Other Hire (Worm/Half-life)(idea)

This is mostly just an idea, I don't really have plans to continue it all that much. Just a fun idea I had since I haven't seen many Half-life/ Worm stuff.

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Earth-081240x, undisclosed location, New Mexico, United States

June 27, 1997, 1022 Hours

Dr. Hall removes sample ZX-817 from a storage closet on sub-level 20-B.

The metal cylinder contains softly glowing yellow dust that seem to glow brighter in the doctor's hands. He boredly places them onto his cart without noticing the effect.

1100 Hours

A grey hand with a blue sleeve picks it up...

The sample disappears... No one notices for two hours...

Earth-712906b, Brockton Bay, New Hampshire, United States

December 22, 2010, 0100 Hours

Half of sample ZX-817 is poured over a collection of earl grey tea bags. Then the sample is hidden inside the wall next to an electrical outlet.

0600 Hours

Fail-safe Taylor Hebert makes herself some tea and smiles at her father when he suggests a family outing.

1300 Hours

Fail-safe Taylor Hebert complains of stomach cramps marking the start of suspected symptoms.

1320 Hours

Fail-safe Taylor Hebert starts running a fever of 312 K and goes to bed early.

2232 Hours

Fail-safe Taylor Hebert goes into a coma, the father is asleep for this event. Agent marks down unfavorable results in log, experiment feared to be a failure before initial conditions met...

0600 Hours

Symptoms disappear, Fail-safe has another cup of tea...

January 2, 2011, 0600 Hours

Fail-safe Taylor Hebert finishes off the dosed tea in its entirety. Zero ill effects, 14% deviation in DNA structures as per predicted outcomes.

January 3, 2011, 0900 Hours

Fail-safe Taylor Hebert exposed to large amounts of stress and biological waste.

1100 Hours

Taylor Hebert vanishes from Earth-712906b. Experiment begins in earnest...

---

I slowly come back to awareness as I feel myself get jostled.

What, where am I?

I open my eyes and only see darkness. I try to move my head, but the wet warmth of the surrounding stuff is too dense around me. How did I...

The smell of rotting sweetness and vomit as my head collides with the back wall of my locker. The slam of metal on steel as the world becomes four walls. The laughter as eventually break my composure and scream out and thrash at the walls of metal. The voices mocking me as I fail to free myself, my fingers shredding themselves along the sharp metal of the slits. My thrashing brings the bugs out from underneath my feet out of hiding, rising like a black cloud of anger and death, they begin to bite me. Crawling under my clothes the bites they leave putrid as they are covered in the filth surrounding me. I remember it all.

Am I still in there? Did they fill it up with more stuff while I was blacked out?

I thrash and the world around me gives another jostle as I hear a noise. A deep humming clicks sounding like a door creaking open sounds as my back meets something. I have been just sort of hanging here I guess, and whatever made the clicking sounds must have laid me down because I feel the denseness around me start to flatten out my back.

I stop thrashing as soon as the noise started, that isn't Emma or Sophia. I don't know what it is, but it sounds mad at me.

The noise stops after a while, but I can feel my back being pushed along something, almost like I am being dragged back and forth. It is calming, it almost feels like I'm being rocked asleep. I do start to feel a little tired...

Without the noise of the thing and since I'm not panicking anymore, I can hear something new. A steady triple rhythm of beats from in front of me. They make me feel safe...

oOoOoOoOo ​

I don't know how long I was asleep for, but when I wake up, I'm still warm in the dense damp place.

Okay Taylor this clearly isn't your locker, I shift a bit and I feel something move around me. One if it was this dark out it would be cold not very warm. I take in a deep breath, and nearly choke as the feeling of liquid flows into my lungs. My panic comes back, and I start as the noise comes back too. I don't stop panicking as the fluid in my lungs starts to suffocate me. A deep pounding of something hitting the ground makes me stop. It, whatever it is, doesn't like me doing that. I stop my thrashing and then the rocking starts again.

I sigh as I realize that I am not drowning, so I can breathe liquid now, huh. Well, I guess this is kind of better than the locker, I mean it is not like any of my bullies are here and I don't have to worry about anything... Unless of course whatever I'm stuck in is some sort of stomach and I'm being slowly digested, that would be concerning. I feel something latch onto my stomach. I want to panic, but I hold it together for now. Big and creaky would get upset and I'm afraid of what it will do to me if I make a fuss.

