The Hive Queen continued the search for food, it was a necessity for survival and the decision to create more of herself as soon as she was able had the immense downside of removing all food reserves. Not to mention the fact that another body meant another need for food, though the Hive Queen was suspicious about the actual amount of food needed for the reproduction. Some rocks, a few morsels of meat and some weird non-meat shouldn’t have given enough raw materials for her to reproduce after everything her original body needed. The resulting body, while smaller than the original, was still rather large. She had a suspicion the answer to that mystery lied somewhere within her overly complicated essence.
As the two bodies crawled through the tunnels and crevices that made up the world, the Hive Queen noticed a small issue as the bodies grew further apart. Whichever body she was not actively focusing on became a bit…blurrier. The sight became less focused, the smells less intense, each sound muffled slightly, and the movement just that little bit more lethargic. The first time it had occurred had almost sent her into a panic, as she had initially thought that her newest body was starving to death. The rapid change back to normality upon moving the bodies closer to each other had been what clued her into this new issue. Thankfully, the range before it became truly unbearable was rather large, but it was still far smaller than the Hive Queen would’ve liked. She would much prefer to have both of her bodies exploring opposite ends of the tunnels, but with this newly discovered restriction she would simply have to settle for mapping nearby sections of tunnel. It would certainly help fill in the mental map that was slowly but surely forming, now that she could think of such things beyond instinctual knowledge.
It took a bit of mental effort to truly memorize each new area, how it connected to others and the exact distances between different sections but it was well worth it in the Hive Queen’s opinion. With the combination of her newfound intellect and additional body, she had managed to figure out far more optimal pathways between different types of stone along with areas that could be easily converted into more safe areas given some time. She had attempted to go down the tunnel that the small creatures had come from, but had found it carefully collapsed. While the Hive Queen knew she could get through the debris relatively easily given time, doing so without causing more stone to fall in on itself was a different matter entirely. It also begged the question, how did the tunnel get that way without her having detected anything? Surely such an event would’ve at least caused some sounds to echo out through the tunnels? Another question, another mystery, and one that would have to wait until the food situation was completely sorted.
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It took the Hive Queen nearly twenty hours of searching, not that she knew how long it had been, to find the first traces of something edible. More fungus, and a slight wetness to the air. The furthest body was rerouted to rapidly arrive at the location while the one already there continued to creep forward through the tunnels, leaving the food behind as the Hive Queen sought out that source of moisture. It was the most glorious sight the Hive Queen had ever seen.
A large open cavern, with a central pool of water that trickled through some holes in the ground deeper into the earth as more water replaced what was lost as it dripped down from the ceiling and flowed down the walls. Along the walls, and even in the pool of water, was food. A veritable bounty of fungus along the walls and in the water was some sort of floating mat that was almost certainly edible. It. Was. Glorious. The sheer amount of food on display here was at least ten times as much as the amount used to create the second body, and there were more branching tunnels from the cavern that would need further exploration, and perhaps there would be more such locations hidden within the nearby tunnels. The water had to be going to, and coming from, somewhere after all. The Hive Queen decided there and then, that she would need to take special care of this area, a self replenishing food source would be most valuable given the never ceasing hunger that afflicted her. But before that, a small harvest of delectable food wouldn’t be so wrong, her bodies were oh so hungry after all.
