“… if you are proceeding on your stomach, dragging your body along by your fingernails, entomology presents itself very forcibly as a thoroughly justified science.”
Markham, Beryl. (1942). West with the Night. Macmillan.
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In an instant, two disparate things happened simultaneously.
Firstly, Jacob dropped the gigantic, verdigris encrusted metal ring he'd been gripping in his nervous, sweaty hand.
Secondly, Jacob found himself reflexively dodging out of the path of the colossal lump of tarnished copper rapidly sailing through the air and about to crash with a fierce thud into the ground below.
Without even pausing to consider his situation, Jacob had instinctively oscillated the muscles in his thorax in such a way as to shift the deformation in his exoskeleton and execute a vigorous back-and-forth "flapping" motion of his hindwings. He was flying! What's more, he was steering. How was he steering? His hindwings continued to flicker rapidly up-and-down with the pulsing deformations of his thoracic exoskeleton. Dihedral to anhedral, over and over again his hindwings sliced and cut into the wind with constantly changing wing angles as he delicately balanced the hard, carapace of his shell-like, red and black elytra, maintaining their upright, fully erect position. It all happened intuitively though! Jacob reflexively knew how to do all this. His antennae twitched in the breeze, and Jacob felt a complex bit of swirling, swiveling, shifting air twirling about in front of him in a vortex. As he continued to angle his wings and positioned his head in different degrees of tilt, he was able to change direction and execute little aerial maneuvers. Roll, yaw, pitch: he was flying! By riding the little air vortices, he could guide himself anywhere and everywhere – in three dimensions! Soaring about in dizzying feats of aerial acrobatics, Jacob playfully tested his newfound abilities. He executed a lazy eight, a corkscrewing barrel roll, a Cuban eight, a bit of a spiraling dive, and then a flawlessly smooth inside loop followed by a long swooping Immelmann turn.
“I'm flying!” Jacob shouted with glee.
His tiny mandibles clacked about, chittering in a sort of clicking attempt to translate his human thoughts from English to the native tongue of Coccinella septempunctata – the seven-spotted ladybug.
“Waitaminute,” Jacob chirped with the metallic sounding clicks, ticks, and clacks of his mandibles. “I'm an insect? I'm a beetle! I'm a ladybug! How did this happen?”
Jacob angled his compound eyes to the ground and spotted the hazy, indistinct shape of the Toroid of Transformation now and resting in the grass.
“You did this to me!” he clicked. “You transformed me into a little, flying bug. Change me back. Change me back this minute! I don't want to be a ladybug.”
The inert lump of extradimensional copper ignored his buzzing pleas.
And that was about the time a new, horrifying realization sunk into Jacob's tiny, insect brain: there were still two, titanic human colossi looming far above him, thundering back and forth in their deep, rumbling human voices. Jacob's simple, ridiculously minute insectile nervous system could make neither heads nor tails of the humans' low, rumbling language of incomprehensible bass growlings.
“If I've become a tiny little insect,” squeaked Jacob. “Then who is that up there talking with Emily? Did I actually switch bodies with a ladybug? Hey you! Up there – you, inhabiting my body. Give me back my body you stupid bug. I want to trade back, do you hear me? I don't want to be a ladybug. Stop pretending to be me. Help! Do you hear me, help?”
But the pair of hairy, fleshy gargantuan primates were oblivious to his cries, completely ignoring Jacob's frantic staccato clicks and ticks of panic and rage. Neither of the behemoth humans even seemed aware of the puny, insignificant little bug buzzing helplessly around in the air, desperately trying in vain to attract their attention.