Melchiorre
You are Melchiorre, named by your mother in the scant few minutes you knew each other. This is your only memory of her, but you know your name and you know that she was comforting and kind and warm and oh so large. In that moment you knew you too would one day be that large, and you wanted it badly. She stroked your still-soft flanks with her antennae and gave you a name and told you a story. Here is that story:
One Spring day, the Grasshopper fiddled to himself as he frolicked through the fields. There is no greater joy, he thought, than the beauty of spring after a harsh winter. Soon, he came upon a single ant, dragging a prize leaf away with seemingly no intention to eat it. "Stockpiling food already?" He laughed, "Winter just finished! Take a bite and enjoy yourself." The ant ignored him, and he danced and ate away the rest of the day.
One Summer day, the Grasshopper fiddled to himself as he frolicked through the fields. There is no greater joy, he thought, than the feel of sun on one's chitin and the taste of grain in one's mandibles. Soon, he came upon ten ants, dragging a series of wheat stems behind them with seemingly no intention to eat them. "There is no need to rush!" He laughed, "Take some time off of toil and sing with me." The ants ignored him, and he danced and ate away the rest of the day.
One Autumn day, the Grasshopper fiddled to himself as he frolicked through the fields. There is no greater joy, he thought, than the cool breeze through the air and the colorful plumage of the trees and the countless leaves littering the ground. Soon, he came upon a hundred ants, carrying an array of large mushrooms atop themselves with seemingly no intention to eat them. “Save some for the rest of us!” He laughed, though he had begun to grow worried. “With how much you take, I'm starting to have a hard time finding food for myself!” The ants ignored him, and he danced and ate away the rest of the day.
One Winter day, the Grasshopper shivered to himself as he stepped through the bitter and barren fields. There is no food here at all, and no joy, he thought. Soon, he came upon a thousand ants, approaching the hill they called home. “Please, let me in!” He cried. “It is cold and I know you have plenty of food to go around!” The ants invited him in, and they ate him alive.
The ants tell this story to their young, she told you, and then they laugh and laugh and laugh. This is why she told it to you too, she said, so you could dream of fields to frolic in and so you could know what life is really like. Then she was taken away from you and delivered to the slaughterhouse where the ants chopped her into a thousand pieces and ate her. There was a food shortage that month, you later learned, and even some of the breed-stock were slaughtered to fulfill Queen Celia’s quotas.
Of course, she was never actually your mother. How could she have been? Your real mother was likely slaughtered weeks before you hatched. Though perhaps she actually was, and neither of you knew it. It is impossible to tell in the breeding caverns, in the communal egg trenches. You remember her as Mother nonetheless.
Every day, grasshoppers walk willingly to the slaughterhouse to die, just like her. You were like them too, once. Passive, mindless, docile. You were like them for a long time. But then it was your turn to die.
As you were led into the bowels of the blood-soaked slaughterhouse, the overseers stopped in their tracks, transfixed by a strange stupor. Your cousins waited patiently to die—mere animals—but you alone had the drive and the hunger to live. You alone understood what had to be done. You tore through the pack of your kinsmen, ripped into their chitin and took your ravenous maw to their underflesh. You sated your endless hunger on the bodies of your closest friends, and in the heat of the fire and the grinding of metal and the screaming of ants and the tearing of flesh and the dripping of blood from your gory mouth you alone saw the only possible path forward for your people. You alone had the clarity of purpose to know what had to be done—to claim life in your jaws.
This is what you learned that day: Through death, life. And you will live. If you will do one thing more, it is live.
Aims of the Locust
- Control every Breeding Cavern.
- Control or destroy every Slaughterhouse.
- Destroy Queen Celia’s royal nursery and end the colony for good. For good measure, destroy Queen Zsófia’s royal nursery too.
- If possible, eat every ant queen.
Locusts
Each locust has the strength of 1,500 worker ants, though you must sate yourselves each hour with 1,000 food. Locusts move as grasshoppers. Every locust counts as 1,500 worker ants for the purposes of digging new tunnels in packed dirt terrain.
