Chaete

Chaete is a character in QUIETUS.

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Your average Space Worm is a planet-eating creature of almost unimaginable size, sitting somewhere between 800 and 1000 miles in length with a radius in the range of 50-70 miles. It would take a significantly long time to walk such a distance on foot, and as the name implies you'd probably need some kind of sealed environment suit to attempt it because they spend most of their time drifting through the stars between meals. Fortunately for the other entrants to this contest, such a titanic adult form takes a long series of millennial childhood stages to achieve. Little more than a baby at 218, Chaete hasn't even undergone a single moulting yet and is thus only eight foot from head to tail, much shorter than that upright as she bends herself into a rough S shape for surface movement.

As she lacks an adult's impressive size, Chaete's most immediately noticeable assets are her teeth. Her cross-shaped mouth can open so alarmingly wide that it turns itself inside out (though this is often unnecessary), revealing a set of tools that would embarrass any dentists, steelworks or torture chamber. Some of them even rotate. These fairly impressive natural implements combined with a bafflingly fast metabolism allow Chaete to tunnel her way mouth-first through almost any substance known to man, though she much prefers a diet free of the foul-tasting oils and pesky micro-organisms so often present in plants, soil and people. These terrifying jaws are necessary because space worms generally feed by floating through space and eating every unpopulated planet in the solar system that they arrive in, culminating with the sun for dessert. As she is therefore evidently capable of surviving in such disparate environments as the cold vacuum of space and the crushing heat of a planetary core you can also chalk “astronomical resistance to heat and pressure” onto the list of notable features.

One particularly arcane set of molars enable what is probably Chaete's most notable ability, eating holes in the very fabric of space itself. Worms do not tend to have a reputation for quickness and this does not change when they are placed into the endless abyss of space. Moving at a speed significantly slower than that of light, they would clearly starve to death rather quickly without some other means of transit. Thus they evolved the ability to tunnel from any starting location to another many light years away in the space of an instant (or more likely, they evolved this first as an escape mechanism and then evolved further in order to use it to travel through space but let's not be pedantic), though as she is a juvenile Chaete's range is fairly less impressive than lightyears and she can barely manage a jump of more than three miles at a time before having to stop and have a snack (and ideally a nap).

These “space tunnels” start out at about the size of Chaete's head for fairly obvious reasons but expand over a period of about five minutes into a jagged-edged circle six feet in radius. In case you are unfamiliar with the idea of portals, stepping into one will deposit you at the other, and vice versa, and looking through one will reveal a view of the other side. They are so thin as to appear two-dimensional and therefore fairly hard to see unless you are facing them head-on though they can be entered from either direction. If they have any kind of set lifespan it has yet to be discovered, many other sapient races use old worm-tracks to save on fuel during interstellar voyages and in certain well-travelled areas they can make navigation extremely difficult.

The largest portion of the rest of her body, as you might expect what with her being a worm, is little more than a tube made of many flexible segments, though any similarity to the earthworms found on Earth ends there. Over the top of the segments are a series of plates (resembling traditional chitin but much tougher) that offer protection against heavy impacts during space travel, these grow to surround the entire body during periods of interstellar movement and then partially break away again when the worm enters a solar system, leaving the configuration that Chaete is currently sporting with little more than the front of the head and parts of the back covered. The colour of these plates is determined by the minerals present in the particular specimen's recent diet and Chaete's are currently fairly reddish.

Eyes are set at fairly regular intervals along the body (more grow as the worm increases in length) and clustered around the head, with one pointing directly backwards to give the creature close to three hundred and sixty degrees of vision while planetside (though oddly she still lacks the ability to see directly forwards, perhaps simply because it would be pointless underground) though as a juvenile, Chaete only possesses the base nineteen.

Unlike the hermaphroditic species on Earth, Space Worms have a fairly traditional pair of genders though only the females are able to grow to their maximum size. While females undergo a long cycle of gorging on rocks and dirt, growing and shedding their old skins, males never moult and live a terrestrial life on the planet that their egg lands on, not growing much larger than the size Chaete currently possesses, until picked up by a feeding Female who happens to eat their planet. At this point they burrow into the space between her digestive system and exoskeleton and become a permanent part of her body. A single female can eventually host millions of parasitic males, their personalities linked psychically into a single community and given as much say in what they do or say as she does herself, though as the decisions a big flying worm has to make are not usually incredibly complicated they spend most of their time just chatting with each other or delegating who has to deal with which children next.

