“…Slider, if we have an underground pathway to those ladybugs, why don’t we just go after them that way? I can send the fire ants right now, get this whole thing over with,” Torch asked, both him and Slider inside the burrow that night. I was allowed inside.
“No,” Slider affirmed. “Kelvin doesn’t want it that way.”
Torch paused, then spoke quietly.
“…Those ladybugs’ll be coming at us with all their strength.”
“…Kelvin’s known how ladybugs behave, for a long eight thousand days. We’ll be fine.”
Eight thousand days… I still couldn’t believe it myself, how the fuck could a single bug live on for eight thousand days?
But that’s our queen. I remember, when I had the chance, I asked Kelvin about all that she saw in those eight thousand days, and she told me about it. It’s too many details for me to write out in here, I couldn’t even remember most of it myself; just deals and histories with bugs that are now long gone. Other scout ants wrote about that kinda stuff in other archives. But when Kelvin found the time, she told me a little about what life was like for them.
Of course, we had to start at the beginning. The moment our queen crawled out of her egg, take a wild guess what she saw… Nothing much, just the most traumatic event of her entire life: The Dust Bowl. Every aphid she saw that day faced some of the most brutal, unforgiving deaths you could’ve ever imagined, all at the tarsi of those fuckin’ ladybugs. You think the deaths I’ve reported so far were bad? You should’ve seen what our queen saw.
Kelvin never exaggerated her shock when she spoke to those younger aphids that day, either; seeing something like that for the first time brought along a serious shift in how you understand interspecies interaction. All while just a larva, too…
So from that day forward, she made it her top ambition to become queen. No matter what, against all odds, against all other competitors. Nutrient after nutrient, protein after protein, she ate and consumed everything she could, all to make sure she had the strength to run a colony all by herself. Something had to give, after an experience like that.
So, the moment she broke out of her pupa, it came time to start the nuptial flight. Kind of a coming-of-age ritual for all ants when they reach adulthood; they all spread their wings and take to the sky, doing nothing else but mating. I swear, it’s like an orgy with wings.
Mating was probably the best luxury a bug could ask for, and you normally had to earn it; you couldn’t have a surviving generation of your own larvae with only a ‘please’ and ‘thank you.’ But here, here was an ant like Kelvin: Young, headstrong in her ideals, clear goals in mind, plenty of long-term strategies, and most importantly? Protein. All up in her system. That was pretty much the deciding factor on whether or not you could be a queen, anyway.
So, far as you could imagine, every single one of the males there wanted to mate with her, and ONLY her. Those drone ants wanted to mate with Kelvin so fuckin’ badly, none of the other females around were able to bear any offspring. In fact, they had to beg the males, when typically it was the other way around. Kelvin didn’t have to beg for shit.
Seriously, you should’ve seen it; it was like a million Ivy’s to a lamp. Pretty fuckin’ awesome.
Anyway, by the time all those males died, Kelvin got to work, finding a colony she could run all by herself. This was an entirely different colony in some other area that I know absolutely nothing about. But point is, eventually, she found it, and that was where she learned everything she needed as a queen: Finding food, scouting, makin’ deals, building herself up the way a good leader should.
Of course, I wasn’t around to see it, and neither were any of her other associates. Not Phido, not Torch, not even Slider. But Kelvin was there, left all by herself with the burden of gaining the rest of the forest’s trust. Bit by bit, she got there, but had to do it all in hiding, underneath a burrow. All for the sake of keeping a long life, and the lives of the long-gone generation she ran there.
And keep in mind, this was before Ruby’s parents’ parents were even fuckin’ conceived.
And somehow, she survived all by herself, all throughout those long days. I don’t know how she did it; she wanted to keep it a secret from us, but she was prolonging her survival like a fuckin’ genius.
If I were to guess, it must’ve had something to do with how she outsourced all her work. She just remained there under that burrow, birthing a thousand workers from those many, many, many drones. Many were in her colony, too. All to work for her and share the food with her. The only thing she ever put effort in down there was laying eggs, along with the occasional interspecies deals.