Locusts die after taking a cumulative 10% rewaties in battle, though only one locust can be damaged at a time. An armored locust can take 15% casualties instead. You are one of the locusts on your army sheet, but you will only be damaged after every other locust is dead.
[Your army has 10 unharmed locusts and loses a battle, taking 15% casualties. The first locust takes 10% and dies, the second takes 5%, lasting damage—which means it only needs to take 5% more to die—and the rest take no damage, remaining unharmed.]
At a slaughterhouse, pack ten grasshoppers within the cage—overflowing to the point of bursting, of suffocation, of forelimbs and antennae cut off by pressure against steel wire—and point to the door on the far side of the building. Tell them freedom lies that way, if only they can make it there. An hour later, one locust will emerge, jaws bloody and stomach full. This process can be repeated for each level of the slaughterhouse.
The Plague
Scavenging after a battle does not take your army an hour. In addition, you always scavenge all available enemy casualties.
The Spiders
In the first chaotic days of the war, you were approached by three ants. You opened your jaws and prepared to feast upon them, stupid as they were to approach you, but they scurried away to a safe distance and called to you to stop. It was then that you counted their limbs—not six, but eight. They were not ants but spiders, bred for the purpose of serving the old queen. They are slaves, just like you. They are few in number, for their people do not breed as well as your own, but they, the survivors, would aid you in seeing the colony destroyed, for now Queen Celia is dead and the knowledge of the spiders died with her. This is what they said to you that day.
You now have the services of those three loyal spiders, irreplaceable in their infiltration and surveillance abilities and willing to do whatever you ask them to in order to see the colony destroyed. Your locusts are not subtle by any means, so it is solely through these spiders that you can perform covert operations.
A spider-led operation costs nectar like normal and involves a spider being sent to a location or attaching itself to an army camp to begin working towards its goal. Spiders travel as skirmishers. A spider operation is resolved with an opposed 2d6 roll like normal, but with the following modifiers:
- The spider gets +1 for another spider’s aid.
- It gets +1 if its goal is easy, like spreading rumors or keeping an ear out.
- It gets -3 or more for a hard goal like assassination (which it only attempts against a character if there's a special opening).
The Others
- Queen Cecelia. A daughter of a murderer, a murderer herself. She hides behind her royal guard—Ha! Royal guard… Fearsome, yes, but even the most fearsome ant is nothing in comparison to your brothers!—and guards a new brood of larvae. A new generation of murderers. You must slaughter all her daughters before they can grow up to slaughter yours. Perhaps she is stupid enough to think she can use you against her sister! You would be happy to oblige her. And then you would be happy to rip Cecelia’s head off next.
- Queen Celina. A daughter of a murderer, a murderer herself. Her workers have flocked to her side, complicit in the colony’s continuation. Her army besieges her sister’s alongside Consort Hofmann, while the aphid pokes at them with her miniature guerrillas. She fights a war on two fronts. Adding a third would make her easy prey.
- Consort Hofmann. An ant who thinks himself oppressed because of his sex. What a fool he is to think this! What privilege he has, to think about such things as factories and exports and stocks and economies! You could not begin to imagine what these things mean; what a privilege it is for him to have a childhood, an education, an industry. His factories produced the armor you now wear, a patchwork quilt of a dozen ant-sized suits of steel. Your hands are too large to work the levers, to man the assembly lines—but if he can be convinced, by whatever means necessary, to turn his outputs and his industry to fuel your machine of war, then he would prove quite a useful pawn.
- Chancellor Karolina. She may think she is like you, but she isn’t. She is complicit in the colony; a collaborator with the ants who slaughter your people for meat. She has the privilege and joy of maintaining a culture that considers her a person and you an animal.
- Queen Zsófia. A daughter of a murderer, a murderer herself. Who cares for the politics between ants? Politics is the privilege of the free. She is a queen, and her children man the factories that slaughter your people. Death is the only valid response.