First things first, I had to secure my viability playing as this symbiote. I was a parasite in a city called Start City. The best way to do that was either expand in mass or in numbers. Preferably both since I was only the size of a penny. If I could grow and replicate, I would have no problems fighting and thriving in the world. I looked at the trees to see if they could help with that. When I opened up the skill trees, I was immediately faced with an option. A popup gave me two options: leech or puppeteer. Leeches could drain energy and life force. Puppeteers could control whatever they took over. I chose leech as I wanted to be my own character and not random NPCs. I was taken to the Leech specific tree. I downed 6 points each into my Energy Drain and Life Drain skills. This allowed me to take energy way faster. I put 5 points in Shape shifter, which allowed me to take two forms by absorbing something. 2 points went to Replicate. Usually, a symbiote could replicate after filling itself 10 times. Each point reduced it by a very sizeable 10%. This meant I could now do it after eight times. That would come in handy.
I decided to scale the wall and see what I could see. There was an open window, so I oozed over and went inside. It was a bathroom. The door to the rest of the hose was closed so I was stuck with that. I did see a brown widow spider on the wall. It was on its web. I wanted to test it out, so I went to the spider and jumped on it. I began sucking its energy. It died immediately. I was given a popup asking if I wanted to store the brown widow spider form away. I accepted and I was told that I could transform into the spider. My spider was not perfect as it was only at a 5. Instead of brown, my exoskeleton and legs were yellow. I still had the red hourglass and three red circles on my abdomen though. I was able to crawl and along the wall and make my way through the crack. I saw that this was the end of the hallway leading to the open living room. The television was on and three children were on it. One elementary student and two high schoolers by the looks of them. I went around and saw the mom was in the kitchen cooking something. There was nothing to do but wait out of sight.
The father came home at some point and they all had a meal. They took their food to different areas of the house and they did not seem to be too chatty with each other afterwards either. As it got later, the mother told them it was time to go to bed. The two high school boys went to their room where they had a bunk bed. The elementary school girl seemed to have her own room. I could tell from watching them that the older of the twins was Cody and the younger was Dustin. The girl was named Zoe. In the twins room, I waited until they went to bed. Dustin was on the bottom bunk. I dropped the spider form and attached myself to the sole of his feet. I began draining him. He was not one of the zodiac blessed. His life force was white. Sucking it out felt pretty good as the warmth enveloped me. Every half hour I reached my energy limit and grew. I started out as 2.5 grams. Each limit break had me increase by 2.5 grams. After four hours, I reached 22.5 grams. That was my not my mass limit, but I could still replicate. I decided to do so early. Another popup appeared with another choice.
As I had just split in half, I now weighed 11.25 grams with each clone. The popup asked how I wanted to deal with the replicants. The three choices were Clone in Stasis, the Autonomous Drone, and the Hivemind. I had to look each choice over. Clones would be in a comatose state until the main body died. My conscious would then shift to the next strongest clone. That meant that if I did die, it was not the end, but it did mean that I would be weaker each time. Autonomous Drones were their own NPCs that were loyal and would generally do as asked. They would each have their own agendas and interests as time went on though. There was no real way to ensure they would not just go and get themselves killed. The hivemind meant that I controlled each clone at the same time. I would get to choose which clone my full focus and would get notifications when a clone was in a combat or a dangerous situation. It also meant the main body took damage for each clone destroyed. After looking at the options I had to choose one. There really was no turning back after this decision.