It wasn't until the eight things latched onto my back; did I realize that my clothing was missing. I went to sleep anyways, even as I start to feel the things slide into my skin, my ribs parting as the few on my back start to wiggle in between them. I dream of small four-legged creatures melting into my body while a giant purr sounds around me...

oOoOoOoOo ​

I think it has been a few days, maybe. I sleep so often that I can't be sure. I found a cord, thick and fleshy, connected to my stomach yesterday, so I think I can rule out stomach. I'm definitely inside of a creature, but I don't think that I'm food...

Mother, the big creaky thing, has been mostly silent. I can hear her walking along at a sedated pace from inside the womb. Occasionally she will screech angry at something, and I get a little scared when the thing she is screeching at roars back. The things latch on to me every night as they decide to fuse to my body, I don't know what I will look like when I am born... I'm afraid that I will hate it.

oOoOoOoOo ​

I lost track of time again, I think I was at a week? Mother has been eating something that I like for a few days, and it makes me happy. The things stopped latching on to me, I don't think there are many left since last night had so few of them. Mother purrs to me every night, I have started to feel so safe when I hear it.

oOoOoOoOo ​

I remembered dad today and got upset. Momma Creaky purred and rocked me all day... she knows when I'm upset.

oOoOoOoOo ​

I think it has been a month now, I don't know for sure I've had to recount a few times and the days start to blur a bit now and again. Momma got scared by something today, it was loud and sounded like her. I was glad when she ran off from the noise, I could hear it getting fainter in the distance. I thought I could hear something else, an explosion or maybe gunfire, but we we're too far away by then...

oOoOoOoOo ​

I feel bigger somehow... Momma ate the thing I liked again... I love her. I think mom wouldn't because they wouldn't understand each other, but I think that momma and mom would at least like each other for me. I cried again thinking about mom, and dad, momma eventually calmed me down...

oOoOoOoOo ​

It's been a while; my body is painful as I grow... I somehow know that something will be happening soon. I'm not afraid of dark places anymore...

oOoOoOoOo ​

Today is the day...

---

The ground is cold and wet as I cough up the birthing fluids from my heavy lungs. The sweet liquid finally leaves, and I take my first breath in what feels like forever. I open my eyes and see stars. A vast expanse of yellow and blue nebula as stars of all color's shine brightly through the fog of interstellar gasses. Orange creatures can be seen flying through the gas clouds, but they are too far for me to tell what they are beyond color. Floating rocks dot the expanse, some green with life or blue with life... I think I see something vaguely like life of a pale pink too... Alien life is weird.

And that is what I can only describe it as, alien. Floating chunks of yellow crystals glowing with odd energies that make me hungry. Strange flying creatures in the distance. The sounds of a roar far, far away hopefully on one of the other rocks. A weird, shattered spire like rock in the distance... Alien.

I turn to look at my surroundings, it is a cave made of reddish grey rock and is bare of any alien stuff. I turn around and stop. Momma? The creature is huge and slumped over on its side, a large, deflated sack hangs out of its underside as its four large legs splay out. It is huffing hard as though it is extremely tired. Momma is a giant crab like creature.

I look down at my body, and ignoring the peculiarities for right now, the long thick cord of flesh is currently leading from me to a small opening at the bottom of the sack. Okay, yes of course, I walk around to the front where the huffing is coming from, my momma is in fact a giant crab. A small black eye on the lip of the massive top shell meets mine. I freeze as she starts to inhale, she is smelling me...

I relax as she starts to purr, it sounds a bit more mechanical than it did in the womb, but it still means safety. I rub along a ridge and her purrs go from idle motorboat to chainsaw. I smile, momma is tired, and I am too. I lie down next to her and sleep.

oOoOoOoOo ​

My body is different, but I don't really feel like it isn't me. I am tall, really tall. After I pulled out the rest of the placenta from momma and cut my cord, I fed it to her. She didn't want to eat it at first, with her small mouth, so I cut it up until it could fit and then she was all over it. With momma fed she started to stand. I don't have a reference for how tall momma is, but she is tall and thus I must be tall too. I feel taller, and I come up to her first digit on her front legs, so I have no idea our size comparisons. It doesn't help that I stand almost exclusively on my toes.

The reason for that is a new pair of limbs I have. They are connected at the base of my spine by two ball joins and are odd. They are a tan flesh like exoskeleton with sparse hairs dotting the thicker parts. They have three thin joints that first go down the sides of my hips before becoming a second set of legs behind my own bent the opposite way from my normal legs. Oh, and they also had a very sharp blade as their tips, it is what I used to disconnect from momma and then chop up the stuff to feed to her. The legs were strong enough to take my weight and even lift me up off the ground, but I can't bring them up too far off the ground. It feels natural to walk with the tips a couple inches behind my heels and walking around on my toes.

