybrid of them and your cells, so now instead of the normal semi-independent reasoning that you can easily overpower, this one's mind. Will not dissolve into the collective. You bring him in only to that he just starts piloting and directing the vessels the same way you normally do. The humans dicked around and managed to give themselves fucking admin privileges in YOUR HIVE MIND

So you just say "okay you take the wheel I'm gonna focused on recovering the main body" because that's really all you can do in this situation and he just spends all his time being like "Mother... we'e finally together...". you're an alien so you only kind of know what the fucking he's talking about, but he's really really into this idea of you being his mother, and it's easier to just not correct it. Then he goes about trying to obtain biomass and hijack the planet the way you normally would but you frequently have to remind him that eating the planet is your main goal and not "revenge against all humanity" or whatever he's going on about this week

NOT YOUR FAULT BUT MINE

And it was

YOUR HEART ON THE LINE

I really

They send someone to stop the experiment but Grace refuses cause they’re so far in already and well that would just ruin the data.

(^ @caligeno tags)

Grace:

Her immune cells responded to that tiny little needle wound as they normally would, and only then detected something wrong with the surrounding cells, attacking the cancer they now associated with that trivial damage.

i mean they have a lot to bond over!

@happybabysloth yeah but like who's gonna know. who's gonna know he's wearing red. definitely not these guys, he's invited <3