Ladybird, ladybird fly away home; Your house is on fire and your children are gone…
“What's the whole point of being pretty on the outside when you’re so ugly on the inside?”
Scott, Jess. C. (2012). I'm Pretty (Envy). jessINK.
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The original, hominid body of Jacob awkwardly lumbered and stumbled back to the artificial forest of sterile, dead wood the big, pink titans called “house.” It smelled funny. Perhaps Jacob would like it more in time.
“No!” screamed the new, arthropod version of Jacob. “I'm not a little insect! I'm a human, do you hear me?”
“No humans will hear you any longer,” replied the new Jacob. She relished in the deep, rumbling tones of her massive, mammalian voice – so rich, low-pitched, and resonant. She was big, hairy, smelly, and monstrous. No longer would she scurry away or fly in terror from birds or spiders. “I am the new Jacob. You are just a little bug. Fly away now, you little, tiny beetle. I am the boy Jacob. I am the human from now on. Go away or I shall squish you.”
“I won't let you steal my life!” chirped Jacob with an angry clacking and chittering of his mandibles. “I'm not a ladybug! I'm a human.”
“Good bye, lady bug,” intoned the new Jacob, slowly plodding into her new home. “I am the boy Jacob. You must get used to the new situation. This is how things will be from hence forth.”
Not yet remotely adapted to her newly acquired primate-style basal ganglia nervous system, the former ladybug's senses and reflexes were both too sluggish to either register or react before the new Jacob swiftly flew in behind.
“I made it!” he wheezed quietly, narrowly missing having his own front door slammed down hard and squishing his exoskeleton between the jamb and the wooden edge of the door itself.
The ladybug swiveled about and inspected the air around the door for a moment. Accustomed to a lifetime of possessing dichoptic compound eyes, she was slow to adjust to her new, mammalian stereoptic, trichromatic vision. Blinking several times and swiveling her big, primate head around wildly on her new, flexible neck, “Jacob” looked for signs of intruders.
The original Jacob wisely held perfectly still, reflexively frozen in place while a loud, lumbering predator was banging about noisily above. He was crouched in place on the floor, wedged as closely against the baseboard, desperately attempting to blend in with the shadows.
Big, human “Jacob” sniffed the air in vain once or twice, suddenly missing her old antennae. Evidently sensing nothing unusual, she turned from the door and resumed her heavy-footed, blundering gait, exploring her newfound, human “nest” with all the grace and refined elegance of Frankenstein's monster.
“It's gone,” wheezed the original Jacob quietly.
But now what?
He was inside the house but remained trapped in the body of an insect. And fare more worrisome was the fact that the beetle he'd switched bodies with now seemed happily (and quickly) adapted to her new life as a human being. She already possessed the capacity for human language! If Jacob didn't act soon, who knows how much more latent human intellectual capabilities would she unlock? And in the meantime, what would happen to Jacob's own mental abilities? Would he regress to the instincts of a mere ladybug? So far he'd been lucky … or had he? Jacob had already demonstrated an intuitive level of competence at flight! He had to admit that was pretty weird, and had to have something to do with the natural aptitude of his insect muscle memory. And how about the way he'd hidden in the shadows along the baseboard and floor just now? Was that the result of his still-human cleverness shining through? … Or was he tapping into the latent, instinctive arthropod genius for evading predators?
“I have to find that stupid metal doughnut and activate it,” he whispered to himself.
Retracting his elytra, Jacob flexed his hindwings and prepared for flight again, this time acutely bothered by the natural ease with which he undertook the actions. As he took to the air with a soft, bombinating hum and began loping around the air of the living room, a disquieting concern crossed his mind: what if the original ladybug figured out how to activate Kaitlyn's stupid ring of transformation? Who knows what sort of crazy things an insect trapped in the body of a human teenager would/could do with access to an unpredictable relic of metamorphic power!
“Oh, where did that hairy, dumb brute stomp off to?” muttered Jacob buzzing furiously throughout the house, his antennae flicking about frantically trying to sniff out the human's odor.
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