[Multiversal Emipre] 5 – Crèche

[Twenty Years Later, Crèche, Zerg Home System]

A planet, once covered in sparse flora and a planet-wide city, has changed drastically in twenty years. Flora now encases the world and city, covering everything in dense foliage and the unique flora of the planet. The atmosphere has thickened, trapping more heat. With its rich plant life, it has also increased oxygen and CO2 levels massively, allowing life on the planet to grow to gigantic sizes.

Sizes that led many of the Primal Zerg on the surface to develop into sizes resembling the dinosaurs of old. With the increase in spawning pools across the planet, the Primal Zerg divided themselves into broods and packs. 

Deep within the jungles of the Crèche, a small tadpole rose from a spawning pool in its first few moments of life. It already had to fight for survival as it fought and consumed the other tadpoles within the pool, gaining more mass and energy with each Zerg spawn consumed. Within an hour, this Primal Zerg grew large enough that the Spawning pool could no longer contain its growth, nor its needs.

This nameless Primal Zerg, emerging from on e of thousands of Spawning Pools, ventured off into the Jungle where it began to fight tooth and nail against other Zerg, each successful hunt granting it more biomass, energy, and if the prey proved to have an advantageous trait, a new addition to its strain.

It evolved sharper claws, more eyes, dorsal plates along its spine, a tail with a barbed hook, and even new senses and organs to provide it with better tools in its hunts. It could now sense heat, taste the smells in the air, track, and identify prey from a distance.

With each passing day, it grew in size, and its genetic strain became more complex as more traits were added to it. By the end of the week, its body was the size of a garbage truck. Its genetic strain and evolution leaned hard towards a juggernaut hunter, its thick carapace and the skin underneath providing immense durability against most kinds of damage. At the same time, its tusks, claws, and spikes allowed it to charge through anything in its path, meaning that its usually smaller prey who hid and fled through the thick foliage of the Jungle found themselves slowed down by the dense foliage, while it did nothing to stop its charge.

Instincts flared in its mind that now that the overmind considered it strong enough to form a pack and it left its nest and headed for the nearby Spawning Pool, the same one he rose from, and it was there it forced a dozen of the Zerg Larvae that craweled out from the Spawning Pool under his command.

...

Twenty years have passed, and under my influence, the Zerg have entirely taken over Crèche. The Zerg underhive had expanded to cover the entire planet, or rather, the underhive expanded to the size of the city above it. At any moment or if the situation was necessary, my Zerg could breach the surface from anywhere on the planet. 

Expansion had stopped nearly five years ago, and the Zerg have reached a balance with the ecosystem of the planet while I worked tirelessly in the underhive, eventually cracking a few locks that had blocked me before.

Psionics.

While the Protoss were far more attuned with Psionics than the Zerg, the Zerg were still psionically gifted. I could freely communicate and command the Zerg through the Psionic Bond that connected all of the Zerg on the planet. In my years of research, I found that it took precise and careful genetic engineering to produce a Zerg specimen capable of the weakest of Psionic feats, Empathy. 

Experiment 47B was a mass of flesh housed in the center of the central hatchery. Although it was incapable of movement, thought, or anything else, it was my first successful experiment regarding Psionics. Through my connection with it, I could see that it was capable of seeing psionic 'shadows' around it, shadows that seemed to reflect emotions. Of course, the Zerg I had in the central hatchery felt nothing, as I had complete control of all of them, leaving behind only the baser instincts of a Zerg, hunger.

I then spent a few more years tweaking and testing, attempting to find the sweet spot for Psionic Potential in a species, but have found no clear genetic markers yet. However, through my experiments, I managed to create a new strain of Drones by incorporating an experimental strain that allowed drones to float via a small organ located in the center of their chest, this organ used a trivial amount of Psionic energy, forcing me to expand and compress the nervous system of the Drones, but the increase in complexity was worth the cost. 

That was not the only experiment I was doing, either; my Primal Zerg experiment was proving fruitful as I was continuously gaining new strains to experiment with, as well as an increasingly growing army of Zerg that I could make use of if the need called for it. I had even managed to obtain strains similar to an Ultralisk, Hydralisk, Infestor, and Roach.

While there was much that needed improving, for now, I could use their Strains to make the base of those four Zerg strains and work on the strains from there. 

Though all of my experiments so far have been nothing but side projects.

Below the Central Hatchery, I had my drones dig out a giant cavern roughly the size of ten square miles. In this cavern, I had begun my work on creating the first of likely multiple Proto-Leviathans. I could not morph a Leviathan in one go, so I was using a majority of the Biomass I gained every year to begin by making my first iteration of a Leviathan.

It would be roughly a mile long and a quarter of a mile wide. I had yet to master Psionics, so I would be doing something quite...primitive to get this first Leviathan into space. From the midsection to the tail end, the Leviathan would have a series of chambers filled with gas that would funnel out the tail. A dozen organs would ignite the gas, hopefully propelling the Leviathan into the atmosphere and the exosphere.

If it made it into space, the front-end of the Levithan would split off and propel further, where the dozen eyes and sensory organs would begin mapping out as much of the solar system as possible, before eventually either dying, or self-destructing to prevent any evidence of its existence being found in space by aliens.

The first dozen or so Proto-Leviathans I would send out into space would hopefully be able to map the entire solar system, helping me see what I was working with. If I could morph a Zerg capable of surviving in such temperatures, I hoped to make a bio-telescope to start mapping out the local section of the galaxy and get a good look at where we were.

If I were lucky, there would be a Mass Effect Relay within the system or in one of the neighboring systems that I could activate and get a good look at what I was dealing with in regards to the wider galaxy at large.