Darkness, warm darkness. It took me time, and in that place I had no way to know how long, to realize I was even awake. I tried to stretch limbs out but they were unresponsive, weakly and feebly shuddering and finding the edge of my new world. My movements must have attracted attention from somewhere for I heard a hissing, strangely comforting, and felt a warmth wash over the edge of my sense.
In that darkness I could not see, could only feel. I could hear, muted through fluid, the occasional sound. My life, if I could call it that was a hazy wash of dark comfort. My mind, with few points of reference, seemed to regress. I did not exactly forget what I had been, but my need to know, to understand, seemed to drift away. In that place I simply was, with no need to understand.
If I had that need what would it have given me? Fear? Panic? I might have recognized my body first regressing, consuming itself as it became younger and younger to the point of needing the large sac of dense proteins and fats that I shared the egg with, unable to sustain itself. I might have recognized my maleness receding as well, disappearing and splitting again as it had been when I was first a fetus, before the wash of hormones in my mothers body and my chromosomes determined I would be male. I might have noticed my skin growing tougher, dull claws growing, eyes growing recessed. I might have recognized I was becoming an alien like my mother.
I might have wished for something different but for the nine months I was in that egg I could not even think to wish. I would come to learn the truth, but not until I fought my way free of my home. It happened like this.
Awareness followed hunger. For the first time I was hungry here. I was just I, not Jake, not anything but hungry in a world that had known only comfort. I began to thrash again, for the first time since I came to this place. I tested the edges of my world and discovered I had grown stronger, more dangerous. Sharp sickles of bone tipped my fingers and they scrabbled at the egg that contained me. My eyes, tiny inhuman dots saw heat through the leathery egg, my tiny ears heard movement near by. I fought against my world and broke it open to emerge in a slick wash of fluids.
My new body was thus revealed to me, in a new world, as strange as the one I had just grown in. The room seemed like it had once been some penthouse apartment, but the windows were covered with steel plates and thick fleshy growths cradled not merely my broken egg but a dozen more. My mother was no where to be seen and I was hungry. It is lucky then that I could smell. My senses were far different, tuned unlike a humans, but I could smell the meat.
It must have been a quarter of a steer, hung in this concrete modern apartment, dripping onto plush carpet stained with numerous fluids. I tore into it, and my claws and jaws found that flesh as yielding as a lovers. I was short, hunched over slightly, my skin black as onyx with bone white protective plates protruding around limbs and organs. My elongated skull had eyes that were black on black, and tiny recessed earholes. My long tongue lashed around a mouth full of razor sharp teeth that drooled slickly. I was an alien child, more bestial than my mother had been for some reason. My sex was...indeterminate. I was coming to more awareness and memories of Jake were floating like half glimpsed icebergs in the amniotic dimness of my memory.
I'd wished...for something?
My mother had...embraced me?
I was...scared?
I whimpered, something thrashing behind me suddenly causing me to jerk around. My tail, whip-like and bony. I had jumped at practically my own shadow. I was alone with the other eggs and I was only just deciding what to do. I would...