This is relevant because females are also significantly rarer than males (for reasons that hopefully do not need to be explained) and thus tend to be spoiled rotten (from a great distance) by their doting parents during childhood. Which also means that, until they gather a generous collection of humbler mates who can keep them under control, they are almost invariably arrogant, demanding and petulant. As she is still several thousand years away from sexual maturity, Chaete has all three of these qualities in abundance. On top of that, as many eggs can land on a single planet but will rarely produce more than a single female and Chaete's own eventual growth to adulthood takes so much food that all of her brothers will eventually starve to death, she has become accustomed to living with an army of siblings who have no purpose but to wait on her hand and foot until she eats their entire planet (though their workload is at least lightened by the fact that she doesn't actually have any feet to wait upon).

So, what with living a life mostly comprised of drifting through space, eating floating rocks and talking to the people that literally live inside of their head it probably wouldn't surprise you to learn that most worms are not all that concerned with material goods. This is not the case with their spawn, who share the same love of trinkets and pieces of cheap, colourful plastic as children the universe over. Alas, it is much harder to do anything with these when you lack any form of manipulating limb and so (at great expense to one of her mother's other children, who hatched many years previously on an already populated planet) Chaete received a pair of mechanical arms for her 180th birthday. They are hardy enough to survive general wear and tear (although they fold away into a backpack when not in use) but otherwise not particularly strong. She couldn't lift a car with them, though she can just about use them to support her own weight when she's tired. In any kind of fistfight they'd almost certainly snap in two. Despite begging her parent for years prior to the actual event, she hasn't actually used them all that much since either (let's face it, did you really use any of the toys you asked for as a child on a regular basis? She has other people to fetch things for her) so on top of that her coordination is fairly poor but at least they allow her the convenience of being able to open a human door without eating it. Not that she's ever encountered one to know how to use a doorknob.

Her poor attitude certainly wasn't helped by the fact that adult worms large enough to eat planets are completely unable to land without dealing catastrophic damage to the surrounding environment (and would be very much tempted to eat that environment), and are thus unable to directly interfere with the growth of their children. Space Worm parenting is a strictly hands-off approach, aided by an incredible gift for telepathy that allows them to store the karmic signatures of their many thousands of children in a mental address book and communicate with them on a one-to-one basis from vast distances. This unfortunately does not allow them to see through their child's eyes and so they are reliant entirely on conflicting anecdotes to find out what their offspring are up to, and with thousands of needy females clamouring for attention (and many thousands more resigned males not getting much) they don't usually have the time to collate this into any kind of accurate picture of what is going on down there at all, let alone deliver any lessons on consequences and right and wrong, leaving little Chaete to pretty much do whatever she wants without fear of parental retribution.

For communication between siblings (when Chaete bothers to talk to them at all, usually only to request (well, order) that they do something for her), a long-distance one-to-one call is a bit of a waste of effort considering they're not only going to be on the same planet but presumably also quite nearby, so for this worms use a different manifestation of their psychic ability that is rather conveniently awfully like just speaking aloud. It differs from plain talking only by the fact that it is not muffled by walls or distance (unless the walls are lined with tin foil) and rather than a drop-off of volume as you move away, you can only either hear it at full volume or not hear it at all. This is also what fully grown Matriarchs use to bind their consciousness with that of their mates, creating a psychic communication field spanning most of their body. There are very good reasons why Space Worms evolved to dislike the taste of life-supporting planets, anecdotal reports say that worm matriarchs who have been forced (due to starvation or attack) to consume colonised planets are driven mad by the psychic emanations of the dead coming from within their own digestive tracts. How this might reflect on Chaete's own psyche if she is ever (to use a purely hypothetical example) entered into some form of battle to the death by an unknowable eldritch horror is perhaps something to watch out for.