Another consequence of my new height is that I'm even more flat and skinny. My body is for the most part still human except for a few hard tan plates covering my stomach and a few places I can't see on my back, just below my ribs. What was different is that I am way too skinny. My arms and legs look stretched like putty, all my ribs are visible, and I'm pretty sure that anyone who saw me would think that I'm a skeleton. I'm also bald which was distressing. To know my long curly hair that I took so much care of, one of the last things I had of mom, was gone. I'm glad that momma is here, as I might have lost it a bit.

The sack on momma sways disgustingly as she stands, but she still purrs as she nuzzles my face, and I still can't help but smile. I have learned to love my momma, I still love mom sure, dad too, but those parents are not here right now. We walked out of the cave, and I entered a new world.

oOoOoOoOo ​

The new world is not safe.

It has been a hundred days since my birth, I've been keeping track of the days on the walls of momma and my cave. In that time, I have started to fill out my arms and legs, the muscles were necessary when you consider what is out there.

Large territorial squid-frog things that spit acid, fast creatures with a single green-blue compound eye that use dangerous sounds to attack you, the weird red tongue things from the ceiling, even the plants seem able to attack you. Thankfully I figured out what my second pair of back legs are for. I can jump far, like really far, between the floating rocks and slam into the creatures with the sharp blades on the feet. I have gotten pretty good at it too.

I jump over the acid spray as the frog creature charges. I swiftly switch position and dodge the rush as I jump to the left along the ground. I stop myself from going too far as my feet position to catch me. It took me awhile to do a dash hop like that, at the start I hit a lot of walls, hard, sometimes with my face, but after I few weeks of practice I could at least go out hunting on my own. The squid monster looks left and right as it tries to see where I went. The squid-frogs don't have the best peripheral vision, so if you dash out of their way it takes them a few seconds to find you. I run up behind it my back legs bouncing me into a much faster gait. I jump and it turns just in time for my back leg to spear it in the face. The creature roars and tries to spit acid on me, but I slam my normal foot into the ground and twist the blade as I spin to face out of the way. It whimpers in pain, but I don't hesitate as I slam the second spike through the back of its head, killing it instantly. Despite their looks, Frog-squids are delicious.

I head home with my prize. One of the good things I think about my new body I like is that I can pretty much eat anything. My mouth was wide when I was just human, now it is huge. My lips are much the same, but I have seems extending my mouth all the way to my ears. Inside are razor sharp teeth, that cut through most food. Frog-squids are kind of citrus-y or fruit-like in their flavor, their blood is green and sweet, but the brain inside the heads are the best. I walk into the cave to find momma resting on her side as she looks at the stars.

Momma perks up as I walk in, the deflated sack underneath her looks diseased as it sways with her standing. I think it needs to be taken care of, but I don't know what to do or if it is just normal. Momma staggers but corrects themselves quickly. I grimace and go about cutting up our food. Momma produces a white acid and dissolves her potion before slurping it up a happy purr in her vocalizations. I purr back as I swallow my portion of the creature's brain...

oOoOoOoOo ​

Momma is sick.

I think she has been since I was born, but it is only now some hundred thirty-four days after my emergence that she is finally showing some severe negative effects. I stare down at the sack, my momma is lying on her side and breathing funny with her legs weakly twitching next to me. The sack has small roach like creatures crawling all over it and its greyish tan is now black and rotting. It doesn't smell like the locker all those days ago, in some ways it smells worse.

It rots bitter rather than sweet and the opening near the bottom leaks a foul green. So, she isn't bleeding, Momma's blood is like my blood sort of a reddish pink color, so the green must be some sort of infection. I place my hand on the sack and push, the green flows faster and momma makes her sad noise and a pained warble. I stop.

I haven't seen any more of momma's kind before so I can't really tell, but I think that momma is not supposed to not pregnant like all the time. I absorbed all her babies while I was inside her, so she must be barren. I seem to remember that lots of creatures on Earth die after childbirth, like some spiders. Momma doesn't look like a spider, she looks like a crab, so I can't be sure if they are similar. I push on the sack and the green flows out faster. Momma protests, but she is too weak to move her legs beyond twitching them. I push harder and the flow increases and then doesn't stop until the sack looks like discarded skin. The insects try to go into by I screech and stab at them until they stop. I stand watch over her while she goes to sleep...

oOoOoOoOo ​

Momma is better, much better.

