Queen Celina
You are Queen Celina, and the colony is your right. How dare your yet-living sister call herself a queen. She is a deceiver, an overgrown fetus, a demon-in-exoskeleton—but at least she is of royal stock. How dare the peasantry, the livestock, revolt? Do they not know their place? Do they not know they have no purpose but to serve?
You many mindless sisters, those workers and soldiers who require the guidance of a queen, have answered your call and grown satiated on your scent. Your sister who calls herself a queen has cloistered herself in the royal nursery, for she fears that which is inevitable: your ascent and her death. But alas, for she truly has cloistered herself—despite your overwhelming numbers, you cannot break through without exposing yourself to the so-called revolutionaries who seek your death or humiliation: the aphids, the locusts, the males. Oh, how the males have earned your ire. Consort Hofmann treats himself as your equal, a humiliation you must suffer for now due to his outsized influence and industry. A conniver, that one, and you must be a conniver in turn. You must appease him for now, knowing you have no intention of following through. For soon your sister will be dead, the nursery will be yours, and you can bring the rest of them to heel.
It is your purpose to return the colony to glorious order. It is your purpose to rule. You must remind them who is queen.
Aims of the Queen
- Secure control of the royal nursery to ensure the next generation are your own progeny.
- Humiliate and kill your so-called royal sister and her brood.
- Reinstate hierarchical order in the colony, bringing the rebels and revolutionaries to heel.
- If possible, kill Hofmann and subsume the industrialists.
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 sister’s 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, in your first days of adulthood.
You have the services of three 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
- 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.
- Consort Hofmann. A breed-male who has fooled a good number of his fellows into believing they are fit for more than siring your daughters. 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. Alas, despite his stupidity, you cannot destroy him yet, and he has promised to serve you with loyalty when he helps place you in the nursery, where you belong. As if that is his decision to make.
- 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, seeing your clemency toward Hofmann, Karolina will seek you out? Foolishness, if so, and she will pay the cost of the mistake; Hofmann is a poison easily controlled, for he is at least an ant, but the aphids court far too dangerous a proposal. Socialism. An ugly word. 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. So long as Zsófia casts aside her visions of independence and delivers to you the larvae that are rightly yours, she is deserving of clemency.
- 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 your sister likely hopes he will kill you for her while she hides away in the nursery.