I don’t know, that work ethic always felt like a point of inspiration for me. Guess it was that kinda thing that let her live for so long.
But after around several thousand days of that colony being their home, the entire place just had to flood with water, all in a single day. So, she had to move her ants, aphids, her immediate business partners (moths, butterflies, bees, spiders, you name it) and other trusty associates to some other colony.
And that was when she first spoke to her ants about that Dust Bowl. It was a seriously traumatic thing for her. Again, she saw that fuckin’ thing herself, as a larva, and survived. Dot? Would’ve probably killed himself.
I’ll always commend Kelvin’s bravery for how she stood up to that event by actually making something of herself, to prevent something like that again. She did change ‘cause of it, but she didn’t really let it change her, if that makes sense. Still, I’m always gonna respect her for that, until the day I’m dead. That’s really how I knew she was much stronger than all of us.
She also talked about this idea that she learned pretty early on in her life, and made sure we knew it, too: Every bug gets exactly what they deserve. Kinda similar to what Ruby would say, but the difference is, Kelvin actually lived it, the way a strong bug was supposed to. If the smartest bug I’ve ever known taught me anything, it’s that.
She then stunned all those ants and all her business partners by announcing that she was moving again, this time in the exact same spot where she saw that horrible aphid massacre take place, all those thousands of days ago.
I was actually born around this time, before I took up my responsibilities as her trusted scouter, and I couldn’t blame her; the aphids in that area repopulated pretty quickly, so it made enough sense to head back in there. She knew that as her real home, anyway.
And we’ve stayed in that area ever since. Contrary to what Kelvin had feared, everything went pretty nice for us; our queen decided to take more of an active role in the colony from that point, even if it wasn’t very necessary.
But then, of all the fuckin’ places that those fuckin’ ladybugs could’ve gone after their fuckin’ diapause, it was THERE that Ruby and her group just HAD to show up and kill that dragonfly from the top of that fuckin’ tree. Kelvin saw it herself, and I remember all of us, including her, were left holding our breath. Seriously, we almost flew into panic. Ladybugs were always totally independent as insects, and we never saw any ladybugs acting the way they were. It was fuckin’ terrifying; we all had to fear the worst.
But thankfully, we… didn’t need to worry so much about that anymore, back in those days.
After Ruby first set up her colony, she was givin’ out top roles in her business to ladybugs that helped her the most; instead of Lucky, Berry, Sprout, and Checker, it was Midge, Rosie, Luna, and Elly. Those four are all gone now, but they were Ruby’s closest ladybugs and best workers while they were here; those were the bugs who really knew how to do their jobs.
See, once the ladybugs got there, Kelvin was getting less and less successful, all thanks to them. After all, Midge was probably the best fuckin’ forager we had ever seen; she was taking every aphid, thrip, and lace bug in her sight, no delays; whiteflies, hoverflies, even some larvae, you name it. All before we even had the chance to eat for ourselves.
But even then, it was done without any interspecies drama. She was a smart fuckin’ bug, and so were Luna and Rosie; they were all amazing negotiators. We could hardly strong-tarsus them whenever we got suspicious of something shady (Which would later end up being their problem later on…)
But back in the day, Kelvin saw the good in them, so she understood it like this: Did they upset most of the smaller bugs in the forest? Yes, big time, but when you’re up there, at the top of the food chain, that’s to be expected; it’s like a free pass. They had it all. Matter of fact, we were the bugs coming up short ‘cause of how well they were doing.
And it’s stupid to stay mad at that.
And the best part about it was, the ladybugs never got difficult, or started any problems. When Kelvin gave out the order to seize the aphids before the ladybugs did, Ruby didn’t even budge. It was fantastic for both of us; you think Kelvin would’ve wanted to get in Ruby’s way back then? After being so generous? We were coming up so short that we couldn’t ignore it back then, but we weren’t even mad. They let us have our protections, no strings attached, no selfishness. Everything was goin’ perfect; we didn’t even need Blackjack or Fuzzball or any of those saps in our business. It was all friendly competition. Far as we understood it, they never played foul.