She got up two days later and ripped off the remains of the sack. I think she quietly mourned its loss, as that was her womb and without it, she'll never have kids again. She still purred though when I came up to her, so at least she doesn't hate me. I spent the days thinking I was going to lose my second mother like I lost the first and it would be my fault all over again. I also was afraid that she would hate me and try to get me to leave. I'm so glad that neither of those things happened.

oOoOoOoOo ​

Day count I think one-hundred sixty-two, me and momma went hunting together near the green pools of regeneration. We bathed and played, and I had a weird turkey thing land on my head. Momma freaked out, I freaked out, and the turkey thing freaked out when I ripped it off my head as its beak thing couldn't puncture the back of my head. I held it as it shivered in my hands, momma beside me as we both glared down at the thing.

I was pleasantly surprised that it did in fact taste like turkey with the texture of crab meat. I named them Turkey-crabs...

OOoOoOoOo ​

Day 201, I have a question...

Are bipeds just the most common form of sentient life?

I dodge past the orange projectiles that buzz by me. The blue armored brute yelled at me as I hid around the pillar. I could hear it chasing after me, but I am much faster than it clearly as I bounce around the rocks. These guys have been coming out here to the hunting ground for a while now. Whoever said that meeting intelligent life would be cool, is misinformed.

Another blue brute comes around the corner with two of the smaller green guys at its side. It fires a few blasts from its weapon, and I dodge. Jumping up into the air and off a floating rock aiming my dagger feet at its head. The blue thing stumbles back, but it is too slow to move as my blades puncture through its triple eyes and out the back. I push back on the top of its head and flip over my back legs, letting the spring-like muscles do all the work of cutting the creatures head in half. The two green guys stare at me with their own three-eyed gaze in the second it takes for my blades to come free. As the blue brute falls backwards, my legs snap back to position, and I find myself and I find that I have jumped backwards and away from the two enemies.

I twist mid-air and continue running the flash of green lights and bolts of lightning firing around me adding some pep to my step. The second blue bruiser comes in to view, its weapon being lifted as it takes aim. I don't give it the chance to hit me as I bounce nearly level with the ground and enter close quarters before it can fire. My hand grabs it by the armor covering its throat and pick it up with my back legs. It tries to kick out my back legs as it brings the end of its weapon up to my face. I jump up onto its chest as it falls to the ground, the momentum of its impact driving my blades deep into its chest.

It grunts in pain but still levels its weapon at me. I kick off its chest as an orange projectile slices through my normal left leg. I ignore the hole in the leg as I bounce away from them. I dash lifting my wounded leg up so that it doesn't get in the way. The cool thing about having four legs is that I can still run if one of my legs are hurt. I zip around a rock to hide. I watch as it runs by me, before stalking up behind it.

Momma and I ate good that day...

---

Day 831

It has been two years... Momma is getting old and the world around us is getting more and more dangerous. I am an adult now, and I finally look it to. I'd be happier if our lives hadn't become nothing but survival...

I slide under momma and enter her head mouth. Momma is an older version of those turkey things, and from the graveyard I saw of them, they don't live for much longer after they stop giving birth. Momma is old and dying...

But I think I have a way to stop it. I hold the yellow crystal to my chest and chew on the tip as I slide up to her beak. I'm not sure how I know this will work, I don't know if this will work period, but I'm not ready for her to go...

The beak touches a weird part in the top of my spine, and I push. Momma protests weakly as her body barely moves. She hasn't gone hunting with me in a year, too weak no matter how much I feed her. Even her acid has become too weak to digest food, it has been too long since she has eaten. This must happen now.

Guided by an instinct I don't understand and a knowledge that came in my dreams I push until I feel momma's beak puncture into my spine. Momma slumps and relaxes as the yellow crystal glows, I relax too. The glow of yellow the only light as momma's body dies and her legs close me inside her body. I feel the beak extent momma's brain onto my spinal cord, and I eat the tasty crystal as I keep her alive inside my own body. I then black out...

---

So I hope you liked this little experiment of mine in writing. Yes it was gross, yes it was short, yes it ended with a cliff hanger. It is also not a good piece of writing, but the story would not leave my brain and I needed to get it out of my head before I could work on something else.

 

Looks neat and honestly kind of disturbing

 

What is Taylor and the mother supposed to be? I know nothing about half-life.

 

Her mother is a gonarch, one of them was a boss battle in Half-Life

Spoiler: Here it from Black Mesa, spoiler to its boss battle

 

Taylor's leg design are based loosely on a strider, and momma is like krahe said, a gonarch...

Strider

Spoiler: Strider

Gonarch

Spoiler: gonarch

 

This one seems interesting. Watched.