The Unexpected Egg

The Unexpected Egg
The egg was cracking. Tiny noises were coming from inside it, scratching sounds like claws on the inside of the shell. Sounds which couldn't be made by any part of a soft membranous Chromo.

Pepper stared in horror. This couldn't be. How could her Lesser Breeding have resulted in anything which could make that kind of scratching sound?

It was strange enough that the message had come so soon. "Congratulations! Your Lesser Breeding has been successful..." and the egg had arrived, after a week. Seven days.

Pepper the Chromo had been told breedings could take 2-3 months for a Lesser Breeding Coin. And now here was this egg. No Speedy Breeding Ticket had been used, Pepper had checked. She could think of no reason why this egg could be here so soon. And now she didn't know what to think.

To make matters worse, her mate had disappeared. When the egg had arrived Pepper had chased down the other pet. At first she hadn't been able to find the other pet, the name wasn't anywhere in their owner's lair. But when she'd thought to search by ID number, Pepper had found them.

Only 'them' wasn't the pet Pepper had bred with. Pepper had bred with a Dappled Swirl Chromo -- a step down, pets would say, for a Custom Chromo to breed with a Site but that Dappled Swirl had such beautiful patterns it really didn't matter if they were unique or not. Those tight-packed tiger stripe tentacles, that dappled belly and the markings like bark growing naturally along Dappled Swirl's body... They were beautiful, so beautiful. Guaranteed to make good offspring, especially when considering how well the deep blue and desaturated purple would suit Pepper's butter yellow and golden stripes.

But that Dappled Swirl was gone. In its place was a Custom, some Maki Pepper had never seen before. Pepper hadn't had the courage to approach the Maki, with all its edits that marked it as clearly Gold. It had been surrounded by fans and what was a Blue like Pepper to that?

So now Pepper had this egg. This egg, shockingly early. And Pepper's mate had disappeared and there was no-one to talk to -- Pepper didn't want to go around asking questions in the Help forums, seeming ungrateful for how quickly the breeding team had worked their magic.

And now the egg was making sounds. Scraping, tooth and claw sounds. It was shaking gently from side to side, cracks across the top widening with every little shake. Pepper was all alone under the Phoenix Tree, nothing but memories for company. Memories and fear.

The crack opened wider. A little chirruping noise like a cooing Reve. Another shake. A drawn out, agonizing scraping noise like a Butcher Chiro approaching with its cleavers dragging along the floor.

Pepper started shaking, every part of her body wobbling and her tentacles waving in the air with fear. What was happening, what could be happening? None of those sounds could be made by a Chromo. What was coming out of the egg? What could she expect? Some horrifying mix of Chromo and Maki? But no, she'd seen Dappled Swirl in the three days since the egg had arrived, she knew she had...

A tentacle pushed through a crack, widening the opening. A tentacle. Striped like a tiger -- or like a Dappled Swirl Chromo. Pepper let out a breath she hadn't realized she was holding, relaxing and letting her fear fade away. It was a Chromo. The Lesser Breeding had been successful, it was all okay.

But the next moment a large chunk of egg shell fell off. A head poked out of the hole. It was a head like nothing Pepper had ever seen before, like nothing anyone in all of Aywas had seen before.

Tentacles were sprouting from an eye, a Chromo eye stretched to such gigantic proportions that it resembled a head but wasn't. It was so much more wrong than anything as innocent or recognizable as a 'head'. Tiny claws made from displaced stripes, markings which had somehow become edits, gripped the crack in the egg and the baby pulled itself out.

It was a horror, a mutant mess of tentacles and eyes and wobbly wavy Chromo bits all spliced into one creature of such ugliness that Pepper felt herself shaking again. Her body trembled so much that she actually started sliding sideways, wobbling away from the egg like a jelly sliding off a spoon.

As the mutant turned its giant eye-head to Pepper and opened a mouth of jagged teeth, teeth made impossibly from tentacles; as it turned that gaping grinning tentacle maw at Pepper, she just had the strength to raise her eyes to read the message about the egg. Not, as she had quickly read it, 'Your Lesser Breeding has been successful'. It was a crucial, a tiny but significant change.

"Congratulations! Your Radioactive Breeding has been successful! You are now the proud owner of Mutant."