[A Bug's Life]

You’ve lived like this for a long time.

Your daily routine is simple. Wake up, eat, sit with the others in silence, eat some more, sleep. You aren’t expected to do much of anything; you hear clanging sounds in the distance day in and day out, but that’s the way the world’s always been for you. You don’t think much of it.

You don’t think very much of anything.



No one else does either, so you don’t worry about it.

Little changes in your world. Well, usually. Lately someone new arrived; you can’t see them, but you can feel their presence, and their orders tugging at your limbs.



They must be tugging at the others, too, because things turn to chaos at the slightest twitch. People jump up and wiggle around, or walk together in perfect step, or go running off at random with doors crashing and banging. You hardly know how to deal with the break in routine. For the first time in your life you’re almost unsettled.

That’s what interrupts today’s empty time. The person sitting next to you leaps out of their seat and races out the door, leaving it swinging ajar behind them. You hardly have time to blink before they’ve vanished.

You’ve never left the room before.

Your first steps into the unknown are unremarkable, for the most part. This longer room is not much different from the room you share with the other small ones, save for the many doors present along each wall.



This is the first time you’ve realized there may be rooms beyond yours and the room the large ones come from. There are no large ones in this long room now, so they must be somewhere else.

Your world never had a “somewhere else” before.



When you step over the threshold, your hand instinctively lifts to shield your eyes from the searing light. Water wells up in the corners of your eyes, a sensation unfamiliar to you - your room never hurt this badly!

But just as you think you should scurry back inside, your vision adjusts and the pain slumps away until it’s only a prickle. Alright.

You blink a few times to clear out the last of the black spots. Now you can make out the ceiling, so high and bluer than anything you’ve ever seen, and you notice that out here the clangs that formed the background noise to your life are much louder.



As you scan this new room - it’s so big you can barely see any walls - you notice three main things to investigate.

Little cylindrical things, shiny in a way that stabs if you look at them wrong, lie on the ground to one side. You can see more beyond them.

A hole hangs open and crusty in a wall to the other direction.

Not far from it, tracks of something reddy-brown - more vibrant than you’ve ever seen! - slink across another wall and around a corner.

> Explore that red stuff. It looks so bright, it has to be friendly

> go look at the cans, avoid the painful shinies though

>Yeah look at the source of the super bright reddish-brown color, must be pretty okay.

>Oooh, shiny cylinders.
>Pull one in dark, give good look.

Contemplate whether a bugs life is a copyrighted phrase
>Investigate hole in wall

> tuch the red stuff

> tuch the red stuff

Drink the red stuff.

>Follow the trail.

> tuch the red stuff

Drink the red stuff.

It needs a name! Let’s name it... Galfis! Perfect.

The red stuff is so striking you can’t resist its pull. You cross the room to it and look it up and down before poking it experimentally. Some of it sticks to your finger. You stare at it, then stick it under your face and give it a lick.

This is the first time you’ve ever tasted something with an actual flavour and it’s so gross you can’t stop gagging for two minutes. Good job.

Once you’ve recovered, you trail a hand along the wall (careful not to brush the red stuff) and follow the streaks around the corner. This room stretches even further than you thought it did. You must have walked the breadth of the world three times over before the red stuff wavers and drops to point at a person slumped against the wall.

They’re way smaller than any of the big people you’ve seen and way bigger than any of the small people. Their head is tipped back against the wall, chest heaving as they clutch their side where more red drips between their fingers.

The weirdest thing is that they don’t ignore you. At the sound of your footsteps they jolt and turn their face to look at you. They make a couple of noises, and a funny huffing sound, and slump back against the wall.

> walk closer to them and tilt your head at them.
> also, examine them more closely from your new proximity.

>try communicating with them, the way you've always communicated with everyone in your life.