Well, except this one time, and it actually had to do with Blackjack. When Ruby was first starting out, lockdowns weren’t a major part of the tree yet. They operated on power alone, and they really fuckin’ showed it, every chance they got.
In fact, the first time a crow showed up to their tree, they didn’t have a scouting keyholder to signal them to go underground; Ruby hadn’t thought up that system yet. With a crow in their proximity, easily able to tear through their whole population, Ruby took the high branch. Y’wanna know what they did to that thing?
…Well, I’ll explain it like this.
The whole tree gathered around it once it showed up, cornered it from both above and below, waited until the right time when it got to just the right branch, and at Ruby’s direction, those ladybugs broke that bird apart. They shattered both her tarsometatarsi with glass shards so she couldn’t walk, chipped her wings so she couldn’t fly, and BURIED that fuckin’ bird under the ROOTS. It took the entire tree to pull that off, and once it was over, that bird was now a cut-up, carved-up fuckin’ mess of red stuff, underneath the soil. She was squirming down there for her life while she was still breathing.
Safe to say, that wasn’t Ruby’s finest moment. But hey, at least now she’ll never do that again.
That killing happened on the day we met Blackjack; that poor crow was crying to us over the way Ruby’s bugs took out his sister, Domino, in such disgusting fashion. Kelvin and Blackjack got along pretty quickly after that, over their shared, newfound hatred for Ruby’s group. Blackjack even agreed to help with whatever Kelvin needed taken care of.
Hey, what else are friends for?
By then, the entire forest knew Ruby’s name. They earned the fear and reverence of all the smaller bugs that were there, but over time, she grew less interested in using up her offenses that way. So, she enlisted Elly, back then a handler with a lot of potential, as her first scouting keyholder before Checker took over.
Big. Mistake. Elly turned out to be a much more complicated case than they expected. Sure, he was one of Ruby’s closest friends, and even her first love. As her first-ever scouting keyholder, he did incredibly well predicting rainy conditions, and acted flawlessly during those scheduled lockdowns, but one tiny event was his weakness, and it was the one thing that fucked absolutely everything up: The oncoming winter diapause.
It was their first as a mafia since that dragonfly ordeal, and NONE of the ladybugs wanted to talk about it; ask one of the ladybugs to bring it up, they’ll probably murk you.
So it happened like this: Elly wasn’t used to planning for the move back down to the burrows; that sap was scouting for birds while it was already practically snowing. In fact, as Kelvin explained it to me, the snow got so strong that he blinded himself under it, and as an absolutely amazing stroke of luck would have it, a hungry dark-eyed junco tore through half their ENTIRE fuckin’ population. Ruby survived, but none of those keyholders dug down in time: Torn limb from limb, no mercy at all.
It was ridiculous; the entire tree spent the whole fuckin’ winter reeling over it; they couldn’t even sleep it off. Ruby had to choose the new keyholders while giving birth to a son, all while underground. And that’s how we ended up with those four saps, and her sap son that we got now.
Was that a sad story? Maybe for you. While she was reeling, we were letting out sighs of relief; the chaos seemed like it was finally gonna stop for a while.
But unfortunately, soon after Dot was born, and as soon as they got out of diapause, they started running that cottonwood tree like predators… as you could probably tell already.
Slider was callin’ them a mafia back when he was a larva, and the label stuck in the burrows as a joke at first, but… it’s hard to say they act like a real business now… It’s odd thinking back on it all, especially when it comes to how they started, with that almost mythical tree of theirs… The roots hadn’t budged an inch, but they sure have grown.
Sometimes I feel pretty bad that Ruby had to be the bug to go. She wasn’t that bad; I mean, she wasn’t like her son. She was by no means that degree of weak, or stupid. But, stupid enough to fuck up our deal, and that was bad enough. So we had to do it. It would’ve been much uglier if it were on somebuggy like her son, anyway; couldn’t imagine what Ruby would’ve tried doing to us.
But yeah; somebuggy had to answer for what was going on. Ruby bore the responsibility for her tree, and we respected her for it, but that kinda thing was the cost. I don’t know. It’s always tough offering your respects like you did in the past, when all you’re left with now are just reasons to despise.