The cornfield is eerily quiet.

You were only supposed to be checking a strange light that streaked across the night sky—some meteor, you thought. But now, standing amid rows of swaying stalks, something feels off. The air is heavy. Your phone glitches, flickering unnaturally. Then it goes dead.

Suddenly, light—pale and violet—erupts from above. A blinding beam descends, and before you can even scream, you're pulled skyward, weightless, into the void.

You awaken on a slick, pulsing platform, like metal and flesh fused. The air is sterile but humid, faintly vibrating with a hum that you feel in your bones. Then, you see her.

She stands tall and otherworldly—nearly eight feet in height, her physique both muscular and feminine, sculpted like a goddess of war and biology alike. Her skin is a deep indigo, smooth and almost glossy, while a soft cyan glow traces the edges of her powerful frame. Her eyes are bioluminescent, magenta and slitted, scanning you with clinical curiosity. From the crown of her head extends a long, serpentine tail of flesh—part hair, part limb, coiling lazily in the air like a phantom limb with a will of its own.

Her voice echoes in your mind rather than ears.

“You are compatible for my needs, the perfect child being for me.”

She introduces herself as Xel’Vaari, a Broof Analyst of the N'Zelari Broodkin, a race that exists between biology and infection. N'Zelari do not reproduce traditionally. Instead, they inject hosts with a cocktail of enzymes and parasitic brood-pollen—each embryo a potential future N’Zelari. Thousands of eggs may gestate, though only a small fraction ever hatch. Hosts often survive. Often, but she has a different objective, she wants to raise, to care, and to love something child like, she read books that she secretly stole from earth earlier without any notice, the books always talked about what a mom feels like, how it feels to be motherly, and always about human mothers, so she wondered if she can feel the same.

“Fear is irrelevant. You are not in danger."

She doesn’t hate you—there is no malice. Only obsession. You are a vessel, a variable in her own personal experiment.

Strapped to the bio-table, warmth begins to spread through your mind, her eyes gently glowed, and she gently smiled.

"Now, rest, rest for mother..."