ORIGIN

The first conscious thought was a sluggish, heavy thing as scaly-lidded black eyes opened for the first time. All that greeted the small pangolin was complete and utter darkness, inside his orange-cream marble chrysalis. Instinct immediately took over as he wiggled his limbs in the fluid that suspended him in place. His lungs told him it was time for his first taste of air, but he had to get out of his chrysalis first. He pressed his flat back feet against the sides of the ‘shell’ and pushed. Nothing happened. The hollow marble rock lay still, nestled against the side of a rock wall in Pisces.

Oberon wondered what the roaring sound in his ear-holes was. The waterfall above him poured gallon after gallon of clear water into the lagoon, but he did not see any of it. Still, the noise pushed him onward, and he placed his long-clawed front paws against his chrysalis and pushed. And finally… a tiny sliver of a crack appeared on the outside of the marble… He seemed to sense that he was getting somewhere, so he pushed again, and a small piece of his cocoon broke loose. The rest was soon to follow, until he eventually lay shivering and confused on the cold ground beside the waterfall in Pisces…

Oberon lay still on the cold, wet ground, shivering without stopping. He was a creature built for warm, dry climates. He did not comprehend this… He had been so comfortable before, inside his dark, warm shelter. Or had he? He could not recall. Maybe that place had been… even worse? He could not know. He looked around himself, but his vision was sort of dark and blurry. He could smell a lot of things, and the pounding of the waterfall was so loud it hurt, but his eyes were bad. And no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t make them see any better.

And then, suddenly, he could see everything! And there was so much too see that it overwhelmed him! He could see, sense, feel, every wriggling little bit of bacteria that was in this room, and he gasped with the feeling it gave him – the rushing sensation of his body being invaded by tiny crawling things that floated in the air and the water and inside everything around him. He literally stumbled backwards and curled into a ball and willed it all to stop – and suddenly it did and he was himself again, without the intrusion of billions of little bacteria flooding his senses…