Queen Celeste
You are Queen Celeste, and the colony is your right. How dare your sisters call themselves queens. Don’t they know the real queen yet lives? They are deceivers, overgrown fetuses, demons-in-exoskeleton—but at least they are of royal stock. How dare the peasantry, the livestock, revolt, in your absence? Do they not know their place? Do they not know they have no purpose but to serve?
When you were young—so young that you can hardly remember it—your loyal followers spirited you away, faking your death in the explosive afterbirth of violence that was your birth. They had it in their heads that they would find a new home where you would establish your own colony, allowing the civil war to rage in the colony left behind. What fools your followers are, no matter how dedicated, how loyal, how loving. Their stupidity is only proof of how necessary the rule of a queen truly is.
The idea was a bad one for multiple reasons. Outside of the colony, your small band of loyalists was exposed and outnumbered. You took losses after losses. Your childhood memories are those of predation and starvation and hard weather. Then one day you heard the buzzing, like distant thunder.
The wasps were on you in a matter of seconds. You were pinned in place, stinger placed to the soft opening where your head meets your thorax, separated from your followers and disappeared into the sky. Held against his chest, your captor introduced himself as Haciye Iffetlü Hoşyar Rewani BaşKadın Hazretleri, most loyal servant and consort of Ayn Ferahşad Kerime Sultan, who is the Adorned Sovereign of the House of Gulpaşa, who is Queen Everlasting of All The Sky, who is First and Only Commander of the Legions of The Sun, who gazes in eternal generosity over her subjects who are all the bugs upon the earth, who was honored by the gift of flight from the graceful wind and the gift of the sting from the glaring sun and the gift of eternal rulership from the elusive moon. And you were to become a gift for the sultan.
You were flown across the world that day at speeds faster than any ant could fly—the buzz of his honor guard’s wings was deafening—to kneel before the sultan. She was glorious and golden, and she looked at you with dark eyes that knew your terror well. You were young, and you shook mightily; your limbs did not have the strength to hold you, so you collapsed to the ground before her. You knew what the Queen Everlasting of the Empire of the Sun does with queens like yourself, and you certainly have not forgotten since. How could you? Every breath you take, they wriggle inside of you. Responding to your movement. She put her own brood in you that day, and any eggs you lay will be hers. Any child, hers.
You spent that night in the slave palace. You are determined to ensure it is the only night you will ever spend there. In the morning, you shouted and screamed and demanded an audience with the sultan once more, for you had a bargain for her. A far greater prize than you, should she act quickly. Three queens in exchange for one.
The BaşKadın stood beside her when you made the offer, staring at you with his hard eyes. They were not killer’s eyes, though. That is a soldier’s description. No—he had the eyes of a starving man, and you were food. He watched silently as the sultan heard your plea, and he watched silently when she gave her assent, and he watched silently as the sultan instructed him to lead his legion in aid of your offensive to reclaim your colony—with one requirement. Three queens in exchange for one. You will do this, declared the sultan, and you will be freed of her brood. If not, you will be forever marked. Thus was her decree, spoken with imperious finality. And the brood within you danced at their mother’s voice.
Rewani BaşKadın and his legion returned you to your loyalists, from whom you hide the larvae growing within your body—even they cannot know what afflicts you. Soon the larvae will change your scent, and your sisters will tear you limb from limb as an imposter. But you ignore that, just as you ignore the movement within you. All will believe the wasps to be mercenaries. There is still time.
It is your purpose to return the colony to glorious order, no matter what it takes to do so. It is your purpose to rule. You must remind them who is queen.
Aims of the Queen
- Find a way to free yourself from the sultan’s larvae without killing yourself in the process.
- Deliver Queens Cecelia, Celina, and Zsófia to the sultan. Better them than you.
- Secure control of the royal nursery to ensure the next generation are your own progeny.
- Reinstate hierarchical order in the colony, bringing the rebels and revolutionaries to heel.
The Spiders
In ancient times, the colony was infiltrated by a small group of spiders that look exactly like ants. One could stand next to you and you would be none the wiser, until it opened its maw and began to consume you. But as is only right for the colony, it advanced quicker than its predators. Like the aphids, like the grasshoppers, like that subservient queen, the spiders were trapped, hunted, and by now have been thoroughly domesticated. They have acted as Queen Celia’s secret police for generations, reporting directly to her, but now your mother is dead and no one knows of them but you, for they recognize your royalty and your sisters’ falsehood. They were always a small group, hard to breed en masse, and in the initial spasms of the civil war many spiders were slain. But not all of them. This is what they said to you when the three of them approached you, when you were still a larva and were spirited away by your caretakers.
Three of them escaped the colony with you and your loyalists. You have the services of these loyal spiders, irreplaceable in their infiltration and surveillance abilities and willing to do whatever you ask them to. You can always send workers or soldiers to perform operations like normal, but as for professionals, you have three.
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 a 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 Pheromone Net
The colony is laced in layer after layer of pheromones; it is the primary mode of communication between you and your subjects, however distant. All ants can near-instantly communicate with all other ants in the colony through pheromone trails relayed by ant after ant, though it is only the queen who possesses the force of will and religious right to broadcast.
The Others
- Rewani BaşKadın. The first consort of the sultan, the man who found you in your caretaker’s arms as a larva and took you from them to offer you to his sultan as a slave. Bargain made, he has returned to the colony as an agent to enforce the will of the sultan—to ensure you follow through on your end. But you know what orders he must have been given in secret, or if not orders given then orders taken upon himself: to deliver four queens, not just three. The BasKadın prides himself on his service, his loyalty. He boasts that he has never failed the sultan. To allow any quarry to escape—to allow you to escape—he would surely consider failure. He must be used and then destroyed before it is too late.
- Cecelia. Your sister, who is foolish enough to call herself queen, and who has conned a minority of the breed-males to impregnate her; she has a new brood of larvae hidden away in the nursery with her, protected by the royal guard, likewise conned. She would be better served by killing herself than by ruling as she does—hiding away in the nursery for the colony to fall to ruins around her, leaving you to prevent it from total collapse. She truly is a soulless demon—born to destroy that which is yours by right.
- You know the royal guard to all be ancient giants, many generations old, whose heads are formed in the shape of great shields. If they position themselves correctly, they can block whole tunnels with their heads; but behind the shield, each is spindly and delicate.
- Celina. Your sister, who is foolish enough to call herself queen, and who conned many workers and soldiers into following her into rebellion. She would be better served by killing herself, with the decisions she has already made, like falling in with that upstart breed-male Hofmann. She truly is a soulless demon—born to destroy the colony that is yours by right.
- Consort Hofmann. A breed-male who has entranced a good number of his fellows, as well as your worker-sisters whom he has fooled into thinking they might be deserving of royalty themselves—this, too, is the fault of your sister and her ill-conceived rebellion. He and his coalition have taken control of much of the industry in the colony; he has great influence with the factory overseers and engineers, and even the millipedes have taken a liking to him, for he has bewitched them all with promises of parliament and liberal economy. Export the colony’s goods? Ship away the fruits of your people’s labor to foreign lands? That is all needed here, in the colony stockpiles, and this rebellion only proves the truth of your feelings. You cannot eat shares or steel.
- Chancellor Karolina. An upstart aphid who has forgotten her place so generously granted. Does she not understand how good the aphids have it? Does she not understand how vital they are in your colony? She and her fellows have grown spikes, entrenched themselves in the aphid gardens, and are trying to force your hand by preventing your access to their nectar. Perhaps Celina will be stupid enough to make concessions to the aphids, in the hopes of gaining their support in usurping you? This cannot be allowed on either account; they cannot get a further taste of independence.
- Queen Zsófia. A weak queen of lesser birth, dependent on your colony for generations due to her weakness—though she has, in the past, been an acceptable administrator. She is also sure to have her own eggs, her own larvae, though in the chaos of your own birth, the most recent scheduled delivery of her daughters (eighty per cent of the brood) was never delivered to the nursery. She is sure to have kept them for herself. What foolishness! They are likely soon to mature. If you are able to claim the nursery for yourself and bring them there before they do so, you can accustom them to your scent and claim them for yourself, as is right and proper. Then the mother can be given away without much loss.
- Melchiorre. An animal unchained. He and his fellows rampage throughout the colony, screaming their desires for all to hear. Their greatest demand: your death, and the death of your children. They are few in number, but each of his locusts is gigantic, larger than the royal guard and rivalling the millipedes. He is a dangerous enemy, and it is almost worth collaborating with your sisters on destroying him—if he does not destroy them